According to CNN, a record-breaking 71 million people watched the results of the election come in on Nov. 8. While the entire nation was awake, senior Jack Missler eagerly waited to see if his algorithm predicting voter turnout and election results would work.

Missler said, “(I developed two) separate equations. The first is to predict how many people will come out to vote, and I have been able to test that equation from 1948 to present. The second equation is how people will vote; basically, who will win. And for that one, we looked at the 2012 election really in depth because that was our most up to date one, and then we looked mainly at 2004 and 2008.”

According to Missler, he correctly predicted voter turnout and popular vote; however, he incorrectly predicted the Electoral College results. 

Missler said, “The equation predicted Clinton. The first equation correctly predicted voter turnout; it was within my acceptable margins of error. The second equation also got the popular vote winner right. It got the electoral college split correct, just not who would win the split right. My prediction predicted that it would be Clinton 290 to Trump 248. However, my equation and the methodology I used was more accurate than that of the New York Times and the Huffington Post, among others. I was still very pleased with the results.”

According to IB Math teacher Paige Wehr and IB US History teacher Will Ellery, despite the incorrect prediction, the development of such an algorithm has a wide range of implications.

Wehr said, “It could be used to prevent gerrymandering, which is where you create more districts where people vote so an election goes a certain way. So hopefully, it would be used to obliterate those kinds of unfair practices. It could hypothetically also be used for bad purposes as well, and you could influence an election based by getting certain people to turn out and getting certain people to not turn out.”

“This year proved that the polls were horribly wrong. So the hope is, with more of a mathematical perspective, we can help people make certain decisions,” Ellery said. “I would argue this is a launching point than an end point, so he can use this to further modify it and move forward to get research and play it out in scenarios and simulations and see if he really (has) stumbled onto something that can be an accurate predictor. This was simply an unusual election.”

Missler said that it is still impossible to create the ‘perfect’ equation which will predict the results every time, because the equation is only as accurate as the polls are inaccurate. Rather, an equation like this can provide a framework.

He said, “If all the polls are wrong, the equations are going to be wrong by that factor. Finding better polling data is our first priority. Also, humans are a strange thing, and they are so unpredictable. Regardless of what people think, people are going to vote how they feel.”

Ellery said he agreed. 

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