Slashdot Mirror
The Votemaster Is...Andrew Tanenbaum
A reader writes: " www.electoral-vote.com, a site of daily updated maps of the US electoral college based on a number of polls is probably a site that the policially inclined check daily. Well, it has been revealed that the person behind the site, AKA the votemaster, is none other than Andrew Tanenbaum, noted author of numerous CS books." He's also known for a little discussion with someone named Linus Torvalds.
I have been a longtime reader of his site. He has mirrors up on electoral-vote2.com on up. I think 5 was the highest I last heard, but I'm sure he'll be putting up more after gettting a good slashdotting. And he thought the people trying to DoS him was bad...
He's a US citizen living abroad:
"My name is Andrew Tanenbaum. I am one of the 7 million U.S. citizens living abroad. I am a professor of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Most of you have never heard of me but in an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny corner of the universe I have done enough stuff that Google has somehow managed to dig up 10,000 pages referring to me."
He's a US Citizen, just not living in the United States.
Nice long post. I can sum it up easy. While he is clearly a Kerry supporter, the polls are non-biased and based on existing polls.
If you followed the site for some time you would see that. There is even a movie on the site to show you how much the polls have been swinging back and forwards.
If anything his site shows how pointless polls are, or that the undeceided voter is completly clueless and changes their mind every 5 minutes.
The only poll that really matters is tomorrows.
On another note "600,000 Iraqis". Can you quote a source for that? The only figure I can find is for displaced and not killed under sanctions. Also you should note that Saddam was grossly inflating the deaths (especially children deaths) in order to try and stop sanctions.
Except he's a US citizen living abroad, which is not the same as not a US citizen.
A friend of mine recently moved to Canada for work and told me that lots of US expats she knows there are voting for the first time in years (often for the first time since they left). If you're living abroad you vote in the last state where you were a resident and you only get to vote for president (maybe senate, too, but I think just prez). Many of those people last lived, and are very likely to vote for Kerry (in Canada, the far right is mostly to the left of the US Dems).
It's going to be an interesting election night...
(sarcasm appreciated except for the nit)
Slykens, he ALWAYS uses the poll with the most recent median date. He's currently using a Zogby poll with a median date of 10/31 in Florida, making it more recent than the Quinnipiac poll. He has explained this many times over the past few weeks: He only averages polls that have the same median date and polling length.
Check the trade balance. It's the US that needs to trade with the rest of the world to survive - not the other way around.
it's in my head
You do not get to vote for president. None of us do. Your state does. You vote for your state's electors, since that is the election system your state has set up. It is the state's choice to cast all of its votes for the state's popular vote winner (although one state currently has a ballot measure which would split up the electoral votes in some situations). We have a federalist system. If you do not and cannot understand the governmental system we use in this country and why we use it, then it's probably best that your vote "doesn't count."