You may hear the phrase "Monte Carlo Method" and you may not know what it is.

It's actually incredibly simple and it is intuitively obvious.

Meaning, even dummies can understand this, and you don't need a PhD in math to get it.

Suppose you had a really complicated thing, with all sorts of rules and exceptions and random events, and you wanted to understand how this thing works.

For my example, let's take a game like "Chutes and Ladders". Or "Candyland."

You want to know some things about this game: How long does it take? What is my chance of winning? If the game involves some sort of decision-making, like you have to choose something, then it gets really complicated and you want to know what sorts of decisions you should make to win the game.

What the Monte Carlo Method is, simply put, is to play the game thousands, millions, billions of times. See what happens if you make certain kinds of decisions versus other kinds of decisions. Look at all the games you played and see how many times you won, or lost, or how long the game took, etc...

The Monte Carlo Method is just that simple.

When it comes to counting votes, the way you might use the Monte Carlo method is you might simulate that Democrats are 90% likely to vote for Biden, and Republicans 90% likely to vote for Trump, and independents 50%. So you randomly determine how each voter voted, whether they decided to show up, and you look at the results of that random election. Then you do it again and again and again, and you see what sorts of election results you see. If you've done it a thousand times, you should start to see some patterns develop and you should be able to say things like, "If independents were 80% like to vote for Biden then that would look like these counties and precincts voting this way."

The way you typically run Monte Carlo simulations is you simply write a program. The program rolls the dice billions of times and then you look at the results and add it all up. And you store the results in a database or an excel spreadsheet or something so you can review them and see what the patterns look like.