elections and OR

With election day coming up on Tuesday, the latest Punk Rock OR Podcast episode addresses elections and OR. You can listen here:

Here are a few show notes and links to extra material.

Walter Mebane, Professor of political science and statistics at the University of Michigan, has written several articles about under-staffing voting locations, election fraud, and election forensics (he may be a political scientist, but his papers have figures that look like they are made in R. Not too shabby). Check it out.

You are more likely to die in a car accident on Presidential election days. Here is the JAMA article that summarizes this disturbing research finding (and a Scientific American podcast about it).

University of Cincinnati PhD student Muer Yang developed a simulation model to reduce and equalize voter waiting times across different voting areas. This is a good example of using OR for elections.

How did the University of Illinois student body elect a gnome and snail for the student body president and vice-president, respectively? Technically, they didn’t. The gnome and snail were disqualified after winning a plurality of the vote, and the controversy led to an investigation. Here is the full story according to the snail. Amazingly, all of this is real.

We followed up on our last episode on pirates and OR. We found a new article in the Journal of Transportation Security that presents statistics on pirate attack success rates.

Don’t forget to email me with your OR jokes. And don’t forget to vote!