[Am-info] An on-topic message about the election

[ethical@1of1.net]

Political junkies who have been following the United States
presidential election quickly become aware of the best sites for raw
data on the Electoral College probabilities based on polling results. 
In no particular order, they are:  

    www.electoral-vote.com 
    www.race2004.net 
    www.NowChannel.com/trend/ (formerly 2.oo4k.com) 
    www.realclearpolitics.com 

Although some of the votemasters at the above site wear their politics
on their sleeve, so to speak, all have been scrupulous to present the
results of the polls as the come in "straight" within their
(spelled-out) methodology for maintaining their respective electoral
maps, and the resulting map is sometimes optimistic for Bush,
sometimes optimistic for Kerry, but always reflective of the actual
polling results.  (Because of differing methodologies -- whether, for
instance. to use only the latest poll or to average results from
mukltiple polls, otr whether to exclude _all_ "paid" polls -- on both
sides -- conducted on behalf of campaign organizations who ahve a p.r.
stake in the result -- the maps differs among themselves.)  There are
also a number of meta-analysis sites of which the best are: 

    http://synapse.princeton.edu/~sam/pollcalc.html 
        (Prof. Sam Wang) 
    http://www.econ.umn.edu/~amoro/Research/presprobs.html
        (Prof. Andrea Moro) 

The identities of the maintainers of some of the sites have been
something of a mystery, but today, the maintainer of
electoral-vote.com, who has maintained his anonymity for all this
time, "came out," and -- it was certainly a surprise to me -- he is
the "grandfather" of Linux!  Here is his self introduction: 


The Votemaster FAQ

Many people have asked who am I, what my qualifications are, and why
am I doing this. People have speculated that I am a Clinton
administration official, a bored retired statistician and more.
Welcome to the Votemaster FAQ. Who are You?

My name is Andrew Tanenbaum. I am one of the 7 million U.S. citizens
living abroad. I am a professor of computer science at the Vrije
Universiteit in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Most of you have never
heard of me but in an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny corner of the universe I
have done enough stuff that Google has somehow managed to dig up
10,000 pages referring to me.

When I am not collecting data, analyzing it, or blogging, my day job
is doing the kind of stuff professors at major research universities
normally do. The best part is working with young people, especially my
graduate students.

To answer the question of why I am in The Netherlands, my lovely wife
is Dutch and long ago we decided that she couldn't do her kind of work
in the U.S. whereas I could work anywhere. I visit the U.S. several
times a year and am thoroughly familiar what is going on there. I also
read the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington
Post on-line every day, as well as numerous political websites and
blogs.

I grew up in Westchester County, just north of New York City, a
Republican bastion and then the 5th wealthiest county in the country.
My parents were staunch Republicans. They liked Ike. I went to M.I.T.
and then got a Ph.D. from the University of California. 


What are Your Qualifications?

Here are my qualifications in four key areas. First, I know a lot
about politics. I cut my political teeth in California on the 1968
presidential election. I was also a lobbyist for the Sierra Club,
buttonholing California state senators and assemblymen, trying to get
them to vote for a bill that would protect San Francisco Bay. The bill
was enacted into the law that created the BCDC and saved the Bay. I am
proud of my contribution.

Now fast forward to 2004. The Democratic Party regards the 7 million
overseas Americans as the 51st state and allows them to send delegates
to the DNC. I joined Democrats Abroad (DA) and tried to become a
delegate. DA uses the famous Iowa caucus system to choose its
delegates. I cleared the first hurdle and was elected as a delegate to
the World Democrats Abroad caucus in Edinburgh this past March. Nearly
200 elected delegates from as far away as Australia came (at their own
expense) for a three-day caucus. We began by pledging allegiance to a
huge American flag in the hall. Then we went on to write our platform,
elect delegates to the DNC, and make plans for the coming months.
Unfortunately, DA gets to send only 9 delegates to the DNC (vs. 96 for
Virginia, which has fewer people than DA), so I didn't make it to
Boston, but I did learn a lot about politics at the caucus.

Second, I know a fair amount about statistics. Although I majored in
physics, I took quite a few math and statistics courses as an
undergraduate and in grad school. I understand polling well.

Third I know a lot about computers and the Web. I can write fairly
complex software. I wrote MINIX, the precursor to Linux, for example.
I also have experience designing Websites, for example, that of the
Computer Science Dept. at my university.

Fourth, I am an experienced writer. I have written five books, which
have gone through a total of 14 editions and been translated into 22
languages. I have also published well over 100 articles in scholarly
journals and conferences. Furthermore, I wrote a humorous/satirical
travel book (vaguely similar in tone to those of Paul Theroux), but
have never quite got around to finding a publisher. Why Did You Do
This?

In a nutshell, because living abroad I know first hand what the world
thinks of America and it is not a pretty picture at the moment. I want
people to think of America as the land of freedom and democracy, not
the land of arrogance and blind revenge. I want to be proud of America
again. The U.S. media do a spectacularly bad job of informing
Americans about what is going on in rest of the world. After Sept. 11,
the U.S. could do no wrong. The entire world was on America's side.
The invasion of Afghanistan was seen as completely justified. After
all, the Al-Qaida leadership had to be decapitated. No one questioned
that.

But Iraq was a completely different matter. Bush, Cheney, and Powell
said they had conclusive proof that Saddam had WMD and could attack at
any instant. The rest of the world wanted to see the proof. No proof
was forthcoming. The answer was "trust us." We now know there were no
WMD. There weren't even factories or labs to produce them. Saddam was
an evil dictator with evil fantasies but he was no threat to America.
Yet former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said that the planning to
invade Iraq began the day Bush was inaugurated. The administration
simply misused the horror of Sept. 11 as a convenient excuse for doing
something that was already in the works.

Let me tell you a short story. When I was in elementary school, the
school was plagued by a bully. He was the biggest, strongest kid
around and would beat up anyone he didn't like. We were all
exceedingly polite to his face, but hated his guts behind his back.
One day he was chasing some poor kid and he tripped and skidded a
considerable distance, scraping his face on the rough asphalt of the
playground. He was bleeding and in pain, screaming for help. But
nobody came to help him. We all just walked away. George Bush is the
world's playground bully. The world sees him--and by inference,
America--as arrogant, self-centered, and mean. I spoke to Americans
from dozens of countries at the DA caucus. Everyone told the same
story--the world hates America. When talking to foreigners, I can tell
them about the Bill of Rights or freedom or World War II, or whatever
I want, but all they see is this big, stupid, arrogant, playground
bully and a stolen election in Florida last time. I think America
deserves better. I want America to be respected in the world again,
and John Kerry can restore the respect America deserves.

Don't believe me that the world hates us? The Guardian, one of
Britain's most respected newspapers, ran a column by Charlie Brooker
last week ending with this paragaph: "On November 2, the entire
civilised world will be praying, praying Bush loses. And Sod's law
dictates he'll probably win, thereby disproving the existence of God
once and for all. The world will endure four more years of idiocy,
arrogance and unwarranted bloodshed ..." Then it gets so bad that I
refuse to quote it. Maybe Brooker is a nut and maybe it was a joke,
but the fact that a serious newspaper would publish this piece shows
how deep the hatred of George Bush runs. And this comes from our
closest ally. Imagine what people in Spain or Indonesia or the Arab
world think.

Now you might be thinking: Who the hell cares if America is the
world's pariah, along with, say, North Korea and Zimbabwe? Well, I
care, for one, and I think most Americans want to be respected for
being a democracy rather than simply being feared because we have more
nuclear weapons than anybody else. You can't make the world love you
by running commercials full of snarling wolves on worldwide TV.

But there are some practical matters to consider as well. If you look
at British and Canadian publications, such as The BBC, The Guardian,
The Economist, and The Globe and Mail, you get a picture not colored
by partisan electoral considerations. You sometimes wonder if they are
reporting the same war as the U.S. media. The situation in Iraq has
deteriorated very badly. Over 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died in the
war, mostly women and children. Well over 1000 American soldiers--many
of them just kids who signed up for the National Guard and never
expected to go to war--have been killed there and thousands more have
been maimed for life. Americans are being killed daily in increasing
numbers and unless there is a radical change, this will go on for
years. Reenlistment rates are way down and manpower needs are way up.
With a President Kerry, there is hope that other countries might
contribute serious numbers of troops to help stabilize Iraq. With a
second Bush administration they will just say: "You broke it, you fix
it."

If other countries won't help out, Bush is going to be faced with an
unpleasant choice: accept another Vietnam-type quagmire lasting for
years or reinstitute the draft. There is no way we can win in Iraq
with current troop levels. Something has to change. More of the same
won't work. And it is an open secret that after the election, Bush is
going to ask Congress for another $70 billion down payment on Iraq.
Who is going to pay for it? We are.

In addition, the U.S. needs the help of other countries to gather
intelligence about terrorists, cut off their funding, and track them
down. Trouble is, when the playground bully comes asking for help,
everyone just walks away. A new president who shows respect for the
world instead of arrogance will get a lot more help. And we need help,
believe me. So Why a Website?

The original goal was to help register overseas voters. The banner ads
I ran until October were linked to several different voter
registration websites. They were my idea and ran free of charge.
Thousands upon thousands of new overseas voters registered, most of
whom are confronted daily by what people in other countries think of
the U.S. A second goal was to present the polling data honestly and
without spin. The media seem obsessed with the national polls, but it
is the electoral college that matters. The cartoons are largely
anti-Bush, but the data are honest. If you want to see an example of a
site with a highly partisan main page, go to electionprojection.com.
But despite the pro-Bush slant, I believe his numbers are also honest.
In fact, there have been times when I showed Bush slightly ahead and
he showed Kerry slightly ahead. He is currently getting about 100,000
visitors a day; I am currently getting about 650,000 visitors a day. I
hope the Bush:Kerry vote is in the same proportion. Who is Behind This
Website?

Me. Just me. To make it crystal clear, this Website is my personal
project. I paid for it myself and did all the work myself except as
noted in the Acknowledgements section on the Welcome page. It is
hosted at HostRocket.com, a commercial Web hosting company in upstate
New York, and I paid their standard commercial rate. The Democratic
Party and Democrats Abroad didn't even know about me. In fact, unless
they happen to see this page, they probably still don't know. No 527
or other group had anything to do with it at all.

The opinions expressed here are my own. This site is now one of the
top 1000 Websites in the world, thanks to you, my loyal visitors.
Consequently, many people want to run ads on the site. I could have
made thousands of dollars. But I didn't want to be beholden to anyone,
so I decided not to have any ads after overseas voter registration
closed. All in all, the site has cost me about $3000. I have no
regrets.

The donations were spent on advertising the site on about 90 blogs and
the websites of about 30 college newspapers in 14 swinging states as
listed on the Donations page. Thank you so much for helping spread the
word. What Next?

Win or lose, I am not likely to move back to the U.S. in the coming
year. Nor will I become a professional blogger. After the election
postmortems are finished later this week, I will keep the Website
alive until 2008 so political scientists can analyze the data, but my
own focus will go back to my research, currently on making computers
more secure. I think there is plenty of work to do there.

Many people have told me that if [insert name of candidate] wins or
there is a draft, they are going to leave the country. If you really
mean it and are interested in getting a Masters degree in Computer
Systems, you might consider a Masters program I am running. It focuses
on operating systems, networks, distributed computing, parallel
computing, grids, multiagent systems and other systems areas.
Knowledgeable observers consider my group to be one of the top three
systems groups in Europe. The program is entirely in English and we
have students from all over the world. It is also relatively cheap as
Masters programs go. Tuition is about $1800 per year for residents of
the European Union and about $6000 per year for everyone else. Why is
it so cheap? Because taxes are high here (the top rate is 52%) and
education is subsidized by the government. Republicans and Democrats
are equally welcome, provided they are smart and work hard. Admission
is competitive.

Last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank all my loyal
readers for sticking with me. I have received thousands and thousands
of e-mails, most of which I have already read and the rest of which I
will read after the election. The best ones were the large number from
Republicans saying: "We're going to vote for different candidates, but
I appreciate your candor and honesty." Thank you.

I am Andrew Tanenbaum and I approved this message.

 ><http://www.electoral-vote.com/info/votemaster-faq.html> 

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