A thought about European elections: why they're boring
The drama of an election comes from the combination of a plot where the end is not known: we don't know who will win (in some cases, who has won), whether the result will be accepted by the loser, and how well or badly the defeated will behave.
But in an election with the D'Hondt method of proportional representation (that rolls of the tongue!), it seems like almost everyone wins something, and really isn't clear who has lost, or by how much: was it close or a landslide?
The U.K. elections for the European Parliament this month are a case in point. How many people realise that the British Nationalist Party scored nearly one million votes across the U.K.? Or how close the B.N.P. came to winning elsewhere and which party narrowly defeated it?
Supporters of proportional representation might pause and think about how much of a turn-off it is to voters to remove the drama from an election. When there are no losers and no clear winners, there is no interest in taking part.
Twitter has re-scheduled a maintenance downtime to about 1.30am local time in Tehran, to allow the protesters to organise and agitate against the recent election result (which "concerns" U.S. President Barack Obama - whatever that means).
Twitter had been planning to have a 90 minute downtime tonight for maintenance. Given what’s going on over in Iran right now, that was a problem. And so Twitter has decided to reschedule the maintenance so the protests can go on.
This is a good move by Twitter. It clearly didn’t want to have to move the maintenance window that it calls a “critical network upgrade,” but the #nomaintenance hashtag that has spent the entire day on the trending topic list, made it pretty clear that Twitter’s users don’t want the service going down at all during this important time. So Twitter worked with its network partner NTT America to reschedule the maintenance for 2-3 PM Pacific, which will be 1:30 in the morning in Iran, rather than during the day.
Twitter uses the rest of the post to praise NTT America for its flexibility, but really this is all about Iran. The people over there are using Twitter as a tool of choice to spread information about what is going on, even as other outlets for communication are being blocked.
I've been too long away from this blog. For reasons that are not really nice (the company I worked for has gone into liquidation) I now have time in the day with a computer that actually works. Hiatus over, at least for now.
I have completed my statistical compilation of the UK's European Parliamentary election data and will be issuing my analysis over coming days.
For those unfamiliar with Twitter, this is something I predicted recently: the first use of social media to try and overthrow a government. This is something quite different from using social media to run election campaigns, which I think is now the norm.
Palin Derangement Syndrome, or "Lipstick on a pig" Take 2
If Senator Obama did not intend the insult, why did he repeat it on the Letterman show? Bush Derangement Syndrome has been replaced by Palin Derangement Syndrome. The Democratic Party candidate for the presidency of the U.S.A. has got it bad. His excuse for the now notorious "Lipstick on a Pig" jibe at his vice-presidential opponent Governor Sarah Palin is:
"Keep in mind, technically, had I meant it this way, [Palin] would be the lipstick. The failed policies of John McCain would be the pig, just following the logic of this illogical situation," Obama said.
So to all the people (mostly women) who have been in denial that this was an attack on Governor Palin: "SHE WOULD BE THE LIPSTICK" on a pig [McCain].
Obama's "had I meant it this way" sounds like O.J. Simpson trying to cash in on "if I did kill my ex-wife and her boyfriend, this is how I would have done it." I don't know on what planet Obama thinks his "following the logic of this illogical situation" will work, but it isn't in this solar system.
It was a cheap shot. The body language tells me he knew it, was embarrassed by it from the moment it left his mouth. The rest is a bully's denial. Pathetic.
Here's a transcript of what I saw: “[hand in starts in pocket then moves towards face] but you know you can’t…you-you know you can put..er…[covers his face]…lipstick on a pig…[long pause waiting for audience to cheer]…[takes his hand off his face]…it’s still a pig! [looks around].”
UPDATE: Just checking out Intrade. Here's what people putting their money think.
Doesn't Senator Obama know how many U.S. Senators there are?
I really hope this isn't the reason Senator Barack Obama loses the 2008 U.S. presidential election:
If Senator Obama thinks he's going to win the NINE states he claims to have visited that don't exist he might have a problem: overestimating his Electoral College votes. He said he hadn't visited Alaska or Hawaii so he can only have visited 48 real states at the most. That's a minimum overestimate of 27 electoral college votes, assuming they're all small. To give Senator Obama some credit, he did run a superb primary election campaign by not, at least until he was clearly going to win, refusing to campaign in states however small or normally Republican (Michigan and Florida re a special case).
Or is it that Senator Obama hasn't a clue? You'd think he knew how many Senators there are at least: 2 per state or 100 in total.
Perhaps it's something about the drinking water in the U.S. Senate washrooms, in which case I assume Senators John McCain (Arizona) and Joseph Biden (plagiarist, Delaware) should be viewed with suspicion:
Last election, Senator John Kerry (Massachusetts) also thought he had a better chance of winning than he really had: he thought that he only had to gain FOUR E.C. votes from New Hampshire and hold the states certified to have been won by Al Gore in 2000. Turns out, Senator Kerry didn't know about the U.S. Census and how that changes things.
"We will leave here more united than we came," she said.
Some audience members heckled her in response. "Lipstick on a pig!" one shouted.
"We just blew the election!" a woman in the audience shouted. The crowd was divided between cheering Obama supporters and booing Clinton supporters.
"This isn't unity! Count all the votes!" another audience member yelled.
At stake was what the Democratic National Committee was going to do about the Michigan and Florida primaries, where the Party initially proposed to ban delegates from those two states from the August National Convention.
The "compromise" effectively gives the nomination to Senator Barak Obama.
Of course the procedure is so convoluted and arbitrary that the deal may not stand up to the scrutiny of a court of law.
Whatever happened to "every vote must be counted"? Silly me, it only applies to when the Democrat is behind a Republican...
Fivethirtyeight.com is a project by a Daily Kos contributor I've mentioned previously, here and here and which has some flaws, despite what I reckon are genuine attempts to avoid overstating Democratic party hopes for November.
I think it's a very good addition to the debate about what will happen, as opposed to what we might like to happen or wish would happen. As such, I have no hesitation in adding fivethirtyeight.com to my blogroll.
Here's what Poblano says about it all, taken from the site FAQ:
What is the significance of the number 538? 538 is the number of electors in the electoral college.
How is this site different from other compilations of polls like Real Clear Politics? There are a few things we're able to do over here that these other sites haven't done. Firstly, we assign each poll a weighting based on that pollster's historical track record, the poll's sample size, and the recentness of the poll. More reliable polls are weighted more heavily in our averages. Secondly, we include a regression estimate for each state among our 'polls', which helps to account for outlier polls and to stabilize the results. Thirdly, we simulate the election 10,000 times for each site update, in order to provide a probabilistic assessment of electoral outcomes.
I'm not sure that RealClearPolitics doesn't already do the weighting that Poblano is doing, but either way there are likely to be some differences. See here for my praise for the RCP.
And we agree on Zogby:
OK, so just who are the most reliable pollsters? As of 3/13/2008, the weights assigned to the various polling agencies are as follows:
Survey USA 1.91 Selzer & Co (IA) 1.47 Field Poll (CA) 1.33 Rasmussen 1.30 Ohio Poll / U. of Cincinnati 1.24 Chicago Trib. / Market Shares 1.16 Mason-Dixon 1.10 Univ. New Hampshire 1.08 Public Policy Polling (PPP) 1.05 Research 2000 1.01 Mitchell (MI) 0.96 ABC / Washington Post 0.95 Insider Advantage 0.95 Quinnipiac 0.95 Strategic Vision 0.95 LA Times / Bloomberg 0.83 Star Tribune (MN) 0.81 FOX / Opinion Dynamics 0.79 CNN / Opinion Research 0.77 Suffolk (MA) 0.77 EPIC-MRA (MI) 0.75 Franklin Pierce (NH) 0.74 Farleigh-Dickinson (NJ) 0.71 Marist (NY) 0.69 CBS / New York Times 0.66 American Research Group 0.65 Zogby 0.64 Keystone (PA) 0.64 USA Today / Gallup 0.63 Public Opinion Strategies 0.63 Columbus Dispatch (OH) 0.50 Zogby Interactive 0.43
"It's easy to have a non-violent election: just make sure that all the parties agree to lose the next election and/or the one after that."
Antoine Clarke
