Summations Only

It's answers like this that are the reason I asked here and not on reddit.... Thanks anyways.

I think one great value of poles and pole results leading up to the election, and exit poles at the election, is a check on the election results.If the precinct exit pole results deviate significantly from the precinct election results, suspect that some sort of fraud has happened.Once again, I was an election judge at our little local precinct. We had 132 voters on the registered voter roster and about 18 time of voting registrations, for a total of about 150 registered voters. Of course, some of those on the roster were no longer voters in the precinct. We had 127 voters total (127/150 = 85% turn out).Voter density peaked at 4 there at the same time. The only waiting at all was if you needed to register.The precinct is pretty liberal, but apparently getting a bit more conservative:Obama, 88
Romney, 29House of Representatives district 8
Rick Nolan (D), 91
Chip Cravaak (R-Incumbent), 28I don't offhand know the overall totals, but 1 term Cravaak went down, returning the seat to the Democrats. Prior to Cravaak, the seat was held by James Oberstar (D), 18 terms. Prior to that it was John Blatnik (D) for 14 terms. It is a pretty solid Democrat district.Cravaak was the only of 8 House incumbents (8 Minnesota districts) to go down, although the Michele Bachmann race went down to the wire (~1% margin in the end). Bachmann's district is very conservative, and the analysis is that she did lag badly, relative to the more local Republican candidates.Amendment 1 (outlawing gay marriage, which was already illegal by state statute) went down locally 76 no and no votes, 46 yes (a non-vote=no). It also went down statewide.Amendment 2 (require photo ID to vote) went down locally 89 no and no votes, 33 yes. It also went down statewide.Both the Minnesota House and Senate turned from Republican to Democrat majority. The Governor is a Democrat. Now we shall see if the anti-gay marriage statute goes down.MooseEdited by Minnemooseus, : Added another Bachmann sentence.

Have you seen the movie Money Ball?http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web...It's the same concept - old guard pundits & managers vs. new-fangled tech computations. Guts & truthiness fight actual numbers, run through a system.I happen to prefer Nate Silver & Jonah Hill types, but I'm just weird that way.

Here's another interesting Electoral College map, distorting state size by population (Romney's team has now conceded Florida):

I wonder if it is always possible (in every hypothetical case, I mean) to do that without leaving any holes, preserving the borders between any two given states.My gut tells me the answer is probably yes, but my gut is only 60:40 on the issue. Besides, it's occasionally wrong. Does anyone have any information on this: a theorem or a counterexample?

Fox News is funny again! Watching Karl Rove implode, and Hannity explode over the last couple of days has been entertaining.Karl Rove claims President Obama won reelection by 'suppressing the vote' — New York Daily News

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Appearing Thursday on Fox News, Rove insisted that Obama won because he succeeded in suppressing the vote with negative ads that turned off voters, keeping them from the polls.

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Fox News host Megyn Kelly didn’t buy it, interrupting Rove by saying, But he won, Karl, he won!

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Both the red and blue states harbor large populations of "vote traitors" who refused to vote according to state color. Any map that doesn't disguises a mere 2 point margin between Obama and Romney, but purports to show some kind of domination of the public for one party or the other is inaccurate.

You know, on the whole, I'm a bit disappointed by this election. After the foregone conclusion of four years ago, I was expected a nail-biting, white knuckle ride this time. It was all supposed to be 'down to the wire' as the news kept promising ad nauseum in the buildup; before the results started coming in pundits kept jabbering about the long night ahead of them.Instead, everything was already settled and Romney had conceded before I got up for work on Wednesday morning (which, bearing my timezone in mind, is only 2:00 am on the east coast). Long night indeed.And now that Florida's settled, just have a look at the map. One state changed hands. One!Call that an exciting election? Thank god Real-Dortmund was a good match, or I can't think how Tuesday evening could have been duller.

Apparently the Romney camp was convinced the poling was bad and the above quoted was true.Romney shellshocked, because he believed his own bullcrap

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The GOP's reality-distortion field went all the way to the top.

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"We went into the evening confident we had a good path to victory," said one senior [Romney] adviser. "I don't think there was one person who saw this coming."

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Thus, it was crushing when reality intruded their fantasy world.

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More there.Moose

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[T]hey believed the public/media polls were skewed - they thought those polls oversampled Democrats and didn't reflect Republican enthusiasm. They based their own internal polls on turnout levels more favorable to Romney.

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But a leaked memo showed that Romney's own numbers included a loss in Ohio. I think Romney's camp was in full denial, and that any of these excuses for why are a product and not the cause of that attitude.

Yeah, but that state slid way into the abyss. The current Democratic governor did not even run and McCrory pounded the candidate the Dems came up with. Republicans have veto proof margins in both state legislative chambers. On social policy, NC is continuing its slide back into Rebelhood.Locally, Democrats did well enough, but statewide, NC election results are pretty depressing. At least we don't have anti-Obama riots on university campuses like one state did.

Actually, two. Indiana and North Carolina. Unless my brain has suddenly become dumb and I can't remember facts any more.

I've heard a few things. One is that Nate's methods included poll aggregating which seems to aggravate the people who spend money and time polling. Nate predicted a Republican loss at a time when Republicans wanted to believe otherwise, which seemed to aggravate even more people. And he did so using science/math. Then he had the gall to be right.If Nates methods are right, then a lot of money spent trying to generate contrary results was wasted.I don't think it is important. But as a child I remember reading a science fiction story where elections were conducted by picking out a single person and asking him a bunch of largely demographic questions and then generating an election result based on his responses. The story must have been Franchise by Isaac Asimov.

So, as I mentioned earlier, if it would not have taken a vote from Obama, I wanted to vote for Gary Johnson.......well, I would like to point out that if Obama and Romney were to disappear, good ol' Gary Johnson would have it by having the most votes of all of the third party candidates! Well done, Gary, well done!Edited by Tempe 12ft Chicken, : No reason given.

OK, seriously now.If you read what conservatives were writing before the election, they had one consistent theme: "Anyone who believes that Obama can possibly win is living in a little bubble isolated from the facts and protected from reality by the MAINSTREAM MEDIA and especially by Nate Silver, who may have called the 2008 election correctly but this time around is a lying partisan hack 'cos we don't like the things he says. He has deceived the liberal sheeple with all his talk of math and science, but we are not deceived, we know better because of our telepathic connection with AMERICA!"Well, if they were sane, now would be a great time for them to revise their opinions about who is living inside a bubble. If they could think, now would be a great time for them to think about how Nate Silver called every single state correctly, whereas the pundits on Fox News were completely wrong about their prediction of a Romney electoral landslide. And they could think that Nate Silver was not partisan at all, and just did the math.I don't suppose this is going to happen, 'cos these people do not in fact think. But wouldn't it be great if they did?