I have been wondering about this rounding business concerning Hillary's win in Pennsylvania. There are many ways to round numbers and I am sure someone with more knowledge about this will have a better answer, but this are my thoughts. (This is my first diary so please be nice.)
Some news organizations have only 99% reported so I am using figures from the NY Times, which is one of the few sites that have 100% reported and the only one I can find that uses decimal places.
The NY Times reports;
Clinton 1,260,444 54.6%
Obama 1,046,220 45.4%
http://politics.nytimes.com/...
Most other organizations report Clinton 55% Obama 45%
I am using total votes of 2,306,664 so I get the following
Clinton 54.643598 %
Obama 45.35641 %
Rounding for Clinton 54.643598=54.64359=54.6436=54.644=54.644=54.6=55%
Rounding for Obama 45.35641=45.3564=45.356=45.36=45.4=45%
As you can see, Clinton's percentage is increased by 4/10% to give her a 55% total. But Obama's 4/10% is chopped off to give him 45%.
If we apply this to the total vote 4/10 X 2,306,664=9226.65 or 9,227 votes being added to Clinton by rounding while 9,227 votes are chopped from Obama. Certainly, it can be said that Obama loses 9,227 votes by rounding and Hillary gains 9,227 votes by rounding. I do not think in 2008 anyone should be given votes by rounding. Howard Kurtz certainly seems to think that these 9,227 votes do not matter, or one could say 18,454 in total do not matter.
All this is done to claim that Clinton achieved a double digit margin when I contend that you cannot give someone a double digit victory by rounding alone. Many elections have been decided by less than 9,227 votes in this country. In fact, a president was decided by only 500 votes in 2000.
If we look at only the 2000 election, 4 states were decided by less than .4% of the vote!
Florida < 0.0092%
New Mexico 0.06%
Wisconson 0.22%
Iowa 0.31%
and Oregon was decided by 0.44% of the vote.
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
With all of the talk about bias toward Obama in the media, I think that this is a concerted effort on the part of the media to give Hillary a double digit win to keep this race going.This might seem obtuse to some, but my curiosity is aroused about the subject of rounding votes and percentages and elections. I still contend that a margin of 9.2% cannot be rounded to 10%! I welcome mathematicians to comment on this.
P.S. One last point, why does Obama's name come up as a possible misspelled word, when Clinton's does not? Shouldn't Obama's name be added to the KOS dictionary by now?