One of my favorite professors at MIT was Arnie Barnett. He’s the George Eastman Professor of Management Science, but more to the point he’s a wizard of statistics, able to make statistics understandable (and dryly funny to boot — as tired as I might be, I always made a point of attending his lectures).
He most frequently talks about aviation safety (he’s “[w]idely considered the nation’s leading expert on aviation safety“), but in this election year he’s been engaged in discussing ways to predict elections and, more significantly, how to improve the voting process so that it reflects the will of the populace more accurately.
On the MIT Sloan Newsroom Podcast page, there’s an interview with him that I invite you to hear. Right now, it’s about a third of the way down the page. Search for “Intellectual Capital: Arnie Barnett finds safety in numbers.”