So, theres a conspiracy theory going on right now about mass voter fraud in North Carolina. Its a right wing conspiracy, so Im not sure why theyre so concerned, since Thom Tillis won with a healthy lead. Regardless, the meat of it is that there were several thousand folks with the same name and birthday that also voted in other elections. Im kind of raging at the mathematical illiteracy of this. The most common names are likely to be repeated, due to the fact that theyre common names. Beyond the fact that there are usually months that are popular birth months, you have the birthday phenomenon where a large enough gathering of folks will share a birthday. It seems improbably, but I believe that in a group of more than 30 people, its greater than 50% that two people will have a birthday. As that number increases, it becomes more and more likely. Youll notice this when you to a restaurant where they sing a birthday song and youll hear TWO in different parts of the restaurant. Never mind the fact that in every group of people greater than 365, there is a guarantee that two of them share a birthday. So, limiting down to common names and then limiting further to sets of every birthday, in a group of nearly 10 million folks, compared to a population of 300 million folks... youre going to see this phenomenon... a lot. Then their smoking gun of about 700 people who had the same birthday, first and last name, and LAST FOUR DIGITS of SSN. Yeah, theres only 9999 possibilities, so yeah, mathematically its not really noteworthy. Not even CLOSE to noteworthy. ... and the crazy fact is, I am *not* a Math guy. Hey, Harry Bowman... can you back me up. Am I out of line with my thinking?
Posted on: Wed, 05 Nov 2014 18:28:54 +0000
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