Nate Silver: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Brazil does it, right? India does it. I was doing a little work on the Indian election, which was fascinating in different ways. They have a physical polling place up in the Himalayas and things like that. I don’t know how many languages they speak and how diverse in every respect that country is, and they count their results very quickly. They also have better exit polling in international countries, where in the US, the exit polls are trying to ask this 100-item-long, proper political-science, demographically weighted survey. Whereas in Europe and Latin America, places like that, it’s, “We just want to know who’s going to win.” To make for more exciting TV, they just ask them one question: “Who’d you vote for?” They do it in a very organized way. Exit polling is quite good in foreign countries and quite bad elsewhere. I don’t think there should be a Republican talking point that we want the vote counted quickly, and not taking days and weeks. If you could wave a magic wand and bring proportional representation to the United States at the national level, would you do it?…

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