Electoral college favors Obama

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GasBandit

Staff member
I can understand the projections of a close Romney victory, but I'm having trouble imagining how anyone could have reasonably projected a 350+ Romney victory. Even at the height of his debate bump, the only way you could get that figure was to systematically ignore every poll that still gave Obama the edge in any state-by-state popular votes...oh.
Two reasons a lot of people are doing that -
1) So very many of the polls are oversampling democrats by a LOT. As in, even more than 2008 levels, and pretending the 2010 midterms never happened.
2) People lie to pollsters. A LOT.

When it all comes down to it, all we really know is that we know nothing other than a lot of ways to reassure/alarm ourselves and drive cable news ratings.
 
Leaving the ballot blank can allow people to check one or the other options... be truly paranoid and check both, and write some sweet words on it about why you did it... probably won't matter, but it sure feels good...
Then you get 2000 Florida situation, where those Nader voters clearly meant to vote for Gore.

Just got back from the polling place. After my ballot was filled out in pen, it was fed into the vote counter. Big grey box that displayed the number of ballots received, it seemed pretty solid, pretty sure no one is getting into it without the key.
 
Just got back from the polling place. After my ballot was filled out in pen, it was fed into the vote counter. Big grey box that displayed the number of ballots received, it seemed pretty solid, pretty sure no one is getting into it without the key.
Over here we have cardboard boxes... and not even the ones with thick walls.
 
Check both? There's something like 17 people on the presidential ballot here. ;)

Also I get a nice touch screen monitor in which I tap my voting options, and then when I'm all done and confirm, it prints on a little roll of paper which never leaves the machine, but shows through a window before it disappears so I can again confirm. <3 my county's voting.
 
1) So very many of the polls are oversampling democrats by a LOT. As in, even more than 2008 levels, and pretending the 2010 midterms never happened.
While the second one is an obvious concern, there really isn't evidence of actual oversampling, at least not for recent presidential elections, and definitely not consistently over history.

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytime...-have-no-history-of-consistent-partisan-bias/

Even the Blaze has trouble making that claim: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/this-graph-shows-why-obama-is-ahead-in-the-polls/

The polls can certainly all be wrong, and people can definitely be lying, but doesn't lend itself to saying that the more Romney-leaning polls are automatically better. The problem with polling is more likely to be in how polls define "likely voter" than party-ID oversampling at this point.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
While the second one is an obvious concern, there really isn't evidence of actual oversampling, at least not for recent presidential elections, and definitely not consistently over history.

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytime...-have-no-history-of-consistent-partisan-bias/

Even the Blaze has trouble making that claim: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/this-graph-shows-why-obama-is-ahead-in-the-polls/

The polls can certainly all be wrong, and people can definitely be lying, but doesn't lend itself to saying that the more Romney-leaning polls are automatically better. The problem with polling is more likely to be in how polls define "likely voter" than party-ID oversampling at this point.
CNN just released a poll yesterday that showed obama and romney tied if you oversample democrats by 11 points. Eleven. You can't tell me there's not a problem with party ID oversampling. Furthermore, the same reports are showing "independents" - which we're told are the key to every election, after all - are going toward romney by 22.

Sometimes I think the biggest reason to want Obama to lose is just to see the sour faces on the sudden crop of statistician fanboys as they dislodge Nate Silver's glans from their epiglottis.
 
CNN just released a poll yesterday that showed obama and romney tied if you oversample democrats by 11 points. Eleven. You can't tell me there's not a problem with party ID oversampling. Furthermore, the same reports are showing "independents" - which we're told are the key to every election, after all - are going toward romney by 22.

Sometimes I think the biggest reason to want Obama to lose is just to see the sour faces on the sudden crop of statistician fanboys as they dislodge Nate Silver's glans from their epiglottis.
The proof is in the pudding, as it were. The nice thing about the statistical models is that we can find out how accurate they are when the votes are all tallied. Believe it or not, many pollsters are genuinely trying for accuracy. As for Nate Silver, he has been repeatedly saying that for Romney to win, polls have to be statistical biased towards Obama. He also points out that historically that degree of bias has not occurred AND he accounts for specific polling firms' bias in his own models.
 
CNN just released a poll yesterday that showed obama and romney tied if you oversample democrats by 11 points. Eleven. You can't tell me there's not a problem with party ID oversampling. Furthermore, the same reports are showing "independents" - which we're told are the key to every election, after all - are going toward romney by 22.

Sometimes I think the biggest reason to want Obama to lose is just to see the sour faces on the sudden crop of statistician fanboys as they dislodge Nate Silver's glans from their epiglottis.
You are aware how statistics work, right? Even a 90% predicted victory from 538 doesn't mean that a landslide is being predicted.
 
Electronic voting needs to be straight out outlawed. Seriously.

*vid*
That looks more like a case of bad touch screen recognition on likely outdated tech than a vote being changed.

Electronic voting needs to be improved.
 
yeah, gasbandit is staggeringly wrong

also Republican and Libertarians and Tea Party members identify "Independent" often since 2008/2010 and still vote exactly down Republican party lines
 
Electronic voting needs to be straight out outlawed. Seriously.

Posted in another thread, but it's really not a problem, since it shows the check. The voter can go to a precinct official and have the machine fixed or taken out of service.

It's not uncommon for a heavily used touchscreen to lose its calibration, and with some machines where the touchscreen is some distance from the video display the perspective makes a huge difference, so it's possible to create this video without a bad machine simply by locating the video camera and finger strategically.
 
Straight from Nate:

If you are following some of the same people that I do on Twitter, you may have noticed some pushback about our contention that Barack Obama is a favorite (and certainly not a lock) to be re-elected. I haven’t come across too many analyses suggesting that Mitt Romney is the favorite. (There are exceptions.) But there are plenty of people who say that the race is a “tossup.”
What I find confounding about this is that the argument we’re making is exceedingly simple. Here it is:
Obama’s ahead in Ohio.
A somewhat-more-complicated version:
Mr. Obama is leading in the polls of Ohio and other states that would suffice for him to win 270 electoral votes, and by a margin that has historically translated into victory a fairly high percentage of the time.
The argument that Mr. Obama isn’t the favorite is the one that requires more finesse. If you take the polls at face value, then the popular vote might be a tossup, but the Electoral College favors Mr. Obama.
So you have to make some case for why the polls shouldn’t be taken at face value.
Some argue that the polls are systematically biased against Republicans. This might qualify as a simple argument had it been true on a consistent basis historically, but it hasn’t been: instead, there have been some years when the polls overestimated how well the Democrat would do, and about as many where the same was true for the Republican. I’m sympathetic to the notion that the polls could be biased, statistically speaking, meaning that they will all miss in the same direction. The FiveThirtyEight forecast explicitly accounts for the possibility that the polls are biased toward Mr. Obama — but it also accounts for the chance that the polls could be systematically biased against him.
Others argue that undecided voters tend to break against the incumbent, in this case Mr. Obama. But this has also not really been true in recent elections. In some states, also, Mr. Obama is at 50 percent of the vote in the polling average, or close to it, meaning that he wouldn’t need very many undecided voters to win.
 
I'm pretty curious to know the results of that Ohio lawsuit regarding the 'experimental patch' to voter machines.
 
yeah, gasbandit is staggeringly wrong

also Republican and Libertarians and Tea Party members identify "Independent" often since 2008/2010 and still vote exactly down Republican party lines
I identify independent, which to me mostly means I'll never punch a partisan ticket.

Which makes voting take forever, and includes tons of people I'd never heard of going for school board and county judge positions.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Posted in another thread, but it's really not a problem, since it shows the check. The voter can go to a precinct official and have the machine fixed or taken out of service.

It's not uncommon for a heavily used touchscreen to lose its calibration, and with some machines where the touchscreen is some distance from the video display the perspective makes a huge difference, so it's possible to create this video without a bad machine simply by locating the video camera and finger strategically.
I have a feeling we're going to see a lot more of that video, along with a lot of people late to the party and with their fingers in their ears.
yeah, gasbandit is staggeringly wrong

also Republican and Libertarians and Tea Party members identify "Independent" often since 2008/2010 and still vote exactly down Republican party lines
The single most definite indicator of something's veracity is that CDS thinks it's wrong.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Gas once read a thing on the internet, man. You can't go discounting that!
I'm sorry I insulted your man-crush, MD.

You are aware how statistics work, right? Even a 90% predicted victory from 538 doesn't mean that a landslide is being predicted.
I didn't say it's going to be a landslide either way. I said the data we have is unreliable and some people go out of their way to make it moreso. Polls aren't about showing what people think anymore (if indeed they ever were), they're about trying to make people think they way the pollster wants them to be thinking.
 

Dave

Staff member
You mean the patches put in to the closed systems that has no governmental oversight by the company that has ties with Karl Rove and have been proven to be unsafe and not secure? Those patches?
 
I have a feeling we're going to see a lot more of that video, along with a lot of people late to the party and with their fingers in their ears.
Probably, but only if it ends up in a swing state, and that state goes for Romney by a very small margin.

It could be chads all over again, though, and that would just be a massive face palm.
 
Probably, but only if it ends up in a swing state, and that state goes for Romney by a very small margin.

It could be chads all over again, though, and that would just be a massive face palm.
Fortunately (?), at this point, the only state projected to be close enough for faulty voting and recounts to matter would be Florida.

And we've already done that 12 years ago, so we should be experts on that by now, right?
 

Dave

Staff member
Bet you guys can't wait for the lawyering to begin tonight, eh?
Nope. It's gonna happen no matter who wins and it's going to make us look like idiots. The American system of voting is a joke. It's partisan, outdated, and rife with stupidity.
 
I'm sorry I insulted your man-crush, MD.
I actually know nothing about Silver at all. But he does have a clear grasp on statistics and statistical theory (I teach it myself) and he explains his methodology, both qualities that don't exist in some predictions people are making.

I guess I should say something snarky too. I'm sorry your third or lower choice is favored to win as assessed by reliable and verifiable statistical modeling.
 
Most electronic voting machines have you double check all your choices not once, but TWICE. I hate that checking over your stuff twice is not enough idiot proofing for some people. I also hate that calibration issues automatically equal corruption to some people, and not the more simple answer. Hell, I hate everything about election season. I can't wait for it to be over. :p
 

Dave

Staff member
I haven't voted yet. I'll do it soon. I don't think Nebraska has the machines yet, which is weird because ES&S started here. I even applied to work there when they first started. Denied.
 
CNN just released a poll yesterday that showed obama and romney tied if you oversample democrats by 11 points. Eleven. You can't tell me there's not a problem with party ID oversampling.
Whether there is oversampling or not, that democrats were represented at D+11 over Republicans in a poll is not proof of it; it's merely proof that there were more Democrats in the poll.

That's not what "oversampling" means. "Oversampling" would mean that democrats are overly represented in the population of the sample compared to the real proportion of the democrats in the population of likely voters.

Given the difficulties inherent in polling already, and the possibility of Republicans choosing to identify as independents (something which would not be surprising given independents overindexing on Romney), you simply can't say from the D+ number that oversampling is occurring. D+11 does seem quite high, but even then, you could only determine actual oversampling by measuring whether the probability of CNN's polling database resulting in that number being not within the realm of chance is statistically significant. You can't just look at the D+ number.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Whether there is oversampling or not, that democrats were represented at D+11 over Republicans in a poll is not proof of it; it's merely proof that there were more Democrats in the poll.

That's not what "oversampling" means. "Oversampling" would mean that democrats are overly represented in the population of the sample compared to the real proportion of the democrats in the population of likely voters.

Given the difficulties inherent in polling already, and the possibility of Republicans choosing to identify as independents (something which would not be surprising given independents overindexing on Romney), you simply can't say from the D+ number that oversampling is occurring. D+11 does seem quite high, but even then, you could only determine actual oversampling by measuring whether the probability of CNN's polling database resulting in that number being not within the realm of chance is statistically significant. You can't just look at the D+ number.
From what I've read, those new "I" affiliations sound more like disaffected "D" types rather than crafty "R" types.
 
As of right now (9:30 PM CST), Fox News has the race tied at 162 electoral votes each.

What's somewhat surprising is that they've called Wisconsin for Obama, despite Romney having a large lead.
 
I thought that was weird too. Also being projected in Wisconsin is Tammy Baldwin beating former Governor Tommy Thompson for the US Senate race, which makes her the first openly gay Senate member.

With 64% reporting, WI now has Obama up by over 60,000 votes.
 
Whether there is oversampling or not, that democrats were represented at D+11 over Republicans in a poll is not proof of it; it's merely proof that there were more Democrats in the poll.

That's not what "oversampling" means. "Oversampling" would mean that democrats are overly represented in the population of the sample compared to the real proportion of the democrats in the population of likely voters.
C'mon guy, this is GB, he knows that very well... never stopped him before.
 
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