One of the most important storylines of this election was the battle over voter suppression, and in some states early voting hours were curbed, leading to unusually long lines at the polls on Election Day. Stories, photos, and videos of voters standing in line for hours to vote were disturbing. The requirement to get away from work to visit a polling place and spend an unknown and potentially long time away from your job is a disproportionate penalty on the working class, especially those who can't afford such a long break away from work. Trying to get to their polls after a long workday, many were left standing in lines stretching down the block.
This thread at Quora on how to increase voter participation in the U.S. has some intriguing suggestions. For example, Oregon votes entirely by mail, and their voter participation rate in 2008 was 86%, far above the national average of 57%.
I voted by mail this year, and it's really convenient. In particular, it was helpful to be able to go online to research all the propositions, most of which are deceptively marketed in the official election literature. Many of the propositions are loaded with loopholes and traps, but you wouldn't know it from the innocuous way they're described.
Meta-polling had a strong night. As of just past midnight here on the West Coast, Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight and Sam Wang at Princeton Election Consortium both still have a chance to essentially nail every state on the Electoral College (the only difference is that Sam Wang called Florida a toss-up, whereas Silver had it leaning Obama. At this moment it is barely leaning Obama, but it's close enough to give Wang credit for calling it as the tightest race.
It's often said that wisdom of the crowds requires diversity of opinion, and we had a range of polls skewing in either direction. Some were upset that some polls were outliers in either direction, but in the end, perhaps the diversity of polling methods increased the accuracy of the meta-polls.
I interrupt my regular content flow for this commercial tip.
Every so often, Best Buy runs a sale on iTunes gift cards. Right now, they're selling all their iTunes gift cards for 15% off. No strings attached, no sales tax, nothing. I'm not sure how Best Buy can do this, if they buy the cards at a discount, or if they're using this as a loss leader (which doesn't seem smart in an age when online shoppers can just spearfish loss leaders without ever setting foot in a store) or if they receive any subsidy from Apple for this promotion (also seems unlikely).
Whatever the reason, it's a good deal for consumers like me who buy lots of apps for my iPhone and iPad or who occasionally rent movies through iTunes to watch on my iPad or AppleTV. Make sure to purchase the iTunes gift cards, not the App Store gift cards, as I think the iTunes gift cards can be spent on a wider range of products, not just all media but apps and books from the iBookstore (I'm not certain about that, but it's implied by the fine print).
15% off is nothing to sneeze at in these tough economic times. Best Buy doesn't run these sales often, but every time they do, I load up my iTunes balance.
Nate Silver is the one garnering all the headlines, but the Princeton Election Consortium is another blog I follow that does meta-analysis of state polls. In 2008, their prediction came within 1 electoral vote of the final outcome, beating out FiveThirtyEight, among others.
Currently, Princeton Election Consortium forecasts Obama winning 303 electoral votes, giving Obama a 99.8% chance of winning re-election. FiveThirtyEight currently has Obama winning 307 electoral votes, with an 86.3% chance of winning re-election.
Silver has been the target of much recent criticism from pundits, and I've seen many people argue that stating Obama's chances at re-election as a percentage is meaningless. That is, if Silver says Obama has an 86.3% chance of re-election and he loses tomorrow, Silver loses all credibility.
No doubt Silver would take a fall from grace in the eyes of many if Obama loses tomorrow, but the percentage is meaningful. It's not the exact same analogy, but if I tell you a fair coin will come up heads 50% of the time and you flip it once and it comes up tails, that doesn't mean my percentage was wrong. Silver and others who are analyzing these state polls suffer from only having one trial. If you could run the election multiple times instead of once, the sampling error would likely decrease and the % of the time Obama wins should converge on Silver's prognostication, according to his math. This is why high level poker players will often ask a hand to be run out multiple times, or why if you count cards you have to play blackjack over an extended period of time to squeeze out a profit from your edge.
If Silver retires from the political space after this election (and from past things he's said it sure sounds like he's ready to move on to a new field; who can blame him), I'd love to see him release his methodology publicly, like open sourcing software. It will ensure his legacy lives on in this field even as he goes on to point his methodology at another problem space.