Spur of the moment voting

I voted today. Hooray!

I actually hadn’t planned on voting. I thought that I wasn’t registered to vote, but then I saw Nelson’s nifty I Voted Foursquare badge and got jealous. So I checked on the interweb and it turned out I was, in fact, registered to vote AND my polling place was less than one block from my apartment. So I got a nifty I Voted Foursquare badge as well.

My rent is too damn high

Also exciting: Jimmy McMillan, candidate for The Rent Is Too Damn High Party, was on my ballot. As high as my New York City rent is, and as much as I love handlebar mustaches, I will admit that I voted for a different gubernatorial candidate.

Hmmm, my rent is actually due today…I might be regretting my vote…

Meh, I’m sure you are who you say you are

I find it pretty crazy that a photo ID is not required. I just had to state my name and address after which they showed me my previously scanned signature (from the DMV) and then all I had to do was copy the signature directly below it. I guess if the two signatures look remotely similar then the trap door doesn’t open below you. My signature looks like two scribbles anyway so if someone wanted to impersonate me two years from now it probably wouldn’t be all that difficult.

Maybe they will be more daring than me and actually vote for The Rent Is Too Damn High Party…

1 Comment / Posted in: politics, Tech

For one minute, McCain won California

It was quite interesting to see all of the interactive election maps that news websites had created for last night’s election. I spent most of my night following CNN on tv at Nelson’s house while monitoring 4 or 5 other interactive maps on my laptop.

Of course I also had to follow the Fox News map. I didn’t notice any bias in their state projections throughout the night, except for one huge exception:

At about 7:50pm, just before the California polls closed, I loaded up the Fox News map. To my surprise California was colored red! Woah! 

I hovered over the state and John McCain’s name was also highlighted and checked! At this time last night, the only chance McCain had to win was some sort of a miracle. Something like, oh, him winning California…

However, even if McCain did win California in Fox News land, he still would have have come up short.

I took this screenshot since I knew it was probably an error and sure enough upon page reload it was back to uncalled.

Still funny though.

1 Comment / Posted in: politics

Vote, dammit!

The video told me to tell 5 people. That’s about the number of people that read my blog. Works out pretty well.

Seriously, register to vote, and then vote in November. Or vote by mail if you’re lazy like me.

5 Comments / Posted in: politics

More Intrade fun: election prediction map!

Intrade has launched a new feature for me to waste time with. They’ve opened up prediction trading markets for individual US states for the upcoming presidential election — and also provided this nifty map to visually translate how those predictions would correlate to electoral college votes.

For some reason the defualt view is the “Average” of electoral votes for each state based on the market values. This really doesn’t make much sense since you can’t split up electoral votes, so I prefer to view the “Leaning” view where votes per state ore given in full based on market values.

I’ve already noticed some significant shifts in just the past day. It’s pretty cool to follow.

OK, I’m wasting even more time writing about this.

No Comments / Posted in: Cool, politics

Latest Internet Guilty Pleasure: Intrade.com

Ask someone who they think will win an election and you might get a biased answer. Have them put money on it and you’re bound to get a more honest answer.

This is why I recently have started monitoring intrade.com, an online predictions market.

Here’s a look at today’s presidential prediction graphs. Looks like some activities at the Republican National Convention created a short spike tonight, but things quickly returned to previous trends after.

Of course you can expand graphs over weeks, months and years. It was very interesting to see how the Palin announcement last week effectively reversed DNC gains made the night before.

I’ll often keep these graphs open all day long, set to auto-refresh, and compare with current news events. It can be pretty interesting at times. (cough cough Google News mashup, anyone?). You can also follow a traditional stock ticker.

Of course you can also bid on or monitor important issues like the Emmy Awards or Britney Spears chances of entering rehab, but I tend to stick with politics.

How is betting on current events legal? It isn’t! Well, not in the US. This company is based in Dublin.

4 Comments / Posted in: politics