As those of you who have been around our site know, we are big promoters of Prediction Markets over National polls. As a consequence, we have been featuring Prediction Market data for the U.S. Presidential Election for quite some time now.

We must, however, be fair. Most of the polls featured on the major news outlets’ websites are national polls. These record the popular vote, which is interesting, but is not how our voting system works. While we like to think of this country as a direct democracy, it is actually a representative democracy. We have an electoral college with a certain number of (unequal) electoral votes for each state. Therefore, a more precise system of polling would be to take each state’s polling data and calculate a weighted average (weighted according to the number of electoral votes).

The outcome of this equation would more precisely reflect the national vote, which would then be a fair comparison to Prediction Markets.

Prediction Markets, of course, conveniently take all of this into account automatically.