Electric Josh

So as of 9:00 at night there is essentially no information at all about who's winning the election, and in lieu of useful analysis the television is running puffball interviews with various campaign spokesmen. How is it that with 1% of the precincts reporting from West Virginia that 1,771 votes for Kerry and 1,779 for Bush means that Bush has been declared the winner? Something pretty interesting is happening there. Some kind of crazy statistical model? Can we hear about the model? People on the west coast are still voting, you know... [Note: This style of ranting could go on for quite a bit, so I'm going to stop.] So we're going to play cards until the Daily Show coverage starts, because that will be funny—gallows humor there if nothing else—and by then there might actually be some information to report. I'm guessing that it will also prove fun to see if a comedy show can describe statistics in a more mathematically useful way than real news networks. Random characters spewed to the screen wouldn't do much worse.
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Why Bush Won and Why Kerry Won, both written three days before the election. Compare with your favorite post-election analysis (and with The Onion's article from the day after the 2000 election, which isn't online) and see if you can tell the difference.
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