Recently in elections Category

This is fascinating - the sequence of digits in provincial vote tallies may be a signal of vote tampering in Iran.

Why would fraudulent numbers look any different? The reason is that humans are bad at making up numbers. Cognitive psychologists have found that study participants in lab experiments asked to write sequences of random digits will tend to select some digits more frequently than others...

The numbers look suspicious. We find too many 7s and not enough 5s in the last digit. We expect each digit (0, 1, 2, and so on) to appear at the end of 10 percent of the vote counts. But in Iran's provincial results, the digit 7 appears 17 percent of the time, and only 4 percent of the results end in the number 5. Two such departures from the average -- a spike of 17 percent or more in one digit and a drop to 4 percent or less in another -- are extremely unlikely. Fewer than four in a hundred non-fraudulent elections would produce such numbers.

There's more - click thru to the Washington Post for details. I'm loving this analysis by political scientists (yay!) Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco.

Via Rolling Stone.

I've been reading some Emerson lately. This passage struck me as particularly germane to the upcoming election:

I was in a bad mood, and then I saw this:

I am the biggest loser, per last night's bet. And as painful as it was, I've fulfilled my debt by making a token donation to a candidate of my friend's choosing: (And note he was chosen only because I dislike him so much, not because either of us like Rudy)

A friend and I decided to do top 3 picks and see who comes closer. I'm gonna put them here for the sake of keeping things out in the open. Me: 1) Edwards 2) Clinton 3) Obama Him: 1) Obama 2) Edwards 3) Clinton Can't wait to see who got closer... Update: Looks like I'm the big loser here!

It's coming down the the wire in Iowa and some candidates are airing their closing arguments during tonight's 6 o'clock news. The ads are really representative of the differences in the style and intentions of the candidates. I hate talking about the mechanics of campaigning, because we should be focusing on the message. So listen to the message. Here's Hillary: I can't find an embedding link for Obama's but it's on his homepage here. And then there's my boy, John Edwards. He doesn't even appear in this commercial, but it was more powerful to me than the other two combined. Message: Hillary - "Let's be friends." Obama - "I like the sound of my own voice." Edwards - "I'm so money, I don't even need to appear in my own commercial."

I have very little to add to the hub-bub about Iowa except to echo Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson. It's gonna be an exciting few weeks, starting with Thursday.

Sometimes I just fucking love politics. The race in Iowa is such that nobody, and I mean nobody, can predict who is going to emerge victorious on January 3 — in either party’s caucuses. We’re looking at a dead heat among Clinton, Obama, and Edwards on the Democratic side and a dogfight between Huckabee and Romney in the Republican race. Polling over the holidays — when families are traveling — is a joke. So the instruments we pajama pundits usually use to gauge momentum are clouded by statistical burps that show Hillary up ten points in one poll or and down two in another.

I'm not a huge fan of the Politico, but I've got to say that their Kingmaker political prediction site is mighty cool. Politics nerds like me get to compete with each other and predict the minutiae of the important primary races. Of course, I should have known it was built by Publi.us, the same guys who created Fantasy Congress.