I object to this article a mere 2 days before my Into to Probability Theory test.

Don't you people have any mercy at all?

I'm not sure that I see your problem. Although Probability is supposedly used in Statistics, which is the subject of this article, they are not one and the same. Care to clarify?

And no, we have not one bit of mercy.

When saying this sample has 3% expected error, what you actually mean is:

The statistical analysis of this sample has X precent chance of being withing 3% range of the right answer.

Probability comes in when you calculate how large the sample should be to have a given chance of being withing a given error. Or what is the chance of being withing a given error with the sample size you have.

Hmm...
Couldn't they mean that there is a 3% chance of the real result being outside a single standard deviation radius from the mean? Or something completely different? They have, indeed, not given us any notion of what it is that they consider an error.
Could they mean that the standard deviation is 3% of the votes?

Problem is, that when you are referring to elections, there are at least two percentages you can be referrring to: those regarding probability, and those regarding the actual percentage of public support each candidate had received.

Here (http://cuwu.editthispage.com/stories/storyReader$144) is a problem you might encounter in such a test, if you haven't seen it already. Good exercise for those probability muscles...
(It seems the 144 is being cut from the URL. If you want to get to the page, punch it in.)

C. I doubt that ever in history anyone literally punched-in a URL. Come to think of it, there's probably a huge market for batch web browsing... I'm on my way to solicit investors.

1. I use windows NT with no hebrew support, so my IE lets me read hebrew, but not write.

2. Ofcourse I knew this problem.
One of the best reasons to learn probability is to see how bad our intuition is. We have so many opinions based on our probability intuition that its educating to see how unreliable it is.

3. I just took the test. It went pretty good. Thanks for the support :-)