Blogging is not my life, nor is it an alternative to my life. Of the two extremes, it comes closer to the latter, so when real life gets interesting (for better or for worse) blogging falls by the wayside. In the last few weeks there's been some worse and some better, but recently more of the latter. As Dorothy Parker once said, I've been ... busy.

I see the last time I checked in was shortly before the Presidential Election. It turns out that Benzene's "official" prediction wasn't very close. My second entry in Brux's contest was pretty respectable -- missing only Wisconsin, New Mexico and one vote of Maine, for a total of 522 electoral votes out of 538 -- but not quite good enough to win. A couple of other entries outscored mine with the help of bonus points for early submission. Without the bonus, I think I would have been second, but one other contestant managed to get everything except for Iowa, which would have won the prize even without the 30 bonus points for making the guess back in July. It was one of four entries by the same person, but it's still pretty impressive.

I missed the whole news drama of election day. I was working at the polls, which kept me at the polling place and away from any news source till about 10:30 pm. Even then, I was busy with other things that week, so that evening I tuned in just long enough to hear that Bush probably won, and then the following afternoon I tuned in just long enough to hear it confirmed that Bush did indeed win.

It wasn't until reading blogs a few days later that I learned that for much of election day it was widely assumed that Kerry had won. On election day, I had taken a quick peek on the Internet during my lunch break, and I saw some of those polls suggesting Kerry doing well, but they were just unconfirmed early exit polls so I didn't take them as anything more than a tentative indicator. From reading the blogs I gather that all the political junkies (on both sides) following the game on TV or the Internet perceived a significant lead for Kerry only to watch it dry up by the end of the evening -- which just goes to prove that Benzene doesn't miss much by failing to stay on top of the news: How much worse off were those of us who missed the whole drama and simply discovered the following day that Bush won?

I also gather that as a result of this dramatic reversal of expectations, a great many Democrats were all the more convinced that the exit polls were right and the vote counts were wrong and thus the election was stolen. Even less plausibly, a great many Republicans were claiming that the exit polls themselves were intentionally fraudulent as part of a nefarious scheme by Democrats to try to steal the election. Within a day, most had abandoned these theories in favor of the more obvious one that the exit polls simply had bad methodology and thus got it wrong, but it seems a few diehard partisans on each side are still pushing their stories.

I'm open-minded, so I'm in favor of any sort of verification follow-up, and if anyone can point to any real evidence of foul play, I'd be happy to look at it. So far, all but one of the arguments I've seen advanced present a lot of talk and no actual data. The one exception -- a study that compares voter registration figures with vote totals across the counties of Florida, measuring the disjunct between the two -- falls apart on closer analysis. The counties with the larger disjunct are the counties that do use a voting machine that leaves a paper trail, not the ones that don't, as the conventional stolen-election theory requires. Furthermore, a closer look at the counties which are exceptions to the pattern show that the real correlation is not to voting machines at all but to smaller rural counties with lower population movement, where a pattern of change in party registration lagging change in presidential choice is entirely consistent with what is known of political preferences in that region.

Setting aside the minutiae of election and looking at the overall result, the closest I came to a wrap-up commentary was an answer I sent to an email from REG the afternoon after the election, which will therefore jump the queue (an exceedingly old and long queue now...) and appear next. My half of the exchange was written shortly after the final result became certain; I think REG was writing a little earlier in the day when Ohio was still not quite settled. My responses in brackets are what I emailed REG then, with nothing new added today.

The conversation continued after this -- and I think REG and I would each say things slightly differently today -- but the rest of it can wait.

12:48:38 AM  [permalink]  comment []