Compare and Contrast
Kentucky Stomper Wants An Apology From Woman He Assaulted (VIDEO)
Virginia Thomas seeks apology from Anita Hill
I feel like there is a theme developing.
Call It A Comeback
I feel like there is a theme developing.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0gNF-xO8c[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyxUnQbVJZY[/youtube]
You know, it’s quite clear to me the state is screwed on November 3rd. It’s a question of more screwed or less screwed.
Illinois Democrats screw up pre-printed absentee applications.
The Sun-Times covers the campaigns’ view of early voting:
The Giannoulias campaign has composed a model that includes every voter in Illinois with a grade from zero to 100, a score of 100 meaning they are most likely to vote for Giannoulias.
So far, of the 150,000 Illinois voters who voted early as of Thursday morning, 54 percent of them scored 50 or above on that predictor, Rendina said.
Among those more intensely for Giannoulias or Kirk, the most-likely Giannoulias voters — those scoring 70-100, accounted for 47 percent of the early votes.
Those judged to be most likely to be Kirk supporters — scoring 0-30 — accounted for only 38 percent of early votes.
There is a lot of guessing involved there, Rendina admits. Not everyone will vote as predicted. The projections are based on past tallies of whether they have generally requested Democratic or Republican ballots.
On the Republican side, Illinois’ Republican Party has been out-performing every other state in America for making phone and in-person contacts with voters, said state GOP Chairman Pat Brady — 3.5 million since June; 110,000 on Saturday alone.
This is going to be very close. The modeling may seem complicated and such, but in reality it isn’t. It essentially asks people in surveys who they are supporting and then a series of voting behavioral questions. The data is then crunched–I imagine using similar methodology to Nate Silver by running simulations based on the likelihood of support for Alexi based on matching past behaviors to the survey data. The probability at the end then tells you the likelihood of a vote for the candidate.
It is far better than precinct level results because it focuses on individual voter behavior and not a geographic proxy. Where the potential weakness exists, it’s very similar to most statistical models. If the models assumptions and underlying data from surveys is not consistent with reality then you’ll get bad predictions. Overall though, the basic technique is relatively simple and should improve upon likely voter models in surveys since it takes behavioral cues as the most important predictor instead of respondent opinions of the moment.
This is usually how these things turn out. I’ll note that nearly the same results turned up when Matt Blunt, as Secretary of State, tried to investigate ‘massive voter fraud’ in Missouri. He identified a fairly high number of initial problems. It turned out then that his staff did not understand the property coding system in the City of Saint Louis and it came down to less than a dozen cases of potential fraud.
But Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman told TPMMuckraker that conservative groups have exaggerated the threat of voter fraud. He also said that their investigation revealed that there was no coordinated campaign to commit voter fraud. Freeman said that 43 of the cases involve felons who were ineligible to vote and four cases involve double voting.
The conservative group Minnesota Majority first alleged that 1,250 people, including over 800 felons, were illegally voting. But the vast majority of those claims didn’t pan out.
“They claimed in November 2009 to have 800 additional individuals who were illegal felon voters,” Freeman said. “When they summited names to us in late February 2010, it was down to 451. We have processed that 451, and more than half of them were either not felons or not on probation when they voted. The rest of them we investigated more fully, and today we reported that the remaining cases presented sufficient support to charge, so we charged them.”
The felon cases are interesting too because those are cases that cannot be caught at the precinct level, but at the registration level. That’s also true with double voting where the people aren’t pretending to be someone else, they are voting under the own name in two different places.
Voters with previous felonies are also irrelevant in Illinois since the law allows all, but those currently incarcerated to vote. Voting integrity projects wouldn’t have prevented any of the fraud cases in Minnesota. What would improve the issue is better list maintenance, though that is difficult.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqQJB8DR_Zo[/youtube]
Mark Kirk claims Phoenix the 2nd in the World in Kidnappings. There is no evidence for this, but there isn’t much evidence for anything he says:
Summing up: “Kidnapping capital” turns out to be a headline-grabbing label; no wonder it caught Dewhurst’s attention. Still, it’s incumbent on him — and news organizations bandying the No. 2 description — to check it out. So far, we’ve seen no evidence that it’s accurate, or even close.
Phoenix has experienced hundreds of kidnappings over the past few years. However, we couldn’t find reliable around-the-planet evidence to confirm that only Mexico City experiences more of them. In fact, experts advise that such rankings can’t be made based on available information. If they could, they speculate, other cities would prove to have more kidnappings than Arizona’s capital.
Punch line: Nothing confirms Phoenix as No. 2 in kidnappings worldwide. We’ll revisit this turf if compelling evidence surfaces, but for now Dewhurst’s statement is False.
Kirk claiming recent convictions of vote fraud, but as I pointed out, that was with absentee ballots which wouldn’t be helped by ‘voter integrity’ program.
Going back to this, Alexi said never which is not true either, but in recent years there hasn’t been more a handful of cases where people voted more than once and that was across state lines and in no way coordinated. Of course, monitors won’t stop that, good list maintenance would.
A reporter friend of mine always joked that the biggest thing you had to do as a reporter was listen as someone got themselves in trouble. Bob Delaney has lots of people listening. Rich has been all over this story. From a link Rich provides
St. Clair County Clerk Bob Delaney acknowledged Thursday that 1,297 military ballots were mailed out two weeks after a deadline set by federal law, including 223 absentee ballots sent out to troops overseas.
Delaney blamed the missed deadline on his decision to wait on an appellate court ruling on whether Constitution Party candidates may remain on the Nov. 2 ballot.
Delaney, a Democrat, said if he had mailed out the ballots before the court ruling had come down, putting the Constitution Party back on the ballot, “I would have had to redo the whole thing again” — at a cost of $2 per ballot, Delaney said.
“I thought it was the safe way to wait,” he said. “I was trying to be prudent. I was trying to be wise.”
You may have thought that, but that would make you an idiot. A really big one. As I pointed out yesterday, unless a court enjoined you from mailing the ballots, you didn’t have a choice. Complying with federal law on voting is not an optional activity. It’s never prudent to violate voting rights laws. It may cost you extra money if the Illinois Court had ruled in favor of the Constitution Party, but that’s the cost of being in the voting business.
Rich points the ISBE might not have entirely clean hands, but Delaney is the person primarily responsible and this would seem to me to be an offense that could easily get you removed from office.