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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.
From the other side of the ponds, the story is quite different. About 113,000 people cast their vote here. In this worldwide shadow election: Kerry wins (77.1%), and Bush comes second at 9.1%. Surprisingly, support for Bush is largest in the Middle East (many votes from Israel?). Some hilarious (frightening...) responses by US citizens to this shadow-election can be found here.
Another initiative (about 20,000 people) is here. Results will be published later today.
It's logical that the results are different than those in the US. However, one wonders how much of a hint some (some) US citizens (especially those posting very harsh comments in response to these shadow-elections) need to realize that it's not just the US that matters in this world.
Mod me flamebait, if you wish. But before you do, consider: it's not me delivering the criticism, it's 113,000 people (on behalf of a much larger group). I'm just the messenger boy here...
Support a Europe-related section on Slashdot!
Interesting that Andy now refers to MINIX in terms of Linux, no? Considering that Linux is obsolete and all that ... ;-)
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
I just read the votemaster description, and came over to Slashdot to submit the story. Funny. Despite being a small, self-run website, this is one I don't think Slashdot can even begin to take down (650,000 hits/day), although it's been the subject of DDoS attacks in the past. Being the computer wizard & all-around smart guy that Mr. Minix is, he's prepared for this by setting up backup site (just increment the number if it's down).
Mostly, I can wait to see how Linus is inspired by this project, writes his own version and then invites the global electoral community to help him make it even better. Take that! (j/k)
If you haven't visited the Current Electoral Vote Predictor site, give it a try. The site is very interesting and his daily updates of the polls in each state is very interesting. The comments in his "News from the Votemaster" might infuriate the conservative third, but are usually insightful, and not pretended to be balanced.
I am living proof of the Peter Principle
I just voted this morning and there has apperently been high early voter turnout for the past few weeks. I'm almost more curious to see how high of a voter turnout there will be. If it hits 81.8% or higher, it will be the highest since 1860.
Total Crap. Polls are conducted over a period of time. The votemast firgure out the middle date and picks the poll that has the latest middle data. In the case of a tie, he chooses the poll with the shortest duration.
It doesn't matter if the latest poll is a Strategic Vision poll (thought to be republican-leaning) or a Zogby (who some think is democrat-leaning)
If you've been really watching the site, you'd notice that there have been wild swings from Kerry to Bush in the past.
Now, I think that this is just a crackpot attempt to discredit what has been a really good site (even if I did wish that he'd throw out Strategic Vission).
You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake -- but you could be if you got off your ass.
Still, Tanenbaum doesn't really make reference to that on his site; he acts as if the mere act of running electoral-vote.com somehow helps the Democratic candidate. That's the part I don't understand.
FUD does not have to come from the hollowed halls of Microsoft in order to be FUD. Liberals do it as well as Conservatives, both of which leave a sour taste on the palettes of the American people. People are getting disenchanted with the whole system. Everyone feels cheated and feels that they cannot trust the other side.
I reperesent a third alternative, one who is disenchanted with both parties enough, that I'm actually doing something about it (in my own ways). Refuting the logic of polls like this and questioning the spreaders of disinformation is the start. Voting your conscience tomorrow is the answer.
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
I would guess that for many people the causal connection is backwards from what it appears you are suggesting. I.e., people "hate" Bush because they think that he his positions or courses of action are inappropriate. I personally don't hate him, but his positions and courses of action are why I'm voting against him. (Yes, I'm one of those many people who are voting against Bush more so than voting for Kerry. I've never been particularly partisan, but have always thought that respect for the environment was very important.)
I do believe that the reasons you've listed are primary reasons we attacked Iraq. I'm still undecided as to whether the reasons were sufficient. Saddam was an evil person, and only time will tell whether we've helped to secure freedom and democracy for Iraq or whether we've prepared the way for a worse dictator. (The US has a bad track record with this - think Khomeni, etc.) Nevertheless, I do think that there has been significant profiteering going on, (e.g., Haliburton), and that is very disturbing.
An interesting thought experiment is to imagine what would have happened had we invaded Germany and removed Hitler instead of ceding the Sudetenland to him. People probably would have said we were overstating the threat, etc. Was Saddam as big a threat as Hitler? (Remember, Hitler had no WMD's either,) Maybe not. But if we had removed Hitler when he invaded the Sudetenland, Hitler wouldn't have been as big a threat.
However, even if you believe we should have attacked Iraq, it is hard to believe that Bush followed a well thought out plan. I think a good diplomat could have bargained with France, Germany, and Russia and gotten them on board. I know that seems impossible now, but that's only because Bush has so alienated them that it's difficult for even them to imagine ever helping us.
Of course, my number one reason for voting against Bush is because of the number of policies he has enacted that have rolled back the environmental policies enacted under Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr., and Clinton.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Texas? WTF? In 2000, Gore won in only one county there. Brazos county, home of Texas A&M University, and a damn disproportionate conglomeration of college students.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Don't take the Florida result in 2000 too much to heart. A lot of elections have post-election litigation associated with vote anomalies or recounts. It usually gets tossed out eventually because of no material effect on the result. It took 204 years and what, 51 elections for a situation like 2000 to present itself. It is not likely to happen again anytime soon.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Not to be a link whore, but I run an election related site - The Electoral College Vote Calculator - and I can report that traffic is going through the roof today. As of 11 am EST, its already on pace to quadruple yesterday's traffic - and yesterday was a record (5000 unique visitors - as an armchair webmaster, thats quite a lot for me).
All this for a dinky little site that never made it past the second page of the google search results. I can imagine what the servers at some of the more widely publicised sites are going through.
SpyDock: Scientific Python in a Docker container
If Bush loses the Electoral Vote and wins the Popular vote - as many are projecting because of the expected record turnout in states already "locked" (Texas, Georgia, etc.) - will Republicans still laud the Distinct Wisdom of our Founding Fathers as they did back in 2000? Or will they be calling for the abolition of a Wretched Anachronism that ignores The Will of the People?
I wonder...
Is this your first day looking at this site? Then you should know that Kerry's huge lead in the electoral college is a recent change. For a while, it was even or at times showing a huge lead for Bush.
The real reason is that the electoral college system can really amplify a tiny advantage. The winner-takes-all system for each state really does that.
In 1936, the Literary Gazette published a poll that predicted a victory for Alf Landon over Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The only problem was that the poll was conducted by telephone, and in the depths of the Great Depression a lot of people couldn't afford a telephone. FDR won in a landslide. Landon only won a state or two.
The cell phone issue reminds me of that situation, although it is not as pervasive. If the turnout of cell-phone-only young people is significant, this could become very interesting.
Funny, because those who respond "undecided" vote 2:1 democrat over republican.
Your speculation is pretty much unfounded. In 2000, Gore was several points behind in polls the day before the election, and he ended up winning the popular vote. That tells me that polls favor republicans.
What?
One of the things I liked about the site was the Dynamic HTML summary that pops up when you place your cursor over the state. It turns out he uses a script written by Walter Zorn, but removes the notice information and doesn't give him credit for it.
Disappointing, considering his line of work.
I actually hope there are thousands of lawsuits. Besides helping to expose both the D and R partys shenanigans, I want to have them bust up diebold and those other election fraud companies forever, and get rid of the notion of pre hacked black box voting elections, and shakeup the population to stop being such utter sheep when it comes to something as important as this. If it takes a thousand lawsuits, better that than the alternative, which would be a full dictatorship shortly once these machines are entrenched all over and legitimised by an "accepted vote tally" and they know they can get away with it. 2002 was a test, and they "got away with it". If they do the same in 2004, that's it, it's over.
This is my opinion of course, but I think it has a lot of merit based on what we know so far.
I first had issue with anyone who called a multithreaded filesystem "a hack" and his mean spirited flame war with Linus looked uncool.
:-)
Sure, you can disagree with many issues but there needs to be an open mind in the scientific and academic community. Flaming others is a sign of weakness and insecurity. Especially when he told Linus "You would not get good grades in my course..." kind of proves that.
He tried to explain himself later on slashdot saying he merely disagreed with him but I was not too sure.
www.electoral-vote.com is an awesome site that I find truly non biased. I go there every day being a political junky. For those who say he is liberal all I have to say is look at his past entries? When Bush was ahead after the RNC liberals accused him of being a Bush sheep.
What kills me is he using Linux and not Darwin, AIX, or MacOSX which are "not obsolete".
I think Linus has the ultimate say now in the flamewar contest.
http://saveie6.com/
...the US is in "Iraq" because it was an easy target in the region, period. ...The US never went to Iraq for WMD (though we were justified in doing so for that reason alone, and probably expected to find quite a bit). Yes, in a way, it went for "oil".
Interesting. Now, consider that the Bush administration used the supposed presence of WMD as its primary justification of the invasion of Iraq to the nation and the world. Unless you dispute that (and it's pretty tough to dispute after reading the transcripts of President Bush's speeches between Jan 2003 and May 2003), then we come to an interesting conclusion. Apparently, you are less concerned about what a candidate/president _says_ his reasons are for doing a thing than you are concerned about what those reasons actually are. If you are correct that the U.S. invaded Iraq because it was a target of opportunity that would provide a platform for countering panislamic fundamentalism, then the WMD justification must have been both a smokescreen and a false statement.
I call this conclusion "interesting" because many who support Bush (perhaps not including you) spend much of their time spouting about "character" and "lies". It's refreshing to see a true pragmatist abandon that tired moral rhetoric and attempt to justify support of Bush's policies and actions based on facts, self-interest, and logic. I happen to disagree with your eventual conclusion (that Bush's methods are sound), but I admire the process by which you reach it.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Anyone else notice every time you hit the electoral-vote.com you get a bunch of outgoing traffic on tcp port 8088? He's also using the site (actually, I think it's a grad student) for research into planet-lab style distributed computing stuff. (see www.planet-lab.org) j
I always thought that gallup was one of the most reliable sources of poll data, but I guess I'm wrong.
On electoral-vote.com, Penn is Kerry, 50-46.
On gallup.com, Penn is Bush, 50-46.
On electoral-vote.com, Wisconsin is Kerry, 51-44.
On gallup.com, Wisconsin is Bush, 51-44.
I'm confused, I thought electoral-vote.com used the gallup data where appropriate, but that seems to not be the case. Where can I find the other source data (not the graphs on electoral-vote.com, but rather, the actual site/sites where the data is coming from).
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
And, BTW, would you rather they linked to a site whose author claims no bias or hides it?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Just out of curiosity, (as the number of electoral votes per state is a function of the number of senators + the number of representatives), do you feel under-represented in Congress year-round, or is it only during elections?
I've never heard an anti-electoral college discussion address this and I'm interested in hearing a response, especially as we are a representative democracy.
Thanks, Jason.
If we got rid of it, the presidential election campaigns would focus on the top five or ten population centers/media markets in the country
Which would be so much different than the current system, where the campaigns focus on the top five or ten states in terms of available electoral votes -- which are based on population.
Nobody will ever campaign heavily for the votes of people in North Dakota, even though with the weighting of the Electoral College a single person's vote in that state carries roughly three times the weight of that of a voter in California. Either with the EC or with direct election, it will still be more cost-effective to appeal to the voters in the large cities of California.
Peace cannot be imposed from without, but there are many ways in which the US (or another nation) could help. For example, it can propose a compromise, and then provide disinterested security during the transition to that compromise.
Also, since the US holds power over Israel (in the form of foreign aid), it has the ability to convince the Israelis to accept a compromise which is more tilted towards the Palestinians. Since the Palestinians have little power, any compromise Israel offers is likely to be less than fair to them. Or more to the point, they have so little power that there's no difference to them between accepting the compromise the Israelis would offer and continuing the intifada. The Israeli wall is a perfect example of that: it's a two-state solution as designed by the Israelis, and because the Israelis have the power they draw the line outside (sometimes well outside) the 1967 borders that many people agree is fair (if somewhat arbitrary to my mind).
Israel's unilateral compromise may eventually evolve into a peace; the Palestinians will have their de facto state and choose to leave peaceably in it. But if the US had forced Israel to draw the border less aggressively, that would have been more likely. The present border is the compromise Sharon draws between the conservatives and the liberals, and therefore offers the Palestinians rather less than most of the world believes they are entitled to.
Ultimately it will rest with the Israelis to say, "We now have enough land and we need not take more" and the Palestinians to say, "We're tired of war; let's try living with the compromise we've got." And then for the Israelis to say, "They seem peaceable enough, let's stop killing their radicals, which usually kills a few bystanders". And then the Palestinians to say, "This is pretty good; if any more terrorists try to jeopardize what we have we risk losing everything and we will stop them ourselves rather than making the Israelis do it."
But it starts somewhere, and I'd love to see the US or the EU or the UN find an effective way to jump start it. I have some hope that Israel's unilateral solution will go into effect (possible) and will lead to the cascade I describe (doubtful; both sides have parties who want it to fail). But it may be the best they can impose without help from a more agressive power, which doesn't need to provide genocide, only police and diplomatic pressure.
As I resident of Illinois, I disagree. I'm not discounting that a large portion of the counties in Illinois are Republican. But I do think that the Illinois Republican Party and Illinois Republicans as a whole are more moderate than those in most of the other "heartland" states (Indiana, for example). This could be just an outgrowth of needing crossover Democratic support to win state-wide office.
While there are numerous reasons for Alan Keyes lack of success at energizing the electorate, I think one of them is that he's just too conservative for a lot of Illinois Republicans.
See, in the US, a lot of us tend to draw different morals from 20th century history. Some of the most common lessons being:
I don't list these to say whether they are right or wrong, but rather to illustrate why we (as a nation) behave the way that we do.
It may seem arrogant for Americans to be drawing these conclusions from a war that mostly took place in Europe, East Asia, the Pacific, and North Africa.
But if Europeans can express their opinions about what goes on in the US, surely it's okay for Americans to think about faraway lands where some 500,000 of their soldiers once went to fight and die.