From: mike_steiner@qm.claris.com (Mike Steiner)
Newsgroups: rec.org.mensa
Subject: Re: Voting Analysis
Date: 24 Nov 92 01:55:53 GMT
Followup-To: rec.org.mensa

In article <1992Nov17.155228.29369@nntpd.lkg.dec.com>, edp@math.zk3.dec.com
(Eric Postpischil) wrote:
> 
> In article <mike_steiner-161192115857@192.35.50.131>,
> mike_steiner@qm.claris.com (Mike Steiner) writes:
> 
> >Yes, the message is sent in the sampling.  Absent the sampling, there is no
> >message.  The point is that not-voting, *in and of itself* does not give
> >any message.  Every example you have given has relied upon another method
> >of communication to send the message.
> 
> Only the sampled non-voters participated in "another method" to send the
> message.  The majority of non-voters did not do so, yet they contributed
> to the sending of the message.  The sampling alone does NOT send a
> message about the other non-voters; it is also NECESSARY that the
> unsampled people refrain from voting in order to send the message.  More
> precisely:
> 
> An interested organization demographically selects 1000 non-voters,
> labeled group X.  They sample the people in group X and learn that
> approximately x% of the general population of non-voters did not vote
> because they objected to the election or the candidates.
> 
> Call the remaining millions of people who did not vote group Y; let y
> denote the number of people in this group.  The interested organization
> can deduce that approximately there are approximately x% * (y+1000)
> people who did not vote because of objections to the election or the
> candidates.
> 
> The interested organization has learned something -- they have gained
> information.  Had the objectors in group Y not refrained from voting,
> the organization would not have this information.
> Without group Y, the organization would only know that the sampled
> non-voters objected; they would have no information about other
> objectors.
> 
> But there were other people in group Y, and they were counted, and they
> contributed to the final estimate of the number of objecting non-voters
> in the amount of x% * y.  Therefore, the non-voting is a cause of the
> organization gaining the information.  Further, the objectors in group Y
> did nothing other than not-vote.  Therefore, not-voting and not-voting
> alone are the sole cause of the organization gaining information about
> the objecting non-voters in group Y.
> 
> You can claim that the non-voters in group X did something else to
> communicate, but that is not true of those in group Y, which is a much,
> much larger group than X.  Millions of people contributed to the
> information gained by the organization and they did so solely by not
> voting.

The fact remains that the non-voters in group x would not have had a
message sent at all if it were not for the fact that the polling
organization did its thing, and that everyone in group x was potentially a
member of group y.  If there had been no poll, or if everyone had refused
to respond to the poll, there would be no information imparted.

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