My town, with more than 1001 voters in each ward, had around twenty elections last year and two of them were decided by one vote. Your model says that this should happen somewhere in America much less than once in a billion years. The fact of the matter is, voters are not binomially distributed (sometimes this lowers the probabilities further, but sometimes it raises them a lot)
Also, elected officials change their behavior based on margins, and on the size and habits of the population of voters. Politicians pay a lot more attention to vote-giving populations than non-vote-giving populations, for instance. The number of minor thresholds that can have some impact is large.
And that's before you multiply the impact of your reasoning by the population who might follow it.
My town ...
Let 20% wards be swung by one vote, that gives each voter 1 in (5 * amount of voters) chance of affecting a vote cast on the next level, if that's how US system works?
... elected officials change their behavior based on margins ...
Which is an exercise in reinforcing prior beliefs, since margins are obviously insufficient data.
Politicians pay a lot more attention to vote-giving populations...
Are politicians equipped with a device to detect voters and their needs? If not, then it's lobbying, not voting that matters.
......impact of your r
Note: Please see this post of mine for more on the project, my sources, and potential sources for bias.
I have written a couple of blog posts on my understanding of climate forecasting, climate change, and the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) hypothesis (here and here). I also laid down the sources I was using to inform myself here.
I think one question that a number of readers may have had is: given my lack of knowledge (and unwillingness to undertake extensive study) of the subject, why am I investigating it at all, rather than relying on the expert consensus, as documented by the IPCC that, even if we're not sure is correct, is still the best bet humanity has for getting things right? I intend to elaborate on the reasons for taking a closer look at the matter, while still refraining from making the study of atmospheric science a full-time goal, in a future post.
Right now, I'm curious to hear how you formed your views on climate change. In particular, I'm interested in answers to questions such as these (not necessarily answers to all of them, or even to only these questions).