US Politics: Voting Tales and Victory Ales

[Mexal]

Voting machine errors in PA:

That scares me.

[Maithanet]

Well, looks like Sam Wang is all in, He has Obama at a 100% chance to win the election.

Frankly, I'd admit at least the possibility that any model could be inaccurate due to systematic bias in the polls. Maybe not the ~9% that Nate SIlver gives it, but something.

Did anyone else notice that FiveThirtyEight has Obama back down to 90.9%, when he was at 92% earlier this morning? I think his number for Virginia went down as well, as I remember it having crossed the 80% threshold, where now it sits at 79%. Not that it really matters, but it is strange that he would be monkeying around with the numbers this late in the game.

[Fez]

Voting machine errors in PA:

The notable half-second freeze in that video makes me think there's some editing going on there. My guess would be the Romney button was pressed when the recording was off and the Obama button isn't actually being pressed to switch it over. It also looks like a loop of the same action, repeated multiple times.

If there really are shenanigans going on, why would they be visible like that?

Did anyone else notice that FiveThirtyEight has Obama back down to 90.9%, when he was at 92% earlier this morning? I think his number for Virginia went down as well, as I remember it having crossed the 80% threshold, where now it sits at 79%. Not that it really matters, but it is strange that he would be monkeying around with the numbers this late in the game.

There was a small last batch of polls that came in this morning. By guess would be that they ever so slightly lowered Obama's national percentage and since Silver has the two related, that ever so slightly lowered Obama's chances in some of the closer states.

[Opisthokont]

Did anyone else notice that FiveThirtyEight has Obama back down to 90.9%, when he was at 92% earlier this morning? I think his number for Virginia went down as well, as I remember it having crossed the 80% threshold, where now it sits at 79%. Not that it really matters, but it is strange that he would be monkeying around with the numbers this late in the game.

Isn't it more likely that he's just feeding the last polls to his model than that he is "monkeying around" with the numbers himself?

[Ormond]

Did anyone else notice that FiveThirtyEight has Obama back down to 90.9%, when he was at 92% earlier this morning? I think his number for Virginia went down as well, as I remember it having crossed the 80% threshold, where now it sits at 79%. Not that it really matters, but it is strange that he would be monkeying around with the numbers this late in the game.

His % chance of Obama winning Nebraska 2 went down, too, back to 12.7% from early this morning's 14.9%.

[Maithanet]

There was a small last batch of polls that came in this morning. By guess would be that they ever so slightly lowered Obama's national percentage and since Silver has the two related, that ever so slightly lowered Obama's chances in some of the closer states.

OK. I sort of read the last post as being "this is the final model estimate before the election" although admittedly he didn't say that.

Isn't it more likely that he's just feeding the last polls to his model than that he is "monkeying around" with the numbers himself?

Bit defensive of Mr. Silver are we?

[Whoring Drunkard]

The notable half-second freeze in that video makes me think there's some editing going on there. My guess would be the Romney button was pressed when the recording was off and the Obama button isn't actually being pressed to switch it over. It also looks like a loop of the same action, repeated multiple times.

If there really are shenanigans going on, why would they be visible like that?

From one of the comments on the youtube video:

This is all over the news here in Central PA. The voting place said that there was, in fact, an issue with the machine and took it offline. They didn't say how many votes were affected.

[Padraig]

According to a survey in the Netherlands 88% of the population would vote for Obama, and 2.9% for Romney. Not suprised, tho'.

That came up earlier. China seems to like Romney. Amusing.

[lokisnow]

We got to our polling station in mid-city Los Angeles at about 7:05 this morning, was about a 35 minute wait.

Easily the most incompetent poll workers I've ever encountered, and the oldest person was the cheerful old guy that was handing out the stickers, most of them were women in their 40s-50s and a younger woman who had clearly been ran roughshod and was sitting with nothing to do. This was at a retirement home so I expected the ninety year old little old ladies that have ran every other precinct I've voted in here in LA, but they were not to be found. This is a shame because the old birds are awesome, fun and incredibly efficient at moving people through the whole process.

This was a complete mess, First the booths are to your right, and the people checking you in are on the right side of the table, two of them as there should be, checking you off in their books--unfortunately the woman in charge kept hovering over everyone "helping" with the people who were signing you in. If there was any discrepancy, every poll worker had to conference on it, maybe because it was so interesting, and after the hen party had thoroughly confused everyone involved and taken all six sides of the two ways a discrepancy could be resolved the voter usually got sidelined with a provisional ballot.

Anyway, after signing in, you moved left, to pick up your ballot--supposedly from the aforementioned young lass who was supposed to be handing out ballots--but the 'helpful' lady in charge was often swooping over to try and help out the young lass do that task as well. Then you kept moving left, walked around the tabulator and behind the poll workers table (there was some controversy over this, since you're not supposed to go behind the machine because you might accidentally put in a ballot that had not yet been filled out, but the other alternative was to push your way back through the line of waiting people to get to the booths on the right, the polite thing to do was to walk behind the incompetent boobs).

All this could have been fixed by having things start on the left and proceed to the right, just a horrible set up that was already causing interminable delays minutes after the polls had opened.

But all that was just a general irritant, that was not the real problem. The real problem was that someone had ripped all the receipts off the top of the ballot--which has never happened in any election we've voted in before--so you voted your ballot, put it in the tabulator and then were handed a random receipt from a stack of ballot receipts. So in the event of a recount there is absolutely no way to tell that your ballot was counted because there's no correspondance between your receipt and the ballot. I think they did this to try and speed things along, but this is just about the worst thing to try and save time on.

We called the hotline as soon as we got home and reported the ballot discrepancy, they were pretty shocked to hear it, hopefully it will be corrected before the end of the day.

They had seven or eight booths there and the poll workers were so bad at what they were doing, there was usually only one-two people at the booths at a time, with a line of 50-70 people.

Oy.

[Opisthokont]

Bit defensive of Mr. Silver are we?

No, I don't trust anyone who doesn't make their data and their analysis model public. But there's absolutely no reason for them to adjust a prediction by a couple of fractions of a percent, it's not as if anyone could measure the accuracy of that change anyway.

[Fez]

From one of the comments on the youtube video:

This is all over the news here in Central PA. The voting place said that there was, in fact, an issue with the machine and took it offline. They didn't say how many votes were affected.

Youtube commentators are now a trustworthy source?

[Maithanet]

Google search finds some hits for the video and some not terribly credible news sources basically saying the same thing. This thread was the #4 return. I'll wait until some bigger news outlet picks it up before freaking out.

[Whoring Drunkard]

Youtube commentators are now a trustworthy source?

I'm not judging, just sharing what's out there. If it's real, it is probably a legit error and not the GOP trying to pull something. Still...paper ballots!!!!!

[Reny of Storms End]

I voted about an hour ago in Western PA. No problems for me, maybe had to wait five

minutes. I was the 58th ballot cast on my machine, there were six total machines.

[The Iceman of the North]

That came up earlier. China seems to like Romney. Amusing.

Not the same survey, the BBC only surveyed 22 countries, the Dutch weren't among them. In Norway a survey put Romney at an astonishing 6%, but it was done by YouGov, so I'm not confident his support are really that high.

[Guest Raidne]

Google search finds some hits for the video and some not terribly credible news sources basically saying the same thing. This thread was the #4 return. I'll wait until some bigger news outlet picks it up before freaking out.

This Yahoo news story looks fairly credible to me: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/watch-glitch-voting-machine-pennsylvania-171806481--election.html

Guy who took the video is a software developer. He says the video is unedited and the jumps are from the Android camera app. On the other hand, the article also quotes one youtube comment at the end, so I guess it has to all be bullshit following Fez's logic.

"I initially selected Obama but Romney was highlighted," writes Centralpavote on YouTube. "I assumed it was being picky so I de-selected Romney and tried Obama again, this time more carefully, and still got Romney."

A software developer, he tried troubleshooting the screen. "I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I de-selected her and started at the top of Romney's name and started tapping very closely together to find the 'active areas.' From the top of Romney's button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama's name was all active for Romney."

A few more taps and he discovered that the only way to select Obama was to click on a small sliver of the screen. All of the buttons for the other candidates seemed to work fine.

[Xray the Enforcer]

I was just going to post that. Fez -- the dude who took that video is offering the raw footage to prove it's not edited but an artifact of his shitty cell-phone video mode.

[Guest Raidne]

Having said that, it's not likely to be fraud, but a machine that needs to be recalibrated: http://gawker.com/5958114

Still, it appears to be real and the poll worker did not seem to care about fixing the problem. We have no idea how many people were affected by this machine.

ETA: I searched voting machine Pennsylvania and did not see this thread anywhere. There were plenty of other hits.

[Prince of the North]

I walked right in and voted at about 8:15 am CST this morning (paper, bubble, scannable voting method). It was great! Too bad North Dakota will very likely be going red in the presidential election but we also have what seems to be a pretty tight senate race going on. I'm hoping the Democrat can pull it out. We also have a governor race going on but, being ND, that will go red as well.

[Xray the Enforcer]

Still, it appears to be real and the poll worker did not seem to care about fixing the problem. We have no idea how many people were affected by this machine.

That's the most galling thing. I hope that the person is barred from ever working at a polling station again. Incompetence or laziness, I don't care -- fuck them sideways.