I recently came across this article.
The title is "Bigger turnout in Australia's same-sex marriage vote than in Brexit".
The url even contains "more-people-have-voted-in-same-sex-marriage-vote-than-brexit".
This is wrong.
The basis for the incorrect information? For the Brexit vote, 72% of the UK population voted. For Australia's same-sex marriage vote, supposedly 79% of Australia's population voted.*
If you haven't spotted the problem yet, you definitely need to keep reading.
Percentages do not mean the number of people. The UK has a population of 65.5 million people. Australia has a population of 24.5 million. This means:
For Brexit: 72% of 65.5 million = 47.16 million people voted (which is already more than the entire population of Australia).
For Australia's same-sex marriage: 79% of 24.5 million = 19.36 million people voted.
Therefore, we can easily see that more people voted in Brexit than in Australia's same-sex marriage.
Therefore, the 'bigger turnout' was clearly for Brexit (because that implies number of people).
And this is just from using basic high school maths.
This is just one of many instances where news reports will carefully word things to give you the impression that the statistics are saying something they're not.
The conclusion: people should always question information they see in the news, especially if the organisation calls itself "Pink News".
* The vote was postal, and there are reports of people collecting and sending off multiple voting papers, essentially nullifying the result.
The title is "Bigger turnout in Australia's same-sex marriage vote than in Brexit".
The url even contains "more-people-have-voted-in-same-sex-marriage-vote-than-brexit".
This is wrong.
The basis for the incorrect information? For the Brexit vote, 72% of the UK population voted. For Australia's same-sex marriage vote, supposedly 79% of Australia's population voted.*
If you haven't spotted the problem yet, you definitely need to keep reading.
Percentages do not mean the number of people. The UK has a population of 65.5 million people. Australia has a population of 24.5 million. This means:
For Brexit: 72% of 65.5 million = 47.16 million people voted (which is already more than the entire population of Australia).
For Australia's same-sex marriage: 79% of 24.5 million = 19.36 million people voted.
Therefore, we can easily see that more people voted in Brexit than in Australia's same-sex marriage.
Therefore, the 'bigger turnout' was clearly for Brexit (because that implies number of people).
And this is just from using basic high school maths.
This is just one of many instances where news reports will carefully word things to give you the impression that the statistics are saying something they're not.
The conclusion: people should always question information they see in the news, especially if the organisation calls itself "Pink News".
* The vote was postal, and there are reports of people collecting and sending off multiple voting papers, essentially nullifying the result.
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