Hat-tip to Institutional Economics blog for this link to a discussion about Earth hour and its insignificance.
Lets jump straight the conclusion the irrelevance of 2% in the normal variance is actually less than the Greens vote in the recent NSW state election.
The Greens got 8.15% for the legislative Council (equivalent to the senate), slightly less than the informal vote. The informal vote is actually a good indication of the number of people protest against having to vote, as it is compulsory to vote in Australian elections.
So does this means that people who vote for Green candidates actually are not really green at all?
Am I going to mine the data from the recent election, get a total primary vote for Green votes in Sydney?
no, I don't have to time and the data is not available in a nice format.
Here is the SQL I would run if I could...
select party,count(*)
from election_results_2007
where area = 'Sydney'
group by party order by 2;
Have Fun
