• Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    1000 is pretty much a compromise between the ideal and what’s realistically possible. Most opinion polls have a sample size between 800 and 1500, with those under 1k considered much less reliable, around 1k pretty much standard and 1500 extra rigorous.

    There’s a lot of technical details on how to select those 800-1500 people to be reliably representative of a much larger population and different poll takers use different methodology, but that’s all too deep in the weeds for a lemmy reply and some of it is outside the scope of my knowledge as a curious and thus pretty well-informed layperson.

    And you’re absolutely right about the EC on all counts. That and the filibuster are both examples of a supposed democracy being EXTREMELY undemocratic.

    • zeppo@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I guess for more info about the mathematics they use, I could ask my uncle - he’s a university statistics professor.

      Yes, also the Senate was specifically designed to be undemocratic as to not give larger states more representation than smaller ones. At this point it’s absurd that states with 12 million people have the same representation as states with 800,000.

    • Optional@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s a ridiculous compromise. It’s all they can do, but it’s just wrong.

      And that’s not even the main problem; the main problem is with the reporting of it. That’s where the wrong end of the stick is used to beat around the bush.