Who did you vote for in the U.S. Presidential Election?
 

Poll to follow.

With early voting underway, I thought it might be fun to start recording how we all ended up voting. We'll have to rely on the honor system for people to not participate in the poll if they didn't (or can't) vote.

Additional commentary on how voting went for you this year (long lines, challenges, bad machines, difficult paper ballots, etc...) would be great as well.

Oh sure. Steal my FOFC tracking poll's thunder!

:p

Shit that's a lot of candidates.

Only 5 on the ballot in Idaho.

I'm still undecided.

Seriously, there's a Boston Tea Party?

SI

I think they're Libertarians too hard core for the Libertarian Party

"The Boston Tea Party supports reducing the size, scope and power of government at all levels and on all issues, and opposes increasing the size, scope and power of government at any level, for any purpose."

There were only three parties listed on my ballot...Repub, Dem, and Lib.

It was very quick and easy for me. Was in and out in about 15 minutes, had the the choice of paper ballot or electronic voting, and I went electronic. Read the directions over really quickly, and it was very easy to understand and use.

I need to figure out what third party candidates are on the D.C. ballot.

How do you just randomly form a party and get on the ticket? Can I be put on the ticket as the "Imaginary Party" and its me and my couch cushion?

Do you need a certain amount of signatures on a petition or something?

I know that at Screen on the Green this summer (the original Superman, fwiw) there was a guy going around asking for signatures to petition for Ralph Nader to be on the D.C. ballot. For what its worth, I signed it. Not because of any support for Nader, but because I think there should be more than two choices.

just my .02 but I think an "I didnt vote" option would make this poll more interesting.

Each state has their own requirements to get on the ballot. That's why you don't see all of the tickets listed above on all ballots.

Some states are easier than others. Some states require you to pay a fee and register even if you just want to be a write-in candidate.

If flere wants me to do so, I'll add that on...

lets take a poll abouut it!

If you are not voting the Trout party, then blame yourself for four more years of troutless government!

That's a good idea - go for it! :D

Yep. Of course not all are on every state's ballot. For simplicity's sake I just listed the ones I found on wikipedia's article on the election.

Done

We have:

McCain/Palin
Obama/Biden
Nader/Gonzalez
McKinney/Clemente (labeled as "Statehood Green", rather than "Green")

"Statehood Green." *cough..suck-ups..cough*

Trout Part is neck-and-neck with McCain/Palin.

Trout's a better option.

She's a looker!

I didn't know there were so many socialist parties.

They should be aware that they probably that they are diluting the socialist vote.

Indeed. :) I noted that for the benefit of others making of me/DC.

It is particularly annoying because there is a "Statehood Green" party, but this is the "Green" candidate. I don't follow either, but I doubt the Green party campaigns on a platform of DC statehood. :) (which we have established I am not campaigning for and I'm not trying to derail this thread with talk of it)

I missed the September primaries, so all of the selections have pretty much been made for me. I didn't hit up the Presidential Primary, though.

Yeah, I would tear her up.

I voted for Pumpy's cousin Tanya

i voted for Pumpy's balls and Cringer's wife's boobies as the VP.

Obama is going to be pissed :)

It's Eugene V. Debs all over again!

Nice job on the Trout ticket - taking our two most extremists. I can't imagine what FOFC discussions would have been like the past few months if they had been here.

this poll confirms what I have been thinking for a while. McCain is gonna get killed

I think flere is trying to secretly sway the voting towards Obama/Biden. If you notice, that's the only ticket that has it's font in italics... ;)

You realize that just shows what YOU voted for, right? ;)

Sonofa.........

Can I get my "New to teh interwebs" badge?

In other news, Clay Aiken is gay apparently.

I'm shocked someone hasn't started a Jedi ticket yet.

Hah, you edited your post, how cute.

Where the hell is Webb and his damn reds?

Any word on what the margin of error is on the FOFC polling thread? I'd probably put the over/under at +/- 15%.

I don't think you can accurately make one because the poll is self-selecting. In "the real world", polls are based on the assumption that you are choosing people at random and that's why they're not bad as predictors.

Now, getting into the wayback machine and remembering my statistics class in college, I'll toss out the theory behind polls and why they're decently accurate but how you have outliers and all that. If you choose people blindly and choose a decently large enough sample, you'll get pretty accurate results- typically, something like +-3% and a 95% confidence interval is pretty much standard.

But there are a couple of "definitions" there to explain- one, large enough is actually kindof small, 3% MOE only takes about 1000 people. And then you hear the usual rhetoric of "well, it's just 1000 people- there are millions of voters; it's not accurate". Well, yes and no- an illustration and then a definition below show why that line of reasoning can be true but is usually just denial by whoever said it. If they're randomly chosen, then that thousand people can usually predict how the larger group will vote. It's kindof like, if you flip a coin 100 times, you know the odds are 50/50 but you won't get 50/50 every time you flip a coin 100 times. However, you'll get close to it almost every time.

And these ideas of "close to it" and "almost every time" are what polls are based on. The idea of a poll is not to correctly guess the percentage as that would take an insanely large sample size. Again, the issue of "you're just polling 1000 people to get the votes of millions". However, what something like 1050 random votes get you are a 95% chance to be within +-3 points of the result. That's not a bad statistical game- you can be really close (within 3 points) all but 5% of the time.

That other 5% of the time, tho, your sample is pretty badly not representative and is inaccurate- those are your outliers. Perhaps you randomly called a majority of GOP members when you're polling San Francisco or the only group of farmers in Kansas who vote Democrat. It can happen. However, with all the other polls out there in the Presidential race, you can see those pretty quickly because it looks different than the others.

In Presidential polls, things can be a bit skewed because pollsters have decided it's more accurate to weigh some groups more than others (i.e. they'll call 35% Dem, 30% GOP, and 35% Indep since that is what the registered voting makeup is). That makes it less random but more of an "educated guess", I guess. And, while one firm may be Dem leaning and another GOP leaning, and that may bias them slightly, what they really want is to be the most accurate so they can get the more lucrative contract next election.

SI

How can people say "I didn't vote" at this point, since election day hasn't happened yet? Are they not registered, are they planning to change their answer when they do vote, or is this poll only supposed to be for early voters?

My assumption is that they are not registered and/or they already know they aren't going to vote no matter what happens.

Just to be clear SI, I had no idea that anyone would bother going into that much detail over the sampling error margin of a message board poll. But kudos to you anyway. :D

They hate America.

Actually, I figured it needed to be pointed out since I've seen the "it's a poll, it's not accurate" post quite a few times in the McCain/Obama thread. And that drives me nuts- not it's not always accurate, but it is accurate a lot more often than not. Hell, I used to think that way, then had to work through the damn proofs that show otherwise ;)

SI

No, they just want to have the ability to bitch about everything when something goes wrong in politics while deflecting blame since they didn't vote for any of the politicians making the decision. :)

No, no, no. If they hated America, they'd vote Democrat. Get it straight. :D

I guess that means the margin of error is 11.76%.