Reply #22: You could also try using a multinomial distribution to estimate the

[thanatonautos]

probability of seven (or more) states deviating.

If you divided up the possible outcomes into ranges
of one standard deviation like so:

(0) less than -4 sigma
(1) from -4 to -3 sigma
(2) from -3, -2 sigma

and so on, you'd get 10 bins. You can calculate
a probability p_i for getting a result in each bin
pretty easily using a table of the cumulative
normal distribution.

Then the probability of getting exactly k_i exit poll
deviations falling into the i'th bin, for every i from 1
to 10, would be given by the multinomial distribution:

P(k1, k2, ..., k10) = C * p1^k1 * p2^k2 * ... * p10^k10

C = N!/(k1!k2!...k10!)

This kind of analysis should be pretty easy to carry out
using the graph in the paper, either for N=7 or for N=50
states.

I'll try to do it later on and see how it compares to the
much simpler binomial estimate.

What BlueEyedSon said is also a good idea ... you could
definitely write to the authors of the paper and ask
for the data that they used. I would think they'ld
likely be very willing to provide them.