A little bit of math fun.
You visit this cool website and see a poll there. You want to know how many people voted in the poll. The number of people voted is important if you want to validate the results. For example, look at the following result:
If you don’t know the number of people voted in this poll, you will be left wondering what this result means. Does it mean that most people think IE6 is the best web browser? Or is it just that a single person voted in favor of IE6? You can calculate the number of people voted in the poll:
1. Note down the current status of the poll:
2. Cast your vote. Note down the new results:
In the above case I voted Yes. Here is how we calculate the number of people voted:
Let x = % of Yes votes before I voted
Let y = % of Yes votes after I voted
Total number of people voted = (100 – x) / (y-x)
In our example, number of people voted = (100-67)/(75-67) = 4
Remember that the result counts your vote too.
Many websites do not want you to know the exact number of people who voted in the poll (Mostly because there are not many votes). This is the reason why they allow you to see the results only after you have voted (Another reason for this is of course to make you vote).
Usually you can get around this by opening a new session to the server (by clearing your cookies etc) and voting again. Note that if there is no change in the percentages after you vote, it just means that a lot of people participated in the poll and it is difficult (not impossible) to get the number of votes.
