Who would've known that counting could be so complicated? Nate Silver, the geek superstar of this election season is predicting how this race will go down. Take a look at the formula he uses in his site FiveThirtyEight.com, I'm still trying to wrap my mind around some of the ideas he's throwing out there but I think it goes something like this: The challenged votes are really complicating things for Al Franken.
Using regression analysis, Silver predicts a Franken victory.
This regression is a bit difficult to interpret, particularly with the presence of all the interaction terms, but the key intuition is as follows. Suppose that the number of challenges is zero -- as will happen once the state canvassing board finishes considering all such challenges in December. In this case, all terms in the regression equation reduce to zero, except for the constant term and t, which is Franken's share of the two-way vote in that precinct. Read more
