India Elections, 2009

On May 16th, 2009, the Election Commission of India announced the results of its recent month-long India-wide election for their lower house of Parliament - the largest democratic election in the world. An estimated 714 million voters (from a population of 1.2 billion) were eligible to cast their vote in one of five separate phases at over 800,000 polling stations, starting on April 16th. Logistically difficult, massive in scale, and opposed by various rebel groups, separatists and protestors, the elections still managed to be held with minimal disruption, with an average voter turnout of greater than 56%. The big winner was the the Indian National Congress party, which will form the new government under the incumbent prime minister Manmohan Singh.

I was not able to determine the time when the election results became clear, so the time for the GCP event was set for 12 hours, from noon to midnight in India. This should cover the emerging conclusion and the formal announcement, as well as some time for celebrations. The result is Chisquare 43519.105 on 43200 df, for p = 0.139 and Z = 1.085. This is a positive, though non-significant result, with the data history showing rather consistent positive deviation during most of the day.

India Elections,
2009

It is important to keep in mind that we have only a tiny statistical effect, so that it is always hard to distinguish signal from noise. This means that every "success" might be largely driven by chance, and every "null" might include a real signal overwhelmed by noise. In the long run, a real effect can be identified only by patiently accumulating replications of similar analyses.


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