The Exhausting Work of Tallying America's Largest Protest

How many people attended the various Women’s Marches around the globe this weekend? The question is simple, but it’s hard enough to estimate the crowd at any one event. As my colleague Rob reported last week, one popular method involves satellites and weather balloons, but the low clouds that hung over Washington, D.C. on Saturday made aerial estimates difficult. Multiply the challenge by several hundred to account for all the sister marches, and assembling a total becomes a very daunting task.

But over the weekend, as President Donald Trump fought with the media over the attendance at his inauguration— put the crowd at about 160,000 people, while Trump an attendance of 1.5 million—a pair of political-science professors began work on a