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Daily Electoral Predictions
Robin Berjon writes "
If you are both a political junkie and a statistics addict, I highly recommend Electoral Vote Predictor 2004, a site that gathers a collates polls taken in individual US states according to a well-documented method and uses that to generate a daily map and victory prediction, alongside a short and insightful analysis of the current trend. The site also includes a wealth of information for past maps, detailed tables, tools, links, the Senate elections, and much more. It also has a convenient RSS feed so you can get your daily fix."
...the Supreme Court? I can't find anything on that site that tells me who they're planning on appointing.
I have been to this site several times before. And while I certainly think it is great from the standpoint that the information presented is (as far as I can tell) totally void of bias, the source of the information isn't quite so grand.
While polls certainly give a reasonable idea of how votes would fall, it's well-known that poll numbers can be fairly easily slanted.
All things considered, I enjoy reading it every morning.
Proudly supporting the Libertarian Party.
Especially since if we could just make it secure, computer tabulation of votes during the month long election could give us a real time look at the election (most people don't realize this, but due to universal mail in voting my home state of Oregon can have ballots turned in, but not counted, as early as October 6th if the mail delivery is on time).
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
You must live in a highly populated state. Those of us in less populous areas appreciate the two baseline electoral votes we get -- just like the big states!
One that I've been frequenting, thought I don't agree with his political beliefs, is electionprojection.com Lot's of state by state information.
Most people have forgotten, or never learned, the reason for the electorial college. In the US, the states select the president, not the people.
When will Windows be ready for the desktop?
Nice link.
I also like Rasmussen Reports.
of information that uses sound methods.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/
Also checkout this site which displays an electoral map/vote projection based on contract prices scraped from TradeSports.com/InTrade.
TradeSports.com is an online gaming site which sells contracts for all sorts of assertions: from sports betting, to political election outcomes. Some of the most actively traded contracts on TradeSports.com are related to the U.S. Presidential Election.
The site above scrapes the average bid price data from each of the state-by-state contracts for the assertion "George W. Bush to win the November 2004 Election."
A winning contract pays $USD 10, and a point costs $0.10. Thus, it can be assumed that a bid price > 50 indicates that the TradeSports.com market believes George W. Bush will win the election in that state, while a bid price below 50 indicates a win for John Kerry.
If you don't like the default rulesets (Bid prices between 45-55 unprojected; projection made with the bid price rather than the ask price; etc), the site allows you to configure your own parameters.
The state-by-state contracts trade rather thinly -- usually, only a few hundred dollars a day -- so take day-to-day movements with a grain of salt. The total size of the market is quite large, however -- totalling just under $1 million when all the states are combined. The site currently projects a win for George W. Bush, with 284 electoral votes.
- James
Pretty much all the polls we see are of "likely voters", a group which is made up mostly (or entirely) on the people who voted in the last election. This may be a useful measure in the average election, but not this one.
The 2004 election will have a much, much higher turnout than 2000. In 2000, it didn't seem to matter a whole lot who got elected. In 2004, most everyone knows someone who has lost their job and/or knows someone in Iraq. A lot of people are still genuinely angry about Florida's lack of concern for voting rights or even following their own laws. At the same time, Bush hasn't given his more casual supporters a reason to come vote for him -- the best they've managed to do is spread a bunch of half-truth (or outright lying) reasons why they *shouldn't* vote for Kerry.
More new voters have already registered for this election than any other since 1992. That should tell you something, and logically it doesn't seem like good news for Bush if these polls are showing a close race...
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
I'd say many of us know the reason, but the reason is about two centuries out of date. The fairest way to have your vote count (and if the state is solid red or blue, it won't) is to have national instant run-off voting.
If you're going to change the voting system, why replace a broken system with a semi-broken system? IRV is better than plurality but has plenty of problems of its own. Condorcet voting is a much better choice.
Right now we have tyranny of small states.
This is a understandable, and common, error, but it's still wrong. The EC has two conflicting effects. The most obvious is that it gives residents of low-population states a slightly larger fraction of an electoral vote than residents of populous states. The other arises from the fact that most states deliver their votes in a bloc. This means that large states are much more likely than small states to swing an election. We saw evidence of this in 2000; even though Florida wasn't the only close state, it was the only one that mattered because Florida has a large population and lots of electoral votes.
Several mathematicians over the last few decades have performed a rigorous analysis of the relative effects of these facets of the EC, based on a simple measurement of the power of a single vote: What is the probability that a given vote will swing the entire election? The result is that a voter in a larger state has more power to decide the presidential election than a voter in a small state, because the advantage of a big bloc of electoral votes outweighs the advantage of fewer voters per electoral vote.
It's also worth noting that a more detailed analysis which takes into account the current political structure of the nation was done recently, and it found that, currently, the EC doesn't favor either party and that the EC will currently only return a result different from a popular vote when the electorate is very evenly divided. In those cases, a single new story, or even just some bad weather, might change the outcome in any case. In other words, the EC might "change" the outcome when the difference in the popular vote is statistical noise anyway.
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Now instead of only affecting the electorial votes of a mythical state called Lincoln, it can effect the whole country. So rather than only create enough votes for the party in favor to win the state, I just create enough votes to throw the election for the whole country.
That said - there are allegations that this has happened in the past in two states so that a certain young senator could be elected president. The only difference is that the big bad nominee for the other party decided to wait his turn to come, rather than going to the supreme court to try to get the election overturned
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
The system is not archaic, in the sense that it does not serve the function which it was created to do. For better or worse, the founders decided that the unity of the country was a higher priority than strict popular power, and so a deal was struck that gave small states proportionately more power. Obviously, it raises the possibility of a candidate winning while losing the popular vote (or at least the votes of the most populous states), otherwise the founders would have specified popular elections (or electors numbered in proportion to state population, which is not the same thing, but is closer in spirit).
The system last time did in my opinion do one thing that is extremely important in an electoral system: produce a clearly legally legitimate winner. Maybe there was skullduggery in FL, but the way the system works is that it is the electoral college that matters. Once the elector casts his vote, that's it. If the criterion was constitutionally that a plurality had to be won in FL, we'd still be arguing over the legitimacy of the Bush presidency.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If we went with a straight popular vote the President would be selected by 7 major metropolitan areas. The EC forces the President to be accountable to all 50 states.
As somebody in flyover country, I would rather not be forgotten.
> If we went with a straight popular vote the President would be
> selected by 7 major metropolitan areas.
Only if all 7 metro areas agreed, which is by no means a given. The alternative is that your "rural" vote counts more than one from a New Yorker. Is that democratic? One vote per person, no one "more equal" than anyone else, if you ask me.
True, this is an inherent problem in a winner-takes-all powerful-executive style of government. We really need a weaker executive branch.
Hear! Hear!
This is the *right* fix to the problem of people feeling like they're un-empowered in the presidential election. That feeling is actually a symptom of the fact that nearly all governmental power has migrated to the Federal level, which is simply too far removed from the average person. A strict popular election won't change that. Other election styles, or representative governments, etc., are other band-aids often proposed.
Nope, what we need to do is pare the Federal government back and shift the power back to the states (and then work on returning what the states have taken from counties and municipalities to fill the vacuum). About all it would take to make it all happen is to repeal the 16th and 17th amendments -- that's clearly a pipe dream, though.
Even without going that far, reducing the influence of the Federal government and moving the control and money back to more local levels will do far more to give the average voter a voice than getting rid of the Electoral College. What I think would be really interesting is that it would also allow different states to adopt significantly different styles of government, and allow people to choose greater or lesser degrees of government influence by voting with their feet, without having to change citizenship, learn a new language, new culture, etc. That would be an interesting experiment.
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Well this is how the union was originaly intended.
Yep.
It was changed by supreme court judges writing law!
Nope. That's why I referred to the 16th and 17th amendments, which are the basic source of the massive expansion of the Federal government we've seen in the last hundred years.
The 16th amendment gave the Federal government the right to levy income taxes. Prior to that, it had to get most of its money from the states. Remember the old saw about the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rule. Before the 16th amendment, the states had the gold.
The 17th amendment made the US Senate popularly elected. Originally, the senators were appointed by the states, under a process devised by the state legislatures. This means that the senators' direct masters were the state legislatures.
Prior to those two changes, the Federal government had to get most of its money from the states. That process worked like this: The US House and Senate would determine how much money they needed and pass a law requiring the states to pay it. The state legislatures then had to figure out how to come up with the money, i.e. raise state taxes. Politically painful. BUT, the US senators were beholden to the state legislatures and, of course, you can't make Federal law without the approval of the Senate.
See how beatifully the framers of the constitution arranged for the Federal government to be weak? No money == no power. Now, the states are dictated to by the Federal government, because that's where all of the money is.
We need to go back to states rights or we will meet our demise eventually.
Don't blame my ancestors... Utah was the only state that rejected both amendments (Connecticutt, Rhode Island and New Hampshire also rejected the 16th, but New Hampshire later recanted, Utah stood alone on the 17th).
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