Yesterday was Democracy Fest day. BtC went back to school, streaking unsuspecting students on the quad of the University of Washington, ala Will Ferrell, and Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas. Not really.
Sharon Chan: "Sparkle Girl, Uncle Sam and Sherman Alexie came together yesterday at the University of Washington to promote one point to students: Do it in a booth."
But not The Booth.
More: "That message about voting, splashed across red T-shirts, reached hundreds of students at Democracy Fest, a local effort to raise political consciousness sponsored by The Seattle Times, the UW, Rock the Vote, radio station KEXP and Jones Soda.
'I am planning to vote,' said Kurt Delaney, a UW senior who came to the festivities to hear author Alexie speak. Delaney said he'd voted in every election since 1990, when he first registered at an erotic bakery in Wallingford.
'It seemed appropriate," he said. "What is voting if not an expression of desire?' "
Indeed, but dude, how old are you? How many senior years in college can one guy have?
Turns out he's 35. Yes! Awesome!
Today is geek day.
Dana Milbank of The Washington Post, the class nerd of the political reporter pros -- always factchecking and whatnot -- looks at all the odd combinations of electoral college "victories."
"President Bush and Sen. John Kerry deadlock Tuesday with 269 electoral votes apiece - but a single Bush elector in West Virginia defects, swinging the election to Kerry.
Or, Bush and Kerry are headed toward an Electoral College tie, but the 2nd Congressional District of Maine breaks with the rest of the state, giving its sole electoral vote - and the presidency - to Bush.
Or the Massachusetts senator wins an upset victory in Colorado and appears headed to the White House, but a Colorado ballot initiative passes and causes four of the state's nine electoral votes to go to Bush - creating an Electoral College tie that must be resolved in the U.S. House.
None of these scenarios is likely to occur next week, but they aren't all that far-fetched. Tuesday's election probably will be decided in 11 states where polls currently show the race is too tight to predict a winner. And assuming the other states go as predicted, a computer analysis finds no fewer than 33 combinations in which those 11 states could divide to produce a 269-to-269 electoral tie."
The Wall Street Journal talked to computer geeks who've used software to figure out who will win. (You need a subscription, so we can't link.)
"To prepare for next week's election, Lawrence N. Allen taught himself the Matlab statistical programming language and built a database of 1,700 state polls pulled off the Internet. His program runs a "likelihood analysis" on 15 closely contested battleground states. It takes 50 minutes to run on an old computer he got in return for a bunch of parts from a broken laptop.
The unemployed computer programmer in Oakland, Calif., identifies his politics as "to the left of standard Democratic candidates" and says he flirted with voting for Ralph Nader in 2000 before opting for libertarian Harry Browne. His calculations, made on Oct. 20, give Mr. Bush a 78.1% chance of victory.
Mr. Allen says he drew inspiration from Sam Wang, an assistant professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton University, who devised a computer program to analyze state polls and step through all the possible outcomes of 22 supposed battleground states.
There are 4,194,304 of them. (That's 2 to the 22nd power: two possible choices -- Bush or Kerry -- in 22 states.)
As of yesterday evening, Mr. Wang's "median outcome" was a razor-thin majority for Mr. Bush -- 279 votes in the decisive Electoral College, versus Mr. Kerry's 259, not counting undecided voters. But if the results followed historical patterns in which undecided voters generally break for the challenger, the Massachusetts senator would wind up with 307 electoral votes and the Oval Office, Prof. Wang says, based on his computations."
Ceci Connolly, also of The Washington Post, looks at the California initiative that would create a massive stem cell trust fund.
"If the bond measure is approved, supporters say, it would revolutionize the fledgling science - with California and its legions of academic laboratories and biotech firms at the epicenter. The payoff, proponents say, could be treatments for chronic conditions such as diabetes, Parkinson's disease and spinal-cord injury.
Opponents counter that the price would be high, in both moral and financial terms. To pursue those treatments, scientists must destroy 5-day-old embryos, a process that Roman Catholic leaders here call a "direct attack on innocent human life." Payments on the bonds would cost the state nearly $6 billion over 30 years, a sum many say California cannot afford."
More later.
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