I’ve stayed away from politics on this site, the main reason is I figure the surest way to offend visitors is politically, these days so many people seem so starkly divided into one political camp or the other, that it seems very easy to step on peoples political sensibilities. I am, however going to talk about politics, but mainly in the general sense to illustrate something I’ve thought about for quite a while and something that is grossly absent in most news coverage of polls and elections. With all science there are assumptions, things that you “assume” to be true so you can proceed with evaluating everything. In the science of polling, the words Sampling and turnout are quite relevant. (What?) In regards to polls, sampling is deciding what the makeup of your poll sample is, (percentage makeup by party affiliation) and trying to match that to expected turnout. But how do you predict turnout? Let’s take the following example of cartoonia….