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7 November 2006

Election Day

As everyone must know (unless you are lucky enough to not own a television), today is Election Day in the US. I always think of analyzing elections (and pre-election polling) as the quintessential statistical problem in political science, so I'm sure that many of us are eagerly waiting to get our hands of the results. Recent elections in the U.S. have been somewhat controversial, to say the least, which is probably bad for the country but unquestionably good for the discipline (see the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project for one example), and my guess is that this election will continue the trend. Law professor Rick Hasen of electionlawblog.org sets the threat level for post-election litigation at orange; anyone looking for an interesting applied statistics project would be well advised to check out his site in the coming weeks. In the meantime, the Mystery Pollster (Mark Blumenthal) has an interesting post on the exit polling strategy for today's election; apparently we shouldn't expect preliminary and incomplete results to be leaked until 5pm this year.

Posted by Mike Kellermann at 12:36 PM