2008 General Election Discussion Thread

[kapkomet]

Sure thing. I'll try posting some pictures as well.

It's OUR reporter on the ground, M**** (yes, I remember your real name).

 

Have fun. No matter what happens, it's historical. I also hope things are peaceful down there no matter what happens.

 

[bmags]

I wish I had an old school lever ballot. I had to just fill mine out with marker, and no, it wasn't the magical invisible ink markers from illinois.

 

Overall, If I remember well enough, I prefer my Illinois ballot from 04 over the Missouri ballot, though I didn't not find Missouri's confusing.

[BigSqwert]

From 538.com:

 

Ten Reasons Why You Should Ignore Exit Polls

 

1. Exit polls have a much larger intrinsic margin for error than regular polls. This is because of what are known as cluster sampling techniques. Exit polls are not conducted at all precincts, but only at some fraction thereof. Although these precincts are selected at random and are supposed to be reflective of their states as a whole, this introduces another opportunity for error to occur (say, for instance, that a particular precinct has been canvassed especially heavily by one of the campaigns). This makes the margins for error somewhere between 50-90% higher than they would be for comparable telephone surveys.

 

2. Exit polls have consistently overstated the Democratic share of the vote. Many of you will recall this happening in 2004, when leaked exit polls suggested that John Kerry would have a much better day than he actually had. But this phenomenon was hardly unique to 2004. In 2000, for instance, exit polls had Al Gore winning states like Alabama and Georgia (!). If you go back and watch The War Room, you'll find George Stephanopolous and James Carville gloating over exit polls showing Bill Clinton winning states like Indiana and Texas, which of course he did not win.

 

3. Exit polls were particularly bad in this year's primaries. They overstated Barack Obama's performance by an average of about 7 points.

 

4. Exit polls challenge the definition of a random sample. Although the exit polls have theoretically established procedures to collect a random sample -- essentially, having the interviewer approach every nth person who leaves the polling place -- in practice this is hard to execute at a busy polling place, particularly when the pollster may be standing many yards away from the polling place itself because of electioneering laws.

 

5. Democrats may be more likely to participate in exit polls. Related to items #1 and #4 above, Scott Rasmussen has found that Democrats supporters are more likely to agree to participate in exit polls, probably because they are more enthusiastic about this election.

 

6. Exit polls may have problems calibrating results from early voting. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, exit polls will attempt account for people who voted before election day in most (although not all) states by means of a random telephone sample of such voters. However, this requires the polling firms to guess at the ratio of early voters to regular ones, and sometimes they do not guess correctly. In Florida in 2000, for instance, there was a significant underestimation of the absentee vote, which that year was a substantially Republican vote, leading to an overestimation of Al Gore's share of the vote, and contributing to the infamous miscall of the state.

 

7. Exit polls may also miss late voters. By "late" voters I mean persons who come to their polling place in the last couple of hours of the day, after the exit polls are out of the field. Although there is no clear consensus about which types of voters tend to vote later rather than earlier, this adds another way in which the sample may be nonrandom, particularly in precincts with long lines or extended voting hours.

 

8. "Leaked" exit poll results may not be the genuine article. Sometimes, sources like Matt Drudge and Jim Geraghty have gotten their hands on the actual exit polls collected by the network pools. At other times, they may be reporting data from "first-wave" exit polls, which contain extremely small sample sizes and are not calibrated for their demographics. And at other places on the Internet (though likely not from Gergahty and Drudge, who actually have reasonably good track records), you may see numbers that are completely fabricated.

 

9. A high-turnout election may make demographic weighting difficult. Just as regular, telephone polls are having difficulty this cycle estimating turnout demographics -- will younger voters and minorities show up in greater numbers? -- the same challenges await exit pollsters. Remember, an exit poll is not a definitive record of what happened at the polling place; it is at best a random sampling.

 

10. You'll know the actual results soon enough anyway. Have patience, my friends, and consider yourselves lucky: in France, it is illegal to conduct a poll of any kind within 48 hours of the election. But exit polls are really more trouble than they're worth, at least as a predictive tool. An independent panel created by CNN in the wake of the Florida disaster in 2000 recommended that the network completely ignore exit polls when calling particular states. I suggest that you do the same.

[DBAHO]

Rove's already basically called it for Obama on his web-site;

 

John McCain and his aides are still banking on a come-from-behind victory Tuesday, but the GOP's most famous political strategist has already called the race for Barack Obama.

 

Karl Rove, the man widely credited with engineering President Bush's two successful White House bids, is predicting the Illinois senator will take the White House in an Electoral College landslide, winning 338 votes to John McCain's 200. That would be the largest Electoral College victory since 1996, when Bill Clinton defeated Bob Dole in a 379-159 rout.

 

In an Electoral Map posted on Rove's Web site, the Republican mastermind predicts Obama victories in several key battlegrounds, including virtually all of the states where polls suggest he currently enjoys a slim advantage. In fact, Rove believes Missouri is the only crucial battleground state McCain will carry, while Obama scores victories in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Colorado, New Mexico, Minnesota, and Iowa. Rove also thinks Obama will win traditionally-Republican Virginia.

[HuskyCaucasian]

This is pretty cool:

[HuskyCaucasian]

Networks May Call Race Before Voting Is Complete

 

At least one broadcast network and one Web site said Monday that they could foresee signaling to viewers early Tuesday evening which candidate appeared to have won the presidency, despite the unreliability of some early exit polls in the last presidential election.

 

A senior vice president of CBS News, Paul Friedman, said the prospects for Barack Obama or John McCain meeting the minimum threshold of electoral votes could be clear as soon as 8 p.m.

 

“We could know Virginia at 7,” he said. “We could know Indiana before 8. We could know Florida at 8. We could know Pennsylvania at 8. We could know the whole story of the election with those results. We can’t be in this position of hiding our heads in the sand when the story is obvious.”

 

Similarly, the editor of the Web site Slate, David Plotz, said in an e-mail message that “if Obama is winning heavily,” he could see calling the race “sometime between 8 and 9.”

 

“Our readers are not stupid, and we shouldn’t engage in a weird Kabuki drama that pretends McCain could win California and thus the presidency,” Mr. Plotz wrote. “We will call it when a sensible person — not a TV news anchor who has to engage in a silly pretense about West Coast voters — would call it.”

 

“When a candidate gets 270 electoral votes, they’re the next president,” said Sheldon Gawiser, director of elections for NBC News. “If some states are still voting, it’s an unfortunate circumstance, that’s what it is. The founding fathers never expected us to count the votes fast.”

[EvilMonkey]

Networks May Call Race Before Voting Is Complete

Hope they have better checks than last time when they called Florida before the voting was even done.

[BigSqwert]

Networks May Call Race Before Voting Is Complete

 

That's just stupid. Calling it early before polls close on the west coast can affect the Congressional races out there and/or the various ballot initiatives.

[BigSqwert]

BTW since the Redskins lost last night that means the incumbent party will lose the Presidential election.

[HuskyCaucasian]

Reports of Republicans trying to suppress the vote in Philly. Shocking.

[BigSqwert]

538's final projection

 

Today's Polls and Final Election Projection: Obama 349, McCain 189

 

It's Tuesday, November 4th, 2008, Election Day in America. The last polls have straggled in, and show little sign of mercy for John McCain. Barack Obama appears poised for a decisive electoral victory.

 

Our model projects that Obama will win all states won by John Kerry in 2004, in addition to Iowa, New Mexico, Colorado, Virginia, Nevada, Florida and North Carolina, while narrowly losing Missouri and Indiana. These states total 353 electoral votes. Our official projection, which looks at these outcomes probabilistically -- for instance, assigns North Carolina's 15 electoral votes to Obama 59 percent of the time -- comes up with an incrementally more conservative projection of 348.6 electoral votes.

 

We also project Obama to win the popular vote by 6.1 points; his lead is slightly larger than that in the polls now, but our model accounts for the fact that candidates with large leads in the polls typically underperform their numbers by a small margin on Election Day.

 

This race appears to have stabilized as of about the time of the second debate in Nashville, Tennessee on October 8th. Since that time, Obama has maintained a national lead of between 6 and 8 points, with little discernible momentum for either candidate. Just as noteworthy is the fact that the number of undecided voters is now very small, representing not much more than 2-3 percent of the electorate. Undecided voters who committed over the past several weeks appear to have broken roughly equally between the two candidates.

 

Our model forecasts a small third-party vote of between 1 and 2 points total; it is not likely to be a decisive factor in this election except perhaps in Montana, where Ron Paul is on the ballot and may garner 4-5 percent of the vote.

 

Any forecasting system is only as good as its inputs, and so if the polls are systematically wrong, our projection is subject to error as well. Nevertheless, even as we account for other cycles in which the polling numbers materially missed the national popular vote margin (such as in 1980), a McCain win appears highly unlikely. It is also possible, of course, that the polls are shy in Obama's direction rather than McCain's, in which case a double-digit win is possible.

 

Nor does McCain appear to have much chance of winning the Electoral College while losing the popular vote; in fact, our model thinks that Obama is slightly more likely to do so. McCain diverted many of his resources to Pennsylvania, a state where he narrowed Obama's margins somewhat, but which our model concludes that Obama is now virtually certain to win. This may have allowed Obama to consolidate his margins in other battleground states, particularly Western states like Colorado and Nevada to which McCain has devoted little recent attention.

[NorthSideSox72]

Reports of Republicans trying to suppress the vote in Philly. Shocking.

Link? Details? Any reality here?

 

[StrangeSox]

Reports of Republicans trying to suppress the vote in Philly. Shocking.

 

Reports of Black Panthers blocking polling places. Shocking.

[Steff]

Reports of Black Panthers blocking polling places. Shocking.

 

 

According to the guy who called the police they were not blocking anyone from entering the building.

[Steff]

BTW since the Redskins lost last night that means the incumbent party will lose the Presidential election.

 

 

I dunno... McCain got the Alien endorcement in NM. That might be just what he needed :-)

 

[StrangeSox]

According to the guy who called the police they were not blocking anyone from entering the building.

 

Ok, standing at the door holding a nightstick. It's still voter intimidation.

 

My point was that both sides will be guilty of their supporters engaging in dirty tactics today, so acting like only one side does it is unfair.

[Steff]

Ok, standing at the door holding a nightstick. It's still voter intimidation.

 

My point was that both sides will be guilty of their supporters engaging in dirty tactics today, so acting like only one side does it is unfair.

 

 

And I agree with your point. However blocking and intimidating are 2 very different things.

[ChiSox_Sonix]

And I agree with your point. However blocking and intimidating are 2 very different things.

 

 

If the purpose of them both is to attempt to keep the "other side" away from voting, how are they different?

[southsider2k5]

This was in my local paper today...

 

http://thenewsdispatch.com/main.asp?Sectio...ArticleID=18637

 

Woman under investigation for voter fraud

 

Dave Hawk

The News-Dispatch

 

MICHIGAN CITY - Authorities are investigating a Michigan City woman who reportedly said - while waiting to vote early here Monday - she already voted in Florida.

 

Ralph Howes, a La Porte County Election Board member, said Monday afternoon he had been on the phone with authorities in Lake County, Fla. He verified someone voted there using "the same date of birth and the same first name and middle initial but a different last name and different Social Security number, so I'm working on it.

 

"If we found out that she has voted twice, we certainly will be referring it to the prosecutor," said Howes, the Republican member of the three-person election board.

 

Authorities were alerted by attorney Doug Bernacchi, who has an office in Michigan City. Bernacchi said when he was going to the courthouse to conduct business, the woman, whom he didn't know, hailed him from a car and asked how many voting machines were available.

 

"She told me she already voted in Florida, where the polling place had 48 voting machines," he said, adding he was surprised anyone would be so brazen about committing vote fraud. He said her car had an Obama sticker on it.

 

Later in the courthouse, he noticed her in a line of people waiting to vote.

 

"She was politicking, going up and down the line, and she was in line to vote," Bernacchi said. She said she voted "in every state," he said.

 

Bernacchi then went to the clerk's office and alerted the two women who were handling early voting.

 

One of them went outside the office and talked to the woman in line and got her identification. She then notified County Clerk Bette Conroy, and Howes began checking. Conroy said she told the election worker to allow the woman to go ahead and vote.

 

Conroy said if a person has an Indiana driver's license, "We have to let her vote. Then a challenge will be done, and it will be turned over to the prosecutor's office,"

 

Conroy said it was her understanding the voter "came right out and told Doug she had voted."

 

If the clerk's office here verifies she voted in Florida, "We'll be able to take her vote off," Conroy said.

 

If the woman voted twice, it's a violation of law in one state or the other, Howes said.

 

Howes said he can remember one other case of someone caught voting twice two years ago in the general election. The person also voted absentee, he said.

 

"I believe it was referred to (Prosecutor) Rob Beckman," Howes said, "but I'm not aware there was any prosecution."

 

 

 

Contact Managing Editor Dave Hawk at [email protected].

[Steff]

If the purpose of them both is to attempt to keep the "other side" away from voting, how are they different?

 

 

Seriously?

 

How is the action of both the same? One stops you from being able to vote the other attempts to sway your vote.

[NorthSideSox72]

Dona Ana county in New Mexico has problems, again (they did in 2004 too). Absentee ballots not fully processed, and many folks didn't get one that were supposed to.

 

I certainly hope that residents of that county are voting to remove whomever is responsible for election work, because this is two cycles in a row they screwed it up.

 

[ChiSox_Sonix]

Seriously?

 

How is the action of both the same? One stops you from being able to vote the other attempts to sway your vote.

 

 

Ok so technically yes, they are different, but the idea is essentially the same.

 

And I believe AHB said something like there were reports of Repubs trying to block votes. What would be the goal of Black Panthers standing in the doorway to a voting building with nightsticks?

 

I just feel it is essentially the same thing, because the goal is essentially the same. And without details about the Philly incident, you dont know. One could make an argument that standing in a doorway with nightsticks would fall under the phrase "xxxxxx is trying to suppress votes in xxxxxx" too. Thats all i'm trying to say.

[lostfan]

This was in my local paper today...

 

http://thenewsdispatch.com/main.asp?Sectio...ArticleID=18637

What a tool.

[Steff]

Ok so technically yes, they are different, but the idea is essentially the same.

 

And I believe AHB said something like there were reports of Repubs trying to block votes. What would be the goal of Black Panthers standing in the doorway to a voting building with nightsticks?

I just feel it is essentially the same thing, because the goal is essentially the same. And without details about the Philly incident, you dont know. One could make an argument that standing in a doorway with nightsticks would fall under the phrase "xxxxxx is trying to suppress votes in xxxxxx" too. Thats all i'm trying to say.

 

 

Attempting to sway voters to vote the way they want them to.

 

I see what you're trying to say, though since they weren't stopping anyone from voting I don't agree with it.

 

 

[BigSqwert]

November 2006 electoral map by Survey USA vs November 2008