In a straw poll of the 400 persons at an election meeting, 200 were in favor of
ID: 3298224 • Letter: I
Question
In a straw poll of the 400 persons at an election meeting, 200 were in favor of the first candidate, 160 the second candidate, but the remaining 40 did not express any opinion. If the 400 can be considered to be representative of all the registered voters, for which situations can the following procedures be recommended? (a) Ignore the 40 without any opinion and estimate the preferences from the 360 responses, (b) add 20 to each of the candidates and consider 220 and 180 to be in favor of the two candidates, and (c) add (200/400)40 and (160/400)40 to the first and second candidates.Explanation / Answer
(A) In the first case, we are mainly intereseted to predict which candidate will win where we are not using the information on 40 persons that they have n't voted.
(B) In the second case, we assumed a unbiased behavior of the 40 persons who didn't voted so we simply assumed that even if they voted, 20 would vote for first one and 20 for the other one.
(C) In the third case, we assumed a more specific behavior of the the 40 persons who didn't voted. So here we assumed that the voted distribution among them is same as that of the distribution among the people who voted.