Hunting The Muse

Protest suits cost city $300,000

Protest suits cost city $300,000

City of Portland is found liable for $300,000 for excessive violence against anti-war protesters.

I remember hearing about the baby being pepper-sprayed the day after it happened.

That's an awful headline by OregonLive, by the way. Does it read to anyone else like it's painting the city as a victim?

Dream Music - Share and Enjoy

So I had this dream last night, where a song was playing over it the whole time. Dream songs are really cool, but really frustrating because you always forget most of it. I liked it though.

I was able to remember the pattern that was repeating itself at the end of the song, and recreate a rough version of it in Garage Band. The only other thing I remember about it is that a vocal melody was above it that centered on the fifth scale degree... although that might have only been for the end of the song.

Rather than lock it up and maybe someday turn it into a whole song, I thought it would be fun to set it free. So I'm releasing it under a Creative Commons license. I guess there's a way to embed it in my webpage but it would conflict with the license I already have for my weblog. So here's the boilerplate:

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.

What that means is that you can take this music and make your own song out of it. You have to keep my name associated with it (along with yours), and you can release it to whoever you want, but not for commercial purposes. If you release it, it has to be under the exact same license so no one else can use it for commercial purposes either. That's what the license allows. (If you use it for commercial purposes or remove my name, that's a violation of my copyright.)

Here is the mp3 if you want to listen. If you're interested in using it, here is the Garage Band archive. The drum pattern isn't quite right (it hiccups near the end) but it's a pretty good feel overall. If you come up with something, please let me know!

The dream itself sounds a little bit corny but it was touching while I was having it. I was pushing an old guy in a wheelchair on a hiking trail in a park. I was able to go really fast, almost floating-like (it was very smooth), and he was enjoying all the motion and speed. While it was happening I was whispering to him that I liked him and had never really had a grandfather. (I actually have had a grandfather, but they're both gone.)

Generating PDF

I'm just putting this out there in case someone out there knows more than me about this.

I am interested in starting several projects that have to do with converting text (or html) to pdf, dynamically. The text would be basic, the pdf would be snazzy based off of a pre-existing branding or design.

One project would be taking pure text only - paragraphs separated by blank lines, much like how we write in email, but then processing them to eventually turn them into a pdf.

It appears that one possible path is markdown->xhtml->docbookxml->pdf . I'm not sure how to accomplish the xhtml->docbookxml step.

Another is just markdown->(something)->pdf. Open to suggestions.

Both would lead to the pdf becoming a hardcopy book. The point is that all the editing would just be in the text only format, to allow for easy collaborative editing.

Another project would be to take several snippets of html - perhaps they are each divs, or tables; snippets that aren't complete html pages - and be able to combine them together into a dynamic layout, so they would always fill up a two-sheet pdf document with professional branding.

Both projects are described rather vaguely here, but both are actually quite exciting once you know the details. And there might be good business opportunities with both projects. I am a solid perl and php programmer, so I can handle data-to-pdf conversions. But what I need is someone who is good at actual book design (typography; margins, etc) for the first project, or good print-media graphic design and pdf layout skill (similar to branding a newsletter) for the second. Remember that in both cases, it would just be to design templates; the actual printed output would be generated dynamically with the data that would be supplied from elsewhere.

Inquire within if you have any suggestions or interest!

Daily Kos :: Science Sunday Special: Paralyzed woman walks again after stem cell therapy

Daily Kos :: Science Sunday Special: Paralyzed woman walks again after stem cell therapy:

Two stories of stem cells leading to miraculous medical advances.

A woman paralyzed for twenty years. She's injected with stem cells in her spinal column. Three weeks later, she is learning to walk again.

That's not sci-fi, it's happening now.

Apportionment And The Electoral College

Regular readers of this site might know of my nuanced opinions regarding vote reform and the Electoral College. I'm not one of those people that believes that the Electoral College should simply be disbanded, because there's something about the logic behind the E.C. that I find consistent with the basic approach behind the U.S. Government.

Basically, each state is given an Electoral Vote for each Representative and Senator that the state has. Much in the same way that Congress is a compromise between popular representation (Representatives) and regional representation (Senators), the Electoral College weights the popular vote by the region the vote comes from.

I agree with that general approach. I think our national interests deserve to be represented, and our interests are not just reflected by our population, but by the geographical environment of our resources. If a vast area of the United States doesn't have much population, I don't have a problem with that population being given a bit more voting power to represent the interests of that area, and of the culture that the area creates.

That said, the way we are choosing to reflect that weighting is pretty messed up. One way in which it is messed up is the winner-take-all of our elections. For each region, 51% gets everything, and 49% gets nothing. The thought is that on a grand scale, these various wins and losses cancel out, and to a large degree, they do. (The other flaw of winner-take-all is that if there is a consistent voting bloc that is always below 50% in any region, they will always be unrepresented.)

The other way in which this is messed up, which I haven't explored much yet, is in this whole subject of apportionment.

This whole subject is kind of dense, and it's easy to take a tangent and discuss gerrymandering, but what I'm referring to in particular is how we decide how many Electoral Votes each state has. What affects the number of Electoral Votes is how many Representatives a state has (each state will always have two Senators).

The number of Representatives is figured by the census we have every ten years - that requirement is actually in our Constitution. This site has all the details.

The main question about apportionment is the balance of power between Senators and Representatives. And what makes it all so maddening is that this is one of those silly examples where there's no longer any valid rationale behind the technique we have now.

Basically what happened is that there used to be far less representatives in the House than the 435 we have now. The government set the House at 435 members in 1941, and it hasn't changed since.

It's basically the story of two warring percentages.

First is the number of voters per representative. There are definitely good reasons to keep this consistent when you're dealing with popular representation. Right now there's an average of almost 650,000 voters per representative, when it used to be far less.

But the second percentage is the number of representatives per Senator. As more representatives are added to the picture, the Senators don't increase in number. This means that as the number of representatives increase, the Electoral College becomes more and more reflective of the popular vote, since those two extra Senatorial EVs count for less and less in the ratio over time.

I came across this study which is a fascinating exploration of the 2000 election. It shows that the result of the 2000 election depended on the size of the House of Representatives. If we had had the exact same vote in every state, but the the House of Representatives had had 492 Reps instead of 435 Reps, Gore would have won.

If we had kept the same ratio of voters/rep that we had had in 1941, then we would have over 800 Reps in the House, and Gore would have won the election easily. This is the main point of the paper. The implication is that as time goes on, election results are going to be less representative of the popular vote than it would have been had we not fixed the House size in 1941. Less and less over time.

But it's interesting because that isn't really the raw deal that it sounds like it is. It overlooks the second percentage - the number of representatives per Senator. There are good reasons to not allow that number to degrade over time, at least not in terms of voting power. I don't know the the reasons behind the 1941 agreement, but much of it could very well be because they didn't want states to lose their Senatorial weight in the Electoral College.

The paper shows a really interesting graph showing how Gore becomes more and more likely of winning as the size of the House increases, which seems very odd at first because it seems like the size of the House is really the only determinating factor. But it's not as exciting as that - the only reason that graph works is because the Electoral College vote went one way and the popular vote went the other way in 2000. As the House increases and the Senate remains the same size, the simple explanation is just that the Electoral Vote count will become more and more reflective of the popular vote. And Gore won the popular vote. So it doesn't really point out anything all that revolutionary.

There's a good reason for keeping the number of Senators at 100 - it's a nice round number, and we don't exactly want the Senate to become even more unwieldy. And a Senator's power is not actually going to decrease as the House increases in size - it actually would probably be the average House member that would have less public recognition due to the added numbers. But, in terms of Electoral College voting power, there's good reason to protect that ratio. So how do we protect it, while also letting the House expand? What's the way to compromise between both warring percentages?

One thing is that you could keep the 4.35:1 ratio of Rep EVs to Senatorial EVs, but then allow the number of Reps to expand again. One way I can think of is to concede that every state is allowed to have at least one representative, so award one representative to the smallest state in the Union - Wyoming - and then use its population as the number of voters per rep. Apply it to the rest of the nation to get the number of Representatives. According to the 2000 census, that would be around 568 Reps instead of 435. Then we apply the 4.35:1 ratio - we'd still keep 100 senators, but we'd add in another 2.6 Senatorial EVs to each state.

People that argue about the Electoral College have to be careful about how many different arguments they are conflating. It's a very complex issue. The issue of how many representatives we have is different than the issue of how important the popular vote should be. There's very good reason to support there being more representatives even without changing the tension between the popular-weight and regional-weight of the Electoral College.

Update: I guess I'm not done analyzing this one yet, due to this quote from this article:

When [the Senate] was set up, there was a nine-to-one imbalance in voting population between the largest state, Virginia, and the smallest, Delaware. (Counting slaves, Virginia's edge increased to 12 to 1.) Now it's nearly 70 to 1 (California versus Wyoming), making the Senate our own equivalent of the United Nations General Assembly as a forum for overrepresented small states.

They're actually arguing that the Senate itself gives too much relative power to the small states compared to the early days, but does that also carry into the Electoral College? Hmmm...

Fraud! We Lost! Fraud! We Lost!

I've written before about the argument the left is having in trying to reconcile the results of the election.

As is the case with most arguments, the problem isn't so much the content of the argument, but the emotion behind it that isn't being admitted.

In the red corner, you have the "Fraud!" folks. There's definitely a wide swath of these folks, from the people that are methodically going through elections data and holding them up to rigorous standards of truth, to Peter Smith on the other end of the spectrum. Many of them hang out in the diaries at Daily Kos, and Democratic Underground.

In the blue corner, you have the "We Lost!" folks. There's a wide spectrum of them, too. These are the people analyzing what went wrong, and what we need to change to have more of a chance in the future. I'd count myself in this camp, along with the folks over at MyDD.com and most of the main page columnists at Daily Kos.

There's an argument going on between the two camps. Many of the "Fraud!" folks believe that the "We Lost!" folks think that all the election irregularities should be swept under the rug. Many of the "We Lost!" folks believe that the "Fraud!" folks are certain that we actually won the election. Both sides believe the other side are going to throw away any hope we have at winning future elections.

What are the emotions behind it? Well, the "Fraud!" folks see the "We Lost!" folks as being defeatist, for not paying the appropriate attention to the irregularities. They feel justified in opposing them because they are opposing defeatism. When actually, the "We Lost!" folks merely believe that it's important to accept a reality of losing before you can lay the groundwork to win again.

And, the "We Lost!" folks see the "Fraud!" folks as being in denial. They feel justified in opposing them because denial is embarrassing when you're witnessing it from the outside. When actually, the "Fraud!" folks are right to be centrally concerned about vote integrity, because of the opportunity for future fraud.

What's really sad is that both side's judgments fuel the problem. The "We Lost!" folks hate being called defeatist, and being called defeatist plays into their view that the "Fraud!" folks are in denial. The "Fraud!" folks hate being dismissed as they have been dismissed, and know very well that people are rolling their eyes at them, and it plays into their views that the "We Lost!" folks aren't taking their concerns seriously enough.

And so of course, both sides end up being a bit poisoned. It is no wonder that the "We Lost!" people want to stop thinking about election irregularities entirely. And in turn, it is no wonder that the "Fraud!" people start to wonder if more things are being swept under the rug out of mere expedience. Which further reinforces each side's judgments, etc.

What is the truth?

Well, let's go back to logic class. Remember sufficient and necessary conditions? If you have a desired outcome, there are conditions that need to be met to bring about that outcome. Some are sufficient conditions - enough to bring about the change. And some are just necessary conditions. Ingredients and pre-requisites for the outcome, but not enough by themselves.

The fact is that if our desired outcome is a Democratic win, both camps in this argument are defending necessary conditions, and neither are sufficient conditions. We can fix the election irregularities, but if we haven't changed the party, it's moot. And, we can change the party, but if the fix is in, it's moot.

It is interesting because people have been trying to make this point, but it has a very labored feel to it - usually with underlines, capital letters, and a metaphorical gasping for oxygen. It feels similar to how people labor to make the point that they are anti-war, yet still support the troops. There's an implicit acknowledgment that two points of view are incompatible, when that acknowledgment doesn't even deserve to be made. Of course they're compatible.

It's the same here. Of course we need both. That's not just equivocation. It's not just, "Can't we all just get along?" They're both necessary ingredients for political survival.

That said, a bit of a love-in wouldn't hurt.

Miscellaneous Department

• NBA Brawl: Interesting petri dish. Mix of conditions conducive to a riot, and deliberate choices. There were two triggers, the fan who threw the drink, and Artest going to the stands. Who is more culpable? Different standards. One is an awful, stupid action, and one is an awful, stupid overreaction. Neither is an excuse for the other. That said, while I don't find much of a defense for Artest, I find something hypocritical about the NBA's approach in this whole thing. It's like that kind of behavior is praised as "intensity" and "competitiveness" right up until the very point that a fine or suspension is meted out, after which everyone backtracks and reinterprets. That kind of double-counting isn't doing anyone any favors, and until the NBA takes actual preventative steps to keep these conditions from happening, it's going to be more and more common. The same goes for fan behavior.
• Matthew Shephard: Some sort of 20/20 investigation coming up on whether his killing was really a hate crime. Now, I'm opposed to hate crime legislation. On principle, I think it's too easily abused legislatively, and uncomfortably close to thought legislation. Actions should be prosecuted. If someone's hateful impulses lead to a more vicious crime, than that viciousness will be readily apparent as actions and should affect stiffness of the penalty. But. If this is really just about whether or not it was a hate crime, that dialogue is hardly the result that will come of the 20/20 investigation, and they know that. It just gives bigots reason to feel justified, and it doesn't do anything to mute the horrible details of the crime. It's a completely pointless post-conviction investigation on behalf of the murderers. 20/20 had a huge investigative and marketing budget for this, and when I compare it to the good that could happen from spending that money on investigating DNA results for death row prisoners that might actually be innocent... it's a pretty sickening choice that ABC is making.
• Exit Polls: Freeman has released a revision of his paper that I've written about several times here. The revision reduces the odds (the degree of strangeness of the exit polls) from 250,000,000 to 1, to 650,000 to 1.
• Ohio: The provisional ballot count is ongoing. Kerry's hail mary shot at flipping Ohio is all but gone - Bush has already gained almost 30,000 provisional ballots out of 155,000. The previous hypotheticals that had Kerry pulling it out assumed Bush would get less than 20,000 provisionals.
• DNC: I kind of like the idea of Dean being chair, but I've never been quite sure whether the whole bottom-up house party thing was more of a Dean thing or a Trippi thing. If Dean doesn't get it, he can still do a lot of good at DFA. But the chair will need to be someone who can help put together regular local community meetings based on the precinct level.
• Congress: We're already seeing more obvious strain between the two wings of the Republican party. GOP moderates are being frozen out and subjected to wedge votes all over the place. My fantasy is a mass exodus. We're not there yet, though.
• Future Elections: Nationalize the race. Nationalize. Nationalize. Rising tide lifts all boats. Environment can be used to appeal to farmers, ranchers, hunters. Start talking about truth again, as opposed to being conned. It all starts with trust and credibiity. Attempt to represent those that won't vote for you, because: it's the right thing to do, and it reduces the intensity of their opposition. Do it without compromising core principles. Focus on education - not just the school kind, but actually educating the voters.
• Thanksgiving: Honestly, it's not my favorite kind of food. And I'm not much for structured gratitude. Spontaneous is better for me. So, I'm looking forward to having the next few days off. I'll get to do more work on my film score, and plan out some future projects. Maybe I'll check out the GRE and see how dumb I've become.

Education

I'm thinking more about two things. Grad studies in poli sci with an emphasis in statistics (PSU has an MS in Poli Sci), and law school.

I'm trying to decide if I should pick one over the other, or do both... and if I do both, which I should do first. At first glance, it seems that going for the masters first would be the way to go.

Also it seems like a degree in poli sci and a law degree make a good pedigree for running for office someday. Not that I'd do that, of course. Put that thought out of your head.

Two Utilities I Wish I Had

There are two utilities I can think of offhand which I would think would help political webloggers (most webloggers, actually) immensely.

• Search your own browsing history. What if you don't want to search all of google, but want to find that article that you saw a few days ago? There should be a better way to restrict your search to your own browsing history. And it would be better if it could outlive the lifespan of your cache.
• Archiving articles. So, you find an awesome publicly available article. And you link to it. But then the owner of the article deletes it, or (more likely in political weblogging) modifies it. It would be better to be able to freeze it at link time, to be offloaded and stored onto some external service. Fair use.

What would be cooler is to combined the two into an offsite service. Imagine this. A plugin for your browser with an encrypted key. Your browser would have a plugin that would watch your browsing traffic and report your browsing history (private and encrypted) to this offsite service.

The pages would be frozen on this service, like a wayback machine. But each user account would have a history stored of the URLs and the timestamp of that page. Aagin, that history would be private and not able to be aggregated. Each user could search among their own history.

Your blogging software would also have a plugin for it, so when you linked to a page, it would make sure to generate a public link to that cached page that people could access if the source page disappeared.

This would be a perfect service for google to invent. They're already caching the pages.

DropCash

DropCash (blog) is one of those ideas that I actually had two years ago that I could have developed, but didn't because of other distractions... so I think it's really cool that it exists, but it also annoys me.

It lets you set up a donation box that is also a pledge drive - a little graphical progress bar, but hooked up to your own paypal account.

Mystery Pollster and Exit Pollster Explain Polls

The Mystery Pollster covers the Freeman Paper. He knows a lot more than I do and I had a couple of things wrong, but it's a good read. He was in direct contact with the exit pollsters.

Finally, I understand completely the frustration of Democratic partisans with the election results. I'm a Democrat too. Sure, it's tempting to engage in a little wishful thinking about the exit polls. However, to continue to see evidence of vote fraud in the "unexplained exit poll discrepancy" is more than wishful. It borders on delusional.

Also:

So to summarize: Absent further data from NEP, you can choose to believe that an existing problem with exit polls got worse this year in the face of declining response rates and rising distrust of big media, that a slightly higher number of Bush voters than Kerry voters declined to be interviewed. Or, you can believe that a massive secret conspiracy somehow shifted roughly 2% of the vote from Kerry to Bush in every battleground state, a conspiracy that fooled everyone but the exit pollsters - and then only for a few hours - after which they deliberately suppressed evidence of the fraud and damaged their own reputations by blaming the discrepancies on weaknesses in their data.

Please.

Finally, someone scored an interview with Warren Mitofsky. Excerpt:

I'll add, though its somewhat public knowledge at this point, that Warren agrees with the conventional wisdom explaining how certain bloggers reached the wrong conclusions. The data that was reported on election day had not been "weighted" for turnout yet. Once an accurate projection of overall voter turnout is made, the raw data that the exit pollsters collect is plugged into a complicated methodological system that I won't begin to pretend to understand. The point is, though, that a sort of "correction" is made to the raw numbers that everyone saw on Wonkette and other sites. The bloggers who ran those numbers either didn't know about the system of "weighting" the exit polling data, or didn't bother to point it out.

In short, we're waiting on the explanation for the 1.9% Kerry bias in the exit polls, but there are very reasonable theoretical explanations for it - which means we're nowhere close to having reasonable cause to believe the exit polls prove fraud.

Cool Electoral Map

This is probably the coolest electoral map I've seen so far. It's a map of each county in the United States, expanded or compressed to represent the population in the county, and it's blue/red spectrum represents how much it went to Kerry or Bush, respectively.

Kind of seems like a fantastical Democratic animal being restrained and almost overcome by the ropes and cords of conservatism.

There are plenty of other maps where that comes from.

More Election Denial

I came across this study, originally titled "Irrefutable Evidence: Ohio Election Rigged".

What he does is he takes a county, averages the votes that the Democrat and Republican got over the last four elections, declares it a "trend", and then compares how different the total was this year from that average. If it's over a couple percentage points, then he says that is irrefutable evidence of fraud.

I'm not going to go into the details here on how stupid that methodology is. I think I can safely assume that most of my regular readers can figure out that an average is not a trend, and that voting patterns don't follow those expectations.

But I decided to go ahead and explain to him why the study was flawed. It's all there up on his weblog - you can go read it and see the argument I lay out in the comments.

After his first couple of responses, it was pretty obvious that he wasn't going to be receptive to the possibility he was wrong. Under normal circumstances it would have been best to just roll my eyes and move along. But I wanted to see what would happen if I just doggedly kept trying to prove why it didn't make sense.

His reaction was pretty priceless - he then banned my IP address so I couldn't comment on his weblog anymore.

Another really great example of the kind of post-election denial that is among the left these days.

There are plenty of legitimate election issues to be upset about as Democrats. This study isn't one of them.

For an exploration of some of the worthwhile issues, please visit this wiki page of Ohio Irregularities. I've been the main maintainer of the site, and there is a lot to follow up on. One study that is begging to be made is the one that compares how many voters per voting machine there were in Democratic precincts versus Republican precinct. That's where you can get real evidence of disenfranchisement.

(Given that other folks on that site are upset at me for being too much of a skeptic of these election studies, that should prove that I'm not some sort of Republican plant. I guess they're too lazy to read my archives.)

Update: I actually made a math error in my last comment on that weblog, by looking at the variance of vote growth for each side, rather than the variance of the vote total compared to the "projection". However, the error doesn't change the fact that the study is silly. Here are the numbers for Mercer using the exact same math that Peter Smith uses:

Variance from '88 to '92:

Dem: 16.7%
Rep: -7.45%

Variance from '88 + '92 to '96:

Dem: 25.42%
Rep: -12.63%

Variance from '88 + '92 + '96, to '00:

Dem: -18.29%
Rep: 10.31%

So, you can see that Peter Smith's insistence that a variance of over 4% being fraudulent is completely silly. Unless you believe that Clinton committed gross fraud to beat Bob Dole.

By the way, Peter Smith also deleted my trackback that appeared on his blog, so that people wouldn't see the link over to here. :-)

More On Freeman's Exit Poll Study

Thank god someone a lot more well-known than me is saying the same thing I've been saying about these exit poll "studies".

Plus, he makes the awesome point that according to these exit poll summaries that are supposedly so predictive of election results, Dukakis beat Bush in 1988.

Remember, the lessons aren't that exit polls are useless or "wrong" - they're just not designed to be used for this purpose.

The detail level of the exit polls (that we don't have access to) is useful for projecting precinct results, and, in turn, the state results. But the summary level (that we see) is not predictive of statewide results, and is not supposed to be.

Exit Polling, Continued - Freeman Study

For an excellent illustration of the exit polling controversy, as well as of the struggle for "political oxygen", check out this thread over at daily kos, and skim the comments. It even includes a discussion of whether fraud skeptics are republican plants.

The thread is about another study that supposedly shows how unlikely the vote count is compared to the exit polls. The study, by Steven F. Freeman, PhD of University of Pennsylvania, puts the odds at 250,000,000 to 1. It's misleading for many of the same reasons as the other study I discussed in my last entry.

Now, for the political oxygen part. One way to create more oxygen is to just agitate and create an incredible stink. That's the method I chose - halfway down the comments, I go ballistic on the community, shouting in all caps "THIS STUDY IS BOGUS!!" and writing in very short sentences.

It definitely got a lot of attention. People accused me of overstating my case, and they were right. And yet, I stand by the content of what I said, and given the same situation, I probably would have said it the same way. At least until I figure out a better way. But I think a qualified, reasonable listing of facts would have been glossed over and dismissed by the community.

People started making more mention of "Tunesmith's comments" in the rest of the thread, and people started requesting that the discussion be brought to the study author's attention. The author of the study has since made it known that while he received hundreds of email responses yesterday and about twenty calls from the press, he read the discussion, and is going to revise his study.

Exit Polling - David Anick

A lot of the screaming about the election is due to the gap between exit polling and the result of the election. There is talk about some mathematician named David Anick completing a study that says that the variance between the exit polling and the election result had a 1 in 50,000 chance of occurring.

First, please note: Being a mathematician does not mean you know how exit polling works.

I'm really skeptical of that study, for one reason: it uses the 4pm exit polling data.

Exit polling uses stratified samples, not random "representative" samples.  The numbers are useless until you have the end-of-day turnout figures to apply to the exit polling, to balance and normalize the numbers correctly. In other words, they are supposed to be wrong in the middle of the day, and they are designed to be "corrected" (re-weighted; normalized) at the end of the day. It just doesn't make statistical sense to create a study directly comparing unweighted mid-day exit poll data to the final result.

Political campaigns and the media look at the exit polls during the day just for really inexact indications.  But it's bogus to treat mid-day exit poll data with the same accuracy that we'd treat a telephone poll that uses random samples.  The mid-day exit polls are less accurate, not more, because the exit poll samples are not random, evenly distributed, or representative of the voting population.

It is so fascinating to make this point over on the political discussion sites and experience the resistance to it. Huge tangent here, but it has me thinking more and more about "political oxygen", and what conditions need to exist for a population to be open to a truth that is different than their conventional wisdom. Or, how to create those conditions. We've got people painstakingly posting facts and conclusions over there, and being called Republican "plants" in response.

Bipartisan Poem

I don't know who wrote it, but it's good:

The election is over, the results are now known.
The will of the people has clearly been shown.
We should show by our thoughts, our words and our deeds
That unity is just what our country needs.
Let's all get together. Let bitterness pass.
I'll hug your elephant.
You kiss my ass.

Play It In Church

Best laugh of the day: The Penis Game

2004 Voter Fraud

I've had some people I know start to ask me more about voter fraud.

First, I think it's a good thing that this is getting into the news cycle. There are a lot of problems with our voting system that need to be corrected. The worst problems in 2004 had to do with the lack of voting machines in Democratic precincts, leading to lines as long as nine hours. And that was with a less than 60% voter turnout. If people are motivated about protecting the right to vote, the best thing they can do is volunteer to become poll workers, and become active in the races for Secretary of State. Next is to lobby your representative to support HR 2239. I don't think Wu is signed on for that. Blumenauer might be. And, demand that voting machines have paper trails - not the kind that give a receipt that you take with you, but the kind that you examine and is then turned into the ballot box.

Now, as for the 2004 race. There's a lot of confusion about this. There have been reports of incompetence and of mistakes. That's not the same thing as fraud. They found out that 4,000 votes had been wrongly given to Bush in Ohio. That was an easy find and it was guaranteed that people would find it. It was a mistake, and not fraud.

Fraud is someone deliberately changing Kerry votes to Bush votes (or vice versa), or deliberately giving extra votes to Bush (or Kerry).

There is currently no evidence that fraud led to Bush winning when he otherwise would have lost. For that, you need to not only prove irregularities (which we have, and which every election has), but also someone doing it on purpose (which hasn't been discovered), and most importantly, it happening on a scale that would affect the election. We definitely don't have that.

People are looking for that. I support the search. We haven't found it though. So don't get your hopes up.

Now, as for Kerry's chances to somehow get the election back. The only hope is in Ohio. It's the only state with a less than 5% margin of victory that would make a difference in the election.

Kerry's margin is about 134,000 votes. Some absentee ballots may not be counted, we don't know how many. Absentee ballots usually go for the Republicans. There are also provisional votes, about 155,000 of them. Provisional ballots are cast when the poll worker can't find the voter on the voter rolls for their precinct. Ohio has a law that says that if someone casts a provisional ballot in the wrong precinct, the ballot gets thrown out. Many of these ballots will be thrown out. The rest of them might very well lean towards Kerry.

If a recount is requested, then 90,000 overvotes can be examined. They are like Florida ballots - dimpled and hanging chads.

Assume there are no really weird surprises left. Here's one best case. Say absentee ballots are 50/50, leaving the margin the same. Now, say that 15% of the provisional ballots are thrown out, leaving 131,750 of them. I've heard reports saying that 85% of the Ohio provisional ballots went to Gore in 2000. If that sticks, then 112,000 would go for Kerry, and 19,750 would go to Bush. That would knock the margin down to 40,000 votes or so.

Now, that isn't enough to trigger a recount automatically. I've heard that the needed margin would be 19,000 votes. But, a candidate could request a recount anyway. At that point, the spoiled ballots would come into play. Let's say that 30% of the ballots truly are spoiled, which seems conservative. That leaves around 60,000 ballots where you could determine intent of the voter. That would mean that 50,000 of them would have to go to Kerry, and 10,000 for Bush, to tie the race.

Kerry's concession wasn't legally binding. If some more surprises turn up - for instance, more lost votes, or actual evidence of fraud, you can bet he'll be back fighting for the presidency. But they have professionals on board, that did more to work for the presidency than the rest of us ever did. They looked at the numbers and decided that the votes they needed to win just weren't there. I trust their competence.

Tax Fairness

Mathew with a well-reasoned response to the calls for a "Tax Fairness Act" (keeping red states from getting a disproportionate share of blue state money):

And finally, about the inequities in federal tax distribution, and the half-serious call among usually-serious bloggers to "end red state welfare": yes, a great deal of it is pork. But unless you're willing to close America's national parks and sell off our federal lands at public auction in order to balance the regional books, then this isn't an argument that you want to seriously continue to make, now that the first initial shock of Bush's reelection has passed.

Electoral Power Continued

I've written before about a study I completed that shows how much electoral power each candidate had through the final sixty days of the campaign and election day.

(Click to enlarge.) Election day ended up with Bush having about 275 EVs worth of electoral power, and Kerry having about 258. The spike at the end is all the undecideds breaking for their candidate, compared to the polls.

The way I figure this is by giving each candidate a portion of every state's electoral votes, by how much support that candidate had. This makes every state award its EVs proportionally, and is a more accurate gauge of the actual support each candidate has - it represents the underlying physics of the Electoral College.

One of the most common points people have made against this technique is that it exaggerates the power of rural voters in safe Bush states. The critics say that since these small states have so little population, then the Bush voters in this state are given too much weight, so this method exaggerates Bush's level of support.

It is true that the Electoral College gives rural states more voting power than the most populous states. But in order for that critique to have merit, it would have to mean that this study gives more of an advantage to these Bush-state voters than the Electoral College does itself.

The best way to gauge this would be by looking at the safe states. If this were true, my method would exaggerate the Bush support in the safe states.

So, I took a look.

We can consider the safe states to be the states where the margin of victory was greater than ten percentage points. Here's how those states added up in the Electoral College:

Bush: 183
Kerry: 146

Now, let's look at how those states would have played out had we awarded the EVs proportionally:

Bush: 171.3
Kerry: 154.4

So, that should be enough to smack that criticism down. Let's look at it again if we look at the states was greater than 5%. First, the Electoral College:

Bush: 249
Kerry: 183

And, the proportional study:

Bush: 223.2
Kerry: 204.5

The reality is that the Electoral College exaggerates Bush's support even compared to this proportional study. It's actually pretty obvious once you think of it - since there are so many small states in the Electoral College, of course the winner-take-all nature is going to work in Bush's favor. In this election, Bush actually outperformed the base numbers due to the inefficiencies of the Electoral College, much like how Gore outperformed them in 2000. My graph, above, actually understates the gap between the two candidates. The truth is that Bush actually had more electoral support than Kerry all along, and we have a ton of work to do before we can have an even chance of beating these folks consistently.

Myths About The 2004 Election

Myths about the 2004 Election

• The youth vote did not turn out: Wrong. They were 17% of the electorate, similar to other elections, but it was the largest percentage of youths that voted in many many years. Plus, they went to Kerry in huge numbers, much more than they went to Gore. The problem was that turnout increased in other age groups too, and more importantly, Bush increased his margin in most other age groups. There's been a bit of scapegoating against the youth, but the truth is, they tried their damndest to save the election - but the other age groups were just too big, and they got more conservative. The truth is, we let the youth vote down.

• We lost on values: Right, but it's not as relevant as you'd think. We do lose on the "values" vote, same as we lose on the "God-fearing" vote and the "It's Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve" vote. It's really just because in the right's mind, "values" is a synonym for "I'm voting for Bush". And off course we lost the "I'm voting for Bush" vote. Duh. For many people, this is a branding success rather than a causal relationship. In other words, it is not "Values => Bush" as it is "Values == Bush". Wink wink, nudge nudge. The point is, "values" doesn't mean "values" anymore. Remember that "purity" used to have a positive meaning, too.

• It was the evangelicals: Actually, Bush's numbers for evangelicals that attend church multiple times a week didn't move all that much. But, he increased his numbers for those who attended church less than once a week, and those who attended church rarely.

• It was the gay marriage initiatives that did it: Actually, while Bush did increase his share of the vote from 2000 in the gay marriage initiative states, he increased his share of the vote even more in the states that didn't have gay marriage initiatives. While I'm sure they helped, they weren't what decided it.

• It was the poor working class "values voters" Actually, we increased our numbers with this voting group.

It was really rich people, and suburb-dwelling upper middle class suburbs people that increased in number for Bush. And, Bush did a better job of turning out people that have been long-registered but don't usually vote - partly because that particular group didn't vote enthusiastically for Bush in 2000.

Finally, I've already dealt with the "Kerry was the rightful winner" myth by showing how Bush had more electoral support all along.

Conservatism Is Our Enemy

Chris Bowers is doing some great writing about lessons from the election. Check out the latest. It starts with statistics on how their conservatives beat our liberals, but check out the later part for some English:

This is why I have begun a campaign to tarnish conservatism itself. For me, this is not difficult. I have never considered myself a conservative anything, and I despise pretty much everything conservative (the exceptions are my conservative relatives who I love deeply). However, when I think back at Howard Dean's campaign, and how all along we Deaniacs kept ramming home the idea of being fiscally conservative as a positive--arrgggghhh!!! What were we thinking? We helped reinforce the national frame where being conservative is good, and thereby helped grow conservatism itself. By helping to grow conservatism, we helped the national decline of Democrats. What we should have been pointing out is that Dean was fiscally responsible, whereas conservatives quite clearly are fiscally childish and irresponsible. Dean was not a fiscal conservative--fiscal conservatives run up enormous debts and deficits!

For a long time I have not considered myself a liberal, because my academic mind despises the historical connection that word has to laissez-faire regulatory, economic, and trade policies. What was I thinking? I know just as well from my studies on language that usage determines grammar, and those historical denotations have little substance in contemporary usage. I should have happily identified myself as a liberal, as part of a larger effort to increase liberalism in this country.

Well, starting today, those days are over. I am a liberal and proud of it. Also, I know my enemy: conservatism. The fight begins now.

Electoral Analysis In Hindsight

I have a depressing analysis to share. I've done a new study on the 2004 polls, and it shows that we were fighting an uphill battle the entire campaign, and that the odds were against us winning all along.

The reason I'm sharing it is because I think it's highly valuable in illustrating just how much work we need to do in order to become competitive again as Democrats.

This builds upon earlier work that I have done. A few months ago, I went back and analyzed the 2000 vote and showed that Bush actually had more electoral support than Gore.

A few days ago I showed that even if we were able to steal the 150,000 votes to win Ohio, Bush still had more electoral support in 2004.

The way I did this is that I checked each state's results and awarded each candidate a portion of that state's electoral votes, by what percentage the candidate got in that state. That's why Gore winning Florida, or Kerry winning Ohio doesn't make much of a difference in the analysis, because what matters in proportions is the margin between the two candidates.

This approach has proven to be somewhat, uh, controversial. I know that almost all states are winner take all in reality. My point is that since almost all of the states are winner take all, they pretty much cancel each other out, and approach the same numbers that this approach does, for close elections. Most people think I'm choosing an arbitrary technique, but it's not.

What this does is it shows the real electoral support that each candidate has in terms of the Electoral College, if the electoral college happened to lay out completely fairly. I take each candidate's percentage in the state, and multiply it by that state's Electoral Votes, and then I add them all up. For instance, this year Kerry gets 9.7 EVs in Ohio, and Bush gets 10.2. A candidate can outperform these numbers by winning more close states than the other candidate, but the point is that you can't rely on winning more close states. Close states can go either way and it's pretty much random who gets them.

If a candidate has lower numbers in the proportional E.C. count, then it means that they have to win more close states than the other candidate in order to win, which means the odds are against them.

So here's the study I just completed. I looked at the last sixty days worth of polls for each state, awarded electoral votes proportionally, and added them up. Each day comprises all the polls that were asking questions of voters that day, average multiple polls per state if necessary. This is an illustration of how much real electoral support each candidate had since September 1st. Here's the graph:

(click for larger version.)

And there you have it. While both are under 270 because of undecided voters, Bush all along had the very clear advantage. Bush needed to win less close states in order to win the election.

And, that's exactly what happened. Kerry outperformed Bush, as Gore did in 2000 (even without Florida). Of the ten closest states this year, Kerry won six, for 69 EVs. Bush won four, for 37 EVs. And, Bush still won.

Bush clearly had more electoral support than Kerry. The only way Kerry could have won was by being extremely, extremely lucky - beyond just not making mistakes.

I wish I had thought of this before the election... if I had gotten it out there enough, it might have shown people how much more work we had to do. At least in the blog activism world, we were really overconfident in the last two weeks, and this could have put a stop to it.

Fifteen (Well, Two) Minutes of Fame (Well, Public Anonymity)

This is really funny. So, I'm reading the front page of dailykos. There's an posting there from kos mentioning a must-read article about linguistics, framing, Lakoff, and Luntz from The Texas Observer.

So I go and read the article, and in there it mentions a discussion thread over at daily kos that discussed Lakoff. Here's the quote.

A glance at the liberal blog www.dailykos.com gives you some idea of the readiness of the troops that Lakoff is sending into battle. In late September, the site’s main blogger, a Berkeley, California, lawyer named Markos Moulitsas posted a short review of Don’t Think of an Elephant, calling it “the best book this cycle.” In the thread of responses that followed, the liberal stereotypes were on parade. The moralist: “I hate pr/marketing/spinning.” The feminist: “Ummm...wonder what he’s got against women?” The post-feminist: “I don’t want to be known as the Mommy party. We’re the party of Solomon.” The literal: “I’m not the child of the government.”

So here's the funny bit - I was the post-feminist! That was me! That was my comment they quoted! Even though I was used as an example of what's wrong with liberals.... Yay!

So. What's a post-feminist?

2004 Weighted Electoral Result

By the way, if every state had awarded their electoral votes proportionally, so that every vote had counted, the total would have been about:

Bush: 275
Kerry: 258
Nader: 2
Other: 3

Inaccurate Ohio Counts

Some guy at daily kos uncovered an example of inaccurate vote counts in Ohio:

In the Gahanna 1-B precinct, Bush is credited with 4285 votes out of 638 votes cast.

I mentioned to a friend of mine that 5% of me is screaming that surprises in vote counts and absentee/provisional ballots could still affect this race. This doesn't make much difference, but... I guess it's up to 5.5%.

Kerry and New Mexico

Evidently, Kerry gets New Mexico. Rumor has it New Mexico local media is reporting that Kerry gets the state. It doesn't really matter, but do with that what you will.

Update: Sorry, was misled by a desperate dailykos diary... NM count is still in progress. It's still very close.

Update: Bush wins new Mexico. Bush also wins Iowa.

Politics And Business

I was talking to a friend of mine who teaches some business classes and we began to speak of the election and the Democratic party in business terms, and that got me thinking a bit.

It appears to me that most arguments about our lack of success break down into three concepts:

• Communications
• Strength Of Product
• Target Audience

We've got a real schism now, I think, in terms of where people believe we've failed. Some people think we need most of our help in Communications. Perhaps there's a better word for it - it's how we talk about our product - and more specifically, how effective you are in reaching people that you target. They believe that what we have is already great, and that we're targeting the right people - it's just a matter of communicating it better. The audience is out there; we just have to take it.

Others have serious concerns about our product itself. You can market the hell out of an inferior product, but it can really only go so far. These people were shouted down this election season, because it means by definition that you aren't part of the bubble. They're also the reactionaries after the election, saying we have to embrace guns, or give up on abortion, or cede the debate about gay marriage.

The final group thinks we're reaching out to the wrong people. Maybe it's excluding too many people, or otherwise having too small of a target audience.

My own thoughts? I think we communicated the hell out of ourselves this campaign. I think we were amazingly effective at reaching the people we targeted. I think it made the difference between our non-embarrassing presidential loss, and being blown out. I also think our product is strong, and there's no way I want us to compromises ourselves on gay rights or individual privacy rights. I don't want us to embrace fear and abdicate reason or empathy, and I don't think we have to.

But our targeting strategy was stunningly incompetent in hindsight. Our target audience was too small. I wasn't in a position to know this before the election, but the Democratic leadership should have known. This is why I'm so bitter. It's one thing to try and fail, but to not even give yourself the opportunity to succeed? It makes all the efforts we put into the presidency feel like a charade, like we were just kidding ourselves. If a company needs to make a million bucks in a year, why would they market a product that couldn't generate the sales to exceed the goal?

I know that by some definitions, we were close. But don't be deluded - Bush had broader support than the Democrats in 2000, as well - it was only because Gore won almost all of the close races that we seemed the rightful winners. And we were swamped and taken completely by surprise in 2002 - yet no one talked about 2002 in the run-up to this election. I don't blame all of us supporters for being under the impression that we could win. But that's where we should be able to trust the leadership.

This was basically a stunningly incompetent business plan implemented by the Democratic leadership. We ran ourselves out of business chasing after a population segment that couldn't sustain us by itself.

So, my thoughts on how to fix it? We have to appeal to a wider audience, without watering down our product. We have to look at the groups of people we didn't reach, and figure out how to approach them. And then we have to have a candidate that will actually appeal to them.

What's the good news? The good news is that the people who voted against us didn't actually prefer tax cuts for the rich, and bad education, and a social security system that will burn itself out, and economic policies that don't advantage them. We get to keep all that. We just need to find the guy that believes in that stuff, but also seems like the kind of man they want as a president.

Political Oxygen

I'm trying to hone in on something but my thoughts are all over the place. Here's a roughdraft freewrite... many revisions coming probably. Help me write it if you can (you can click on the link and edit the page).

MyDD :: Post-Election Strategy Memo, Part One

MyDD :: Post-Election Strategy Memo, Part One:
Chris puts his finger on a lot of what I'm so stunned about right now.
I just really thought that if we turnout out our base, and won with independents, we'd win. I just totally didn't realize that we were so completely outnumbered. This whole time I thought we were the unfairly silenced majority, but we're not.

Values

Right now I think the only hope for Democrats is to find a way to compete on "values" again. We need to become the New Testament Jesus party, and need to find highly religious liberal Christians. Going the Dean direction is a bad idea. What was good about Dean was his straight-talking demeanor, and we need to find more of that too. But the other qualities about Dean would have been even less appealing to the overall electorate than Kerry was.

It'll be a huge and interesting challenge, figuring out how to turn the language of religion back towards the Democrats' favor.

Election Night Summary

Tonight was a disaster.

I'm going to assume Kerry gets Wisconsin, which means that Ohio decides it. Bush gets Nevada, so there's no scenarios with the House or electors throwing votes to the other candidate - the margin would be too great either way.

Bush wins the national vote when he lost it in 2000. That means that there were more Gore->Bush switchers than there were Bush->Kerry switchers.

We had a turnout of less than 110 million people, and we had lines of up to nine hours in places. That means that this stupid nation doesn't even have the capacity to handle a 60% turnout.

I think Republicans increased their margins in the House and Senate.

I don't even feel distraught yet, because I honestly hadn't even imagined this yet and haven't grasped what it means yet.

Ohio is being contested, but Bush's margin has been growing.

I guess the only wildcards are if it turns out that all the "early voting" weren't included in tonight's results, or if there are far more number of provisional ballots than we thought, or if we find out that the Diebold counties were completely out of whack with exit polling when exit polling was spot-on accurate in other counties.

The Democrats were so confident. I don't get it. I don't think the answer is going the Dean direction because he couldn't even beat Kerry.

I think this changes me. I thought we were a lot closer, so I was feeling pretty motivated towards becoming more engaged in the party. But now it just seems like it will take something much different to actually make the nation be more representative of those who believe in truth, empathy, and reason. Secession? New governments? Emigration?

No matter what goes our way the next few days, we were so far off.

I did get a whiff of it. I remember feeling uncomfortable the other night that all of our optimism was so predicated on the certainty that pollsters were undersampling Democrats, or were underestimating turnout, or young voters, or voters without landlines.

But in hindsight, the media actually pretty much had it right.

I guess I was in a bubble. I can be forgiven. But the people in the Democratic Party? What's their excuse?

Election Thread

Polls have closed in some states. Check this grid throughout the night for a cool chart on what networks have projected what state. There's also an awesome map at cspan that has the vote totals as they come in.

Bush: GA, IN, KY
Kerry: VT

Good news for Kerry that SC and VA are too close right now.

Mongiardo(D) takes lead in KY Senate race.

Damn, CBS's interactive monitor is really cool.

It's a half hour after close and SC is still not projected for Bush. That's good news, even if Bush ends up winning it.

Too close to call: VA, OH, NC
Too early to call: SC (so it's just a lack of numbers, not necessarily a close race)

More great news for Kerry, although he hasn't won any surprises yet.

CNN has WV for Bush. So do several others. 39-3 Bush. So, not as much opportunity for a Kerry blowout.

NBC mentions that Kerry is still working the media when they hoped he would have been done by now. First twinge of uncertain news on Kerry's side I've heard. Hopefully it's nothing.

Many absentee ballots will not be counted tonight in PA and FL. Hopefully the margin will be enough that it won't matter.

MSNBC says that NC is so close because of the number of voters below age 30, which is preferring Kerry at 60% nationwide.

More polls closing:

Bush: TN AL OK
Kerry: IL NJ MA MD CT ME(3) DC DE
Too close: MO FL OH PA NH

77-66 Kerry. A lot of Bush-favored states are still too close to call, some even an hour after polls have closed. Will one of them break to Kerry?

Bush gets sign of relief for WV, Kerry gets sigh of relief for NJ.

NBC projects Obama to win his senate race. ;-) Networks are downplaying Dem's chances of taking the Senate.

NC is called for Bush. Took long than expected. 81-77 Bush. They also projected SC for Bush. 89-77 Bush? Still no surprises. CBS has projected VA for Bush. 102-77 Bush? Still no surprises.

Too early to call: AR

Oof. Coburn (R) is projected to beat Carson for Senate in OK. That sucks.

Still 102-77 Bush. No surprises so far. And now we're waiting for another half hour until 9PM EST.

Bush: TX KS NE ND SD WY
Kerry: NY RI
Too close: WI, MI, NM, CO, AR, MS, MN, and earlier others.

Still no surprises or switches from 2000. 156-112 Bush

I am starting to feel very suspicious about Republicans in FL and OH.

Bush: LA MS

171-112 Bush, still no surprises.

10 PM EST Closings:

Bush: UT

176-112, no surprises.

Bush: AR

182-112, no surprises.

Bush: MO

193-112, no surprises. I'd like to see more surprises for Kerry, though. Ugh.

Bush: MT

196-112, no surprises still.

Kerry: PA

HUGE sigh of relief for Kerry. 196-133 Bush. Still no surprises, but Kerry really needed PA.

Bush: AZ

206-133 Bush. Still no surprises.

11pm EST calls

Kerry: CA WA
Bush: ID

OR and HI are too early too call.

210-199 Bush. Still no surprises. Come on, Oregon!

Rumors of a large youth turnout were greatly exaggerated. :-(

Knox County in Ohio - nine hour lines.

Some of the more visible leaders over at daily kos are sounding discouraged.

Bush: CO

219-199 Bush. Still no surprises.

Joe Scarborough on MSNBC says that Kerry insiders don't believe they will win the state of Florida. Now, can we believe Joe?

The upper midwest looks good so far for Kerry. If Kerry gets Ohio, I still think he wins.

CNN also reports that Kerry insiders believe they don't have Florida.

Bush: FL

Oof. ABC and CBS call FL for Kerry. I guess it's down to Ohio. 246-199 Bush. This is the first big flip of the night, if you considered Florida rightfully the Democrats'.

Kerry: OR

PHEW!!! But, still no surprises. 246-206 Bush.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Kerry will not get Alaska. Given that, it means that Ohio is now a must-win. If he doesn't get Ohio, Bush gets re-elected.

Kerry: Last EV in Maine.

246-207 Bush. Still not a surprise. If Bush gets Ohio and Alaska and we get everything else, it's 269-269 and Bush is re-elected through the House.

People are getting REALLY pessimistic about Ohio over on daily kos, when they look at the percentage precincts reporting in various democratic counties. They're saying there just aren't enough remaining voters left to make up the margin.

All sorts of Daily Kos members projecting four more years of Bush.

Ugh, Fox projects Ohio for Kerry. They're the only network to project Ohio so far. Deja vu anyone?

Kerry: MN, NH

246-221 Bush. Our first real surprise of the election, Kerry takes New Hampshire from Bush.

MSNBC projects Ohio for Bush.

AL: Bush

If they're right, then we've got 269-207, and Bush is re-elected president - possibly in the House. But rumors are that Bush is ahead in NM.

Fuck.

CNN announces they will not call Ohio because there are over 200,000 provisional ballots out there.

Colorado was called for Bush even though none of Boulder County's (hippieville) ballots will be counted until tomorrow. The margin must be pretty wide.

Right now Nader is deciding Iowa in favor of Bush.

Weird - PBS had projected Bush winning New Hampshire, even though other networks have projected Kerry winning New Hampshire. That's the first clear disagreement in projections.... and, PBS has just corrected its projection, calling NH for Kerry.

Right now it looks like we are in a worse position than we were in 2000. Iowa will not be called tonight because the counters are going home. They are hinting that Bush will win Iowa. Kerry has to win Wisconsin for challenging Ohio to even make sense. And right now it looks like the Democrats are behind by a large amount of voters in the nationwide popular vote.

Turnout overall doesn't look much higher than 2000. None of those 120-million numbers that were bandied about.

Kerry: MI

That makes it 249-238 Bush.

Kerry: HI

That makes it 249-242 Bush.

Evidently Wisconsin is being called for Kerry by local press in Wisconsin. That would make it 252-249 Kerry. That would mean that the only way for Bush to win outright is to win Ohio.

Bush's margin in Ohio is growing.

Reports are that already-reported exit polling results all over the place are being changed to better fit the election results.

I'm done with this thread. TV is being turned off. Summary coming up.

Pre-Election Thread

I will update this posting throughout the night as information comes in.

Frank Luntz, GOP Pollster: 'Kerry is going to win' (says Wonkette)

Internet servers are going down all over the place. My poor reload button.

Screw Daylight Savings Time. If not for that, the polls would be starting to close right NOW.

The financial markets where you can bet on Kerry or Bush (Tradesports, IEM) show Bush tanking.

Right now the consensus is that if Kerry keeps his close leads in FL and OH, he wins, and if he doesn't, he loses. I don't really like being in that position, because again, these close leads are how the voters think they voted, but not how the votes have been counted.

Jesus, I just saw a live shot in lines in Georgia. It's horrible. They are actually too long - people will leave. That's horrible.

Even though FL and OH are close, OH had early voting that favored Kerry, so that's good.

The really good news is that Rove's backup strategy - of stealing upper midwest states - looks like it has completely failed. So it's really down to FL and OH for them, too, or stealing something completely unexpected.

I've heard from a few places that it's good news that there haven't been many reported problems with the e-voting machines. It ticks me off - the whole problem is that they can record a vote that you didn't cast, and you wouldn't know.

Ginsberg implies that Democrats are potentially bussing people around to vote at multiple polling locations. Dude, have you seen the lines? There wouldn't be time! He's saying that the problem is Democrats having all these false registrations. If you have a fake registration, who's going to show up? You going to conjure a real Mickey Mouse out of midair?

MSNBC is giving hints about a Kerry victory. Laura Bush reportedly forcing smiles. They refer to Bush campaign officials talking about how exit polling numbers are not going their way, and reassuring people not to trust the numbers...

I'm not sure which network to watch tonight. I'm thinking of watching ABC, even though Dan Rather might be more fun... polls start closing in a half hour.

Republicans are evidently trying to extend the closing time in New Hampshire. Not sure why. As long as you're in line by the time polls close, you can still vote even if it's two hours later. (Hmm... atrios retracted that later...)

Evidently, some states results are already being reported (not sure by whom). IN, KE. Bush is expected to win both handily, but evidently the margin is less than polls led us to believe...? Very few precincts reporting, though.

Hey, more exit polls - 6pm EST exit polls:

 Kerry Bush

PA 53   46
FL 51   49
NC 48   52
OH 51   49
AK 47   53
MI 51   47
NM 50   49
LA 43   56
CO 48   51
AZ 45   55
MN 54   44
WI 52   47
IA 49   49 

I've decided this is the pre-election thread. New thread starts at 7pm EST.

Zogby Projects Kerry Win

Zogby waiting until after both rounds of exit polls and has projected Kerry will win the presidency, 311-213.

According to this article.

Here's the link. FL, OH, NH. He's also projecting Kerry will lose the popular vote.

The Skinny On Exit Polls

Mystery Pollster: Exit Polls: What You Should Know

A good rundown on exactly how exit polls work. And actuallly, there's no real data to support the belief that either Democrats or Republicans are more or less likely to vote in the morning or afternoon.

The afternoon exit polls are also out at mydd.com - they're about the same as before. Kerry still seems to have the edge.

Remember that in 2000, Gore was ahead in the exit polls. The actual vote total was different. People (morons) took it as proof that exit polling was all screwed up. I still think the other possible explanation is that the votes were changed. Remember that exit polls are the count of who people thought they voted for. They might be wrong.

Polls: Kerry Momentum Muted

Compare this graph with the one yesterday. What's different is that more polls have been reported that were being asked the same day as the ones that were included yesterday. The additional data shows that Kerry's momentum wasn't as huge as it first seemed. However, Bush's collapse is real.

This graph reflects a tie for Florida. It's a 260-251 lead for Kerry. You'll note it's a different result than what electoral-vote reports for the day, because this one more properly averages polls that are having questions asked on the same day.

2pm Exit Poll Numbers

From MyDD.com:

         AZ  CO  LA  PA  OH  FL  MI  NM  MN  WI  IA  NH
Kerry    45  48  42  60  52  51  51  50  58  52  49  57
Bush     55  51  57  40  48  48  47  48  40  43  49  41

Exit polls don't take early voting and absentee voting into account. They also don't take fraud into account - these are who voters think they voted for.

Also, word is that Republicans tend to vote earlier in the day than Democrats.

So far it looks like the most common prediction - Kerry holds Gore states plus Florida and New Hampshire - is the most realistic one.

Gauging The Victory

After studying Matt Gross's summary, here's the skinny on the election returns. If the EV score is tighter than 75-3 (Bush over Kerry) before 5pm PST, then we have an easy night for Kerry.

Otherwise, the pressure points are making sure Kerry gets PA and NJ at 5pm, watching OH at 4, FL at 5, and the Arkansas hail mary at 5:30.

If there's no clear good surprises for Kerry by then, then we have a tight night. Eek.

The most common prediction for the Democrat pundits is that Kerry duplicates the Gore states, while also getting FL and NH.

I think that's boring. I want blowout.

Bin Laden Full Transcript

I knew it, I knew it. All those articles claiming they had the full transcript of his speech were misleading. They only had the transcript of the seven minutes that were broadcast. But it was an eighteen minute speech.

Click below to read the full transcript of all eighteen minutes. It is stunning.

"Praise be to Allah who created the creation for his worship and commanded them to be just and permitted the wronged one to retaliate against the oppressor in kind. To proceed:

Peace be upon he who follows the guidance: People of America this talk of mine is for you and concerns the ideal way to prevent another Manhattan, and deals with the war and its causes and results.

Before I begin, I say to you that security is an indispensable pillar of human life and that free men do not forfeit their security, contrary to Bush's claim that we hate freedom. If so, then let him explain to us why we don't strike for example - Sweden? And we know that freedom-haters don't possess defiant spirits like those of the 19 - may Allah have mercy on them.

No, we fight because we are free men who don't sleep under oppression. We want to restore freedom to our nation, just as you lay waste to our nation. So shall we lay waste to yours.

No-one except a dumb thief plays with the security of others and then makes himself believe he will be secure. Whereas thinking people, when disaster strikes, make it their priority to look for its causes, in order to prevent it happening again.

But I am amazed at you. Even though we are in the fourth year after the events of September 11th, Bush is still engaged in distortion, deception and hiding from you the real causes. And thus, the reasons are still there for a repeat of what occurred.

So I shall talk to you about the story behind those events and shall tell you truthfully about the moments in which the decision was taken, for you to consider.

I say to you, Allah knows that it had never occurred to us to strike the towers. But after it became unbearable and we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the American/Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, it came to my mind.

The events that affected my soul in a direct way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American Sixth Fleet helped them in that. This bombardment began and many were killed and injured and others were terrorized and displaced.

I couldn't forget those moving scenes, blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and high rises demolished over their residents, rockets raining down on our home without mercy.

The situation was like a crocodile meeting a helpless child, powerless except for his screams. Does the crocodile understand a conversation that doesn't include a weapon? And the whole world saw and heard but it didn't respond.

In those difficult moments many hard-to-describe ideas bubbled in my soul, but in the end they produced an intense feeling of rejection of tyranny, and gave birth to a strong resolve to punish the oppressors.

And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children.

And that day, it was confirmed to me that oppression and the intentional killing of innocent women and children is a deliberate American policy. Destruction is freedom and democracy, while resistance is terrorism and intolerance.

This means the oppressing and embargoing to death of millions as Bush Sr. did in Iraq in the greatest mass slaughter of children mankind has ever known, and it means the throwing of millions of pounds of bombs and explosives at millions of children - also in Iraq - as Bush Jr. Did, in order to remove an old agent and replace him with a new puppet to assist in the pilfering of Iraq's oil and other outrages.

So with these images and their like as their background, the events of September 11th came as a reply to those great wrongs, should a man be blamed for defending his sanctuary?

Is defending oneself and punishing the aggressor in kind, objectionable terrorism? If it is such, then it is unavoidable for us.

This is the message which I sought to communicate to you in word and deed, repeatedly, for years before September 11th.

And you can read this, if you wish, in my interview with Scott in Time Magazine in 1996, or with Peter Arnett on CNN in 1997, or my meeting with John Weiner in 1998.

You can observe it practically, if you wish, in Kenya and Tanzania and in Aden. And you can read it in my interview with Abdul Bari Atwan, as well as my interviews with Robert Fisk.

The latter is one of your compatriots and co-religionists and I consider him to be neutral. So are the pretenders of freedom at The White House and the channels controlled by them able to run an interview with him?  So that he may relay to the American people what he has understood from us to be the reasons for our fight against you?

If you were to avoid these reasons, you will have taken the correct path that will lead America to the security that it was in before September 11th. This concerned the causes of the war.

As for it's results, they have been, by the grace of Allah, positive and enormous, and have, by all standards, exceeded all expectations. This is due to many factors, chief amongst them, that we have [not] found it difficult to deal with the Bush administration in light of the resemblance it bears to the regimes in our countries, half of which are ruled by the military and the other half which are ruled by the sons of kings and presidents.

Our experience with them is lengthy, and both types are replete with those who are characterized by pride, arrogance, greed and misappropriation of wealth. This resemblance began after the visits of Bush Sr. to the region.

At a time when some of our compatriots were dazzled by America and hoping that these visits would have an effect on our countries, all of a sudden he was affected by those monarchies and military regimes, and became envious of their remaining decades in their positions, to embezzle the public wealth of the nation without supervision or accounting.

So he took dictatorship and suppression of freedoms to his son and they named it the Patriot Act, under the pretense of fighting terrorism. In addition, Bush sanctioned the installing of sons as state governors, and didn't forget to import expertise in election fraud from the region's presidents to Florida to be made use of in moments of difficulty.

All that we have mentioned has made it easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two  Mujahideen to the furthest point East to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies.

This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the Mujahideen, bled Russia for ten years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat.

All Praise is due to Allah.

So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah.

That being said, those who say that al-Qaida has won against the administration in the White House or that the administration has lost in this war have not been precise, because when one scrutinizes the results, one cannot say that al-Qaida is the sole factor in achieving those spectacular gains.

Rather, the policy of the White House that demands the opening of war fronts to keep busy their various corporations - whether they be working in the field of arms or oil or reconstruction - has helped al-Qaida to achieve these enormous results.

And so it has appeared to some analysts and diplomats that the White House and us are playing as one team towards the economic goals of the United States, even if the intentions differ.

And it was to these sorts of notions and their like that the British diplomat and others were referring in their lectures at the Royal Institute of International Affairs. (When they pointed out that) for example, al-Qaida spent $500 000 on the event, while America, in the incident and its aftermath, lost - according to the lowest estimate - more than 500 billion dollars.

Meaning that every dollar of al-Qaida defeated a million dollars by the permission of Allah, besides the loss of a huge number of jobs.

As for the size of the economic deficit, it has reached record astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars.

And even more dangerous and bitter for America is that the Mujahideen recently forced Bush to resort to emergency funds to continue the fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, which is evidence of the success of the blee-until-bankruptcy plan - with Allah's permission.

It is true that this shows that al-Qaida has gained, but on the other hand, it shows that the Bush administration has also gained, something of which anyone who looks at the size of the contracts acquired by the shady Bush administration-linked mega-corporations, like Haliburton and its kind, will be convinced. And it all shows that the real loser is...you.

It is the American people and their economy. And for the record, we had agreed with the Commander-General Muhammad Ataa, Allah have mercy on him, that all the operations should be carried out within twenty minutes, before Bush and his administration notice.

It never occurred to us that the commander-in-chief of the American armed forces would abandon 50 000 of his citizens in the twin towers to face those great horrors alone, the time when they most needed him.

But because it seemed to him that occupying himself by talking to the little girl about the goat and its butting was more important than occupying himself with the planes and their butting of the skyscrapers. We were given three times the period required to execute the operations - All Praise is Due to Allah.

And it's no secret to you that the thinkers and perceptive ones from among the Americans warned Bush before the war and told him, "All that you want for securing America and removing the weapons of mass destruction - assuming they exist - is available to you, and the nations of the world are with you in the inspections, and it is in the interest of America that it not be thrust into an unjustified war with an unknown outcome."

But the darkness of the black gold blurred his vision and insight, and he gave priority to private interests over the public interests of America.

So the war went ahead, the death toll rose, the American economy bled, and Bush became embroiled in the swamps of Iraq that threaten his future. He fits the saying, "Like the naughty she-goat who used her hoof to dig up a knife from under the earth"

So I say to you, over 15 000 of our people have been killed and tens of thousands injured, while more than a thousand of you have been killed and more than 10 000 injured. And Bush's hands are stained with the blood of all those killed from both sides, all for the sake of oil and keeping their private companies in business.

Be aware that it is the nation who punishes the weak man when he causes the killing of one of its citizens for money, while letting the powerful one get off, when he causes the killing of more than 1000 of its sons, also for money.

And the same goes for your allies in Palestine. They terrorize the women and children, and kill and capture the men as they lie sleeping with their families on the mattresses, that you may recall that for every action, there is a reaction.

Finally, it behooves you to reflect on the last wills and testaments of the thousands who left you on the 11th as they gestured in despair. They are important testaments, which should be studied and researched.

Among the most important of what I read in them was some prose in their gestures before the collapse, where they say, "How mistaken we were to have allowed the White House to implement its aggressive foreign policies against the weak without supervision." It is as if they were telling you, the people of America, "Hold to account those who have caused us to be killed, and happy is he who learns from others' mistakes," And among that which I read in their gestures is a verse of poetry, "Injustice chases its people, and how unhealthy the bed of tyranny."

As has been said, "An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure."

And know that, "It is better to return to the truth than persist in error." And that the wise man doesn't squander his security, wealth and children for the sake of the liar in the White House.

In conclusion, I tell you in truth, that your security is not in the hands of Kerry, nor Bush, nor al-Qaida.
No.

Your security is in your own hands. And every state that doesn't play with our security has automatically guaranteed its own security.

And Allah is our Guardian and Helper, while you have no Guardian or Helper. All Peace be Upon he who follows the Guidance."

GOP Tries To Throw Out Oregon Ballots

MyDD :: New Republican Shenanigans in Oregon The Republican Party is trying to throw out hundreds of thousands of ballots in Multnomah County because voters didn't include a xerox of their drivers license inside their ballot envelopes.

The lawyers behind it? O'Donnell and Clark. Clark is the lawyer who was on Koin 6's Gay Marriage Panel. Funny, Koin 6 didn't identify him as the law firm representing the Oregon Republican Party and the Bush-Cheney 2004 re-election campaign.

Kerry Has Momentum - Proof

(click for larger image)

This is a graph of all the polls over at Electoral-Vote.com. But unlike how that site communicates the polls, this organizes the numbers in a much more stable way - by matching up the poll numbers with the date that the questions were being asked.

This means that the numbers are always a few days old, because of the time it takes to release a poll. If a poll taken on 10/24 is reported on 10/29, its numbers here are assigned to the 10/24 date.

But here you can see that given the numbers already reported, Kerry has overtaken Bush. This doesn't even take into account the very recent momentum, because those polls are still happening.

This includes all reported polls, all of which use RV numbers.