Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Why the votes for Charlie Brown must have been random

I wrote previously, suggesting that Charlie Brown won his primary due to people who voted for the first name on the ballot. Another writer responded in the Tennessean, suggesting that he instead won due to informed voters. I would like to explain how I concluded this was unlikely.

94,000 people voted for Brown. If 94,000 informed voters chose him, there have to be a number of similarly informed people who either didn't vote, or voted for someone else. We can reasonably say that at least 200,000 people have to have been informed about Brown's positions before the election.

So how did these people get that information? Remember, I'm not the only one wondering who this man is; he's a cypher to the newspapers too! He has no internet presence, nor any other mass media campaign. Perhaps he mailed fliers? But if he had a massive snail-mail campaign that reached a couple hundred thousand voters, he'd need to spend at least $20k. His campaign reports having no money at all.

Perhaps Brown has a couple dozen volunteers going door to door twelve hours a day for six months. But other than that, I'm just not seeing a way that most votes for Brown could possibly be informed votes. Perhaps someone who knew Brown's positions before the election, and chose to vote for him based on them, can write and tell us how? And also why out of his 94,000 informed supporters, only a hundred have joined his facebook group?

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