The Final US Election Thread

[CountArach]

Excellent news. While it's disturbing that so many Alaskans would vote for a convicted felon, at least they're not (quite) the majority).


Now if only I knew what the outcome was going to be in my Senate election. The recount for the Coleman-Franken race hasn't even started yet, and we won't know the results until next month sometime.

Nate is optimistic about Franken's chances. Basically the theory is (Using data from other recounts, especially in independent recounts of Florida) that the people who are most likely to make ballot errors (And hence not have their votes counted initially) are most often:
1) Working class
2) Minority
3) Elderly

Franken won the first 2 categories and tied in the third. The votes are more likely to be counted this time because often it is clearly marked who the person wanted to vote for, but they did not fill the ballot in correctly.

[Crazed Rabbit]

Nate is optimistic about Franken's chances. Basically the theory is (Using data from other recounts, especially in independent recounts of Florida) that the people who are most likely to make ballot errors (And hence not have their votes counted initially) are most often:
1) Working class
2) Minority
3) Elderly

Franken won the first 2 categories and tied in the third. The votes are more likely to be counted this time because often it is clearly marked who the person wanted to vote for, but they did not fill the ballot in correctly.

That and the places manufacturing votes out of whole cloth for him helps a lot.

CR

[Martok]

That and the places manufacturing votes out of whole cloth for him helps a lot.

CR

Care to elaborate?

[Crazed Rabbit]

Care to elaborate?

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,449334,00.html

When voters woke up on Wednesday morning after the election, Senator Norm Coleman led Al Franken by what seemed like a relatively comfortable 725 votes. By Wednesday night, that lead had shrunk to 477. By Thursday night, it was down to 336. By Friday, it was 239. Late Sunday night, the difference had gone down to just 221 -- a total change over 4 days of 504 votes.

Amazingly, this all has occurred even though there hasn’t even yet been a recount. Just local election officials correcting claimed typos in how the numbers were reported. Counties will certify their results today, and their final results will be sent to the secretary of state by Friday. The actual recount won’t even start until November 19.

Correcting these typos was claimed to add 435 votes to Franken and take 69 votes from Coleman. Corrections were posted in other races, but they were only a fraction of those for the Senate. The Senate gains for Franken were 2.5 times the gain for Obama in the presidential race count, 2.9 times the total gain that Democrats got across all Minnesota congressional races, and 5 times the net loss that Democrats suffered for all state House races.

Virtually all of Franken’s new votes came from just three out of 4130 precincts, and almost half the gain (246 votes) occurred in one precinct -- Two Harbors, a small town north of Duluth along Lake Superior -- a heavily Democratic precinct where Obama received 64 percent of the vote. None of the other races had any changes in their vote totals in that precinct.

To put this change in perspective, that single precinct’s corrections accounted for a significantly larger net swing in votes between the parties than occurred for all the precincts in the entire state for the presidential, congressional, or state house races.

The two other precincts (Mountain Iron in St. Louis county and Partridge Township in Pine county) accounted for another 100 votes each. The change in each precinct was half as large as the pickup for Obama from the corrections for the entire state.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune attributed these types of mistakes to “exhausted county officials,” and that indeed might be true, but the sizes of the errors in these three precincts are surprisingly large.

Indeed, the 504 total new votes for Franken from all the precincts is greater than adding together all the changes for all the precincts in the entire state for the presidential, congressional, and state house races combined (a sum of 482). It was also true that precincts that gave Obama a larger percentage of the vote were statistically more likely to make a correction that helped Franken.

There gets to be a point where coincidence just don't cut it.

CR

[CountArach]

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,449334,00.html

I'm sorry, but that's your source?



I thought you were above that man...

[Lemur]

I'm sorry, but that's your source?

Note that the item CR linked to is not even categorized as "news" by Fox, but rather as "opinion." And as anyone who's sampled Fox News knows, once you get into the opinion category, anything—anything goes.

[Askthepizzaguy]

LOL

In my opinion, the Democrats won all the seats in the House and Senate. Even the ones which weren't being contested this year.

[Askthepizzaguy]

That and the places manufacturing votes out of whole cloth for him helps a lot.

CR

I didn't know we could do that. Dang!

Well, I know what my strategy is for 2012. I'm already setting up the manufacturing plant. I need some people to volunteer, preferably ones who can work 12 or more hours a day, and don't mind sleeping on shelves.