General Question
Can someone help me with a problem on my statistics homework?
I have a take home quiz for my statistics class and I can’t for the life of me figure out where to start with the last problem. It falls under the subtitle “Normal Approximation to the Binomial” but I don’t ever remember learning how to solve this in class. I need to show my work but I don’t know what equation to use or where to start. The problem is in 5 parts and reads as follow:
AN ELECTION WITH 10,000 VOTES HAD MR. J DEFEATING MS. S BY 9 VOTES
a. How many votes did each candidate get?
b. A total of 100 other votes were not counted and accidentally destroyed. What is the smallest number of these votes that Ms. S would need to have won the election?
c. Assuming that the probability of Ms. S getting any vote is 50%, what is the binomial probability that she got this minimum amount of votes?
d. In fact any number of votes at least that large would have given her the election. Use the normal approximation to the binomial with mean=50 and standard deviation=5 to determine the actual probability that Ms. S might have won the election.
e. Ms. S argues that there should be a new election since she had a good chance of winning if the lost votes had been counted. If you were the appeals judge, how would you rule? Try to include all of the issues you can think of which would be involved in holding a new election.
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