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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.
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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