I think a lot of people struggle to understand why voting on a weekday is a problem, so let's do a quick tweetorial on selection/sampling bias 1/https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1126610464320831488 …
Now, we need to pick a location to run our survey Should we run it at
-
-
While you answer that question, think about how each of those places might influence the answers you get Who will be answering your survey? How might they be feeling about trains? What effect might that have on the results?
Show this thread -
The thing is, no matter which location you picked, you've biased your results. The polling location has influenced how people feel about trains! Your poll is now useless as a reflection of the general population 10/pic.twitter.com/apj7FJ2s6G
Show this thread -
How does this apply to voting? Well, in democratic elections, we want to know who the people would most like to have as their leader 11/
Show this thread -
And because it's important that everyone has input into this, we want to ask every single person what their opinion is, otherwise we don't have a very good democracy 12/
Show this thread -
But the problem is, there's an enormous amount of evidence that certain groups are less likely to be able to vote The best example is young people, who are the lowest voting group worldwide 13/pic.twitter.com/EhEZ1jGVG1
Show this thread -
And this is true of many/most demographic factors. Ethnicity, language spoken, income etc all impact who is able to vote or not 14/
Show this thread -
This is an example of selection bias at play We select the voters based on who is capable of fulfilling the criteria that we set for voting (i.e. being able to take time off work to vote), and these are the people who get to choose our leaders 15/
Show this thread -
In Australia, we try to minimize this bias by making voting compulsory, as well as providing other avenues (postal/online/pre-poll) to help people out And even THEN we have some selection bias 16/
Show this thread -
Ultimately, it's impossible to entirely get rid of selection bias, but if you actually want your elections to be a reflection of the will of the people, it's important that you minimize the biases that are at play 17/
Show this thread -
Also, selection bias is why the Left loves to promote expanding voting and the Right wants to restrict voting as much as possible If you select by age and income, you make your governments far more conservative BY DESIGN! 18/
Show this thread -
If you want a fair and just society, a very good way is to make voting compulsory, have it on weekends, and try to minimize other biases that may crop up (i.e. have remote voting stations and creches nearby) 19/end
Show this thread
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.