October 23, 2008
Huge Obama lead in Early Voting returns and things that keep me up at night:
The overwhelming force of the Dem's early voting success could mean that exit polls on election day swing lightly McCain. Say one third of voters go early, by a margin of 66-34 to Obama, and two-thirds vote on the fourth, 48-52. Obama therefore carries the state by an overwhelming 54-46 margin, but what the media will see on election day is: "Election day shocker! Voters leaving the polls went for McCain by a 4-point margin." They will then be told by election officials that after counting in the fairly small fraction of early and absentee ballots, the final tally is an eight-point *Obama* victory.
Is the media numerate enough to understand this situation? I doubt it. If nothing else, this seems fraught with post-election accusations of voter fraud.
With that said, early voting is an enormous boon to the GOTV strategy -- vote now, and spend the fourth at your local campaign office. In fact, I'm heading over there now.
(The math of the returns above:
one third of people vote early, two thirds on election day. Say there are 3million voters: so, 1M and 2M. among early voters, 660,000 go for Obama, and among election day voters, 960,000 Obama overall, (660k + 480k + 480k) = 1,620,000 for Obama. That's 1.62/3.0 = 54% Obama. among early voters, 340,000 go for McCain, and among election day voters, 1,040,000 McCain overall, (340k + 520k + 520k) = 1,380,000 That's 1.38/3.0 = 46% McCain.
Obama wins by an unmistakable 240,000 voters, due to his 320,000 extra early votes -- but 80,000 more voters left the polls having gone for McCain.
The Art and Science of Choosing Likely Voters -- check out how many people lie about their intent and ability to vote:
And no, that's not a typo. Eight-four percent (84%) of these confirmed non-voters said they planned to vote [but are shown in official records to have not cast a ballot]. Their answers were more accurate after the election, but still, nearly half (44%) of the non-voters claimed inaccurately a few weeks later that they had voted.
The far right column shows the respondents who were confirmed as non-registrants. Nearly a third (30%) told the interviewer that they were registered to vote during their first, pre-election interview, and 45% said they intended to vote. After the election one in five of those with no record of being registered to vote (21%) claimed they had cast a ballot.
Turns out the consensus is that the exit polls DO take early voting into account, though don't do so perfectly, in particular, not factoring cell phone-only voters.
There will be probably be a slight pro-McCain bias in the final exit poll results, but probably not enough of one to skew the final results. At least provided that they're doing their weighting properly.
« Older McCain Attack Ads | History Repeating Newer »
To post comments to a thread you must login or create a profile.
McCain's already building up the groundwork for accusations of voter fraud, too. I really think that's the reason behind all of this ACORN stuff. It's not about swinging this election, it's about delegitmizing Obama should he win.
It's so hard to prove that these sorts of memes are bullshit.
posted by Valatan at 05:56PM CST on October 23