| Article ID: | iaor20033232 |
| Country: | United States |
| Volume: | 51 |
| Issue: | 1 |
| Start Page Number: | 32 |
| End Page Number: | 40 |
| Publication Date: | Jan 2003 |
| Journal: | Operations Research |
| Authors: | Kaplan Edward H., Barnett Arnold |
| Keywords: | voting |
As the 2000 elections so vividly showed, it is Electoral College standings rather than national popular votes that determine who becomes President. But current pre-election polls focus almost exclusively on the popular vote. Here we present a method by which pollsters can achieve both point estimates and margins of error for a presidential candidate's electoral-vote total. We use data from both the 2000 and 1998 elections to illustrate the approach. Moreover, we indicate that the sample sizes needed for reliable inferences are similar to those now used in popular-vote polling.