Thousands of readers sent in their votes for the Question of the Year. The Explainer was unable to go through each and every e-mail, so instead used the following approaches to determine the winning questions:

First, the Explainer used text-matching to count e-mails that contained keywords associated with each of the 39 possible questions. This method introduced small but significant errors, as not every e-mail was a valid vote. (For example, some people wrote in to answer a specific question rather than to vote for it.)

Second, the Explainer reviewed a sample of 1,000 e-mails, selected at random from the inbox. The results from this hand count were compared to a series of simulations to determine how likely it was that the sample would pick out the winning question. (The simulation assumed that the distribution of votes resembled an exponential falloff from the most popular to the least popular questions.)

Both approaches returned the Abraham Lincoln question as the top vote-getter, and the simulations suggested a high degree of confidence for that finding. Both approaches also identified the stripper and self-cleaning soap questions as being among the top four, along with a question about whether the universe is infinite. The exact ordering of these three runners-up was not conclusive.