Welcome

About this Site

Welcome to Electoral Vote Predictor 2004, which tracks the electoral vote (EV) state by state. In 2000, Al Gore won the popular vote by over half a million votes but George Bush won the electoral vote by 5 votes and became president. Thus watching the electoral vote is more important than watching the national polls. This website is dedicated to tracking the electoral vote by examining the state-by-state polls. As new state polls are released, the maps, spreadsheets, tables, graphs, and movies will be updated. In the maps, the white states are essentially tossups and are subject to rapid fluctuations. The magic number needed to be elected is 270.

To the right of the map are several links, as follows:

Polling methodology and using polls is not as simple as you might think. The Polling methodology file explains polling and the methodology used here in detail. The site is updated once a day, generally by 7 a.m. EDT. For this reason, polls released during the course of a day will not show up until the next morning. Morning newspapers have the same timing cycle.

Before sending e-mail, PLEASE, PLEASE read the FAQ first. Your question may be answered there. Please DO NOT send e-mail announcing a new poll until you have checked the site the next morning. Getting 1000 e-mails about a poll I already know about is not so much fun.

I am a Kerry supporter. I am open about that. Despite my political preference, I have bent over backwards to be scrupulously honest about all the numbers, and have carefully designed the main page to be strictly nonpartisan. Only the third row of menu items below the map contains material that could be considered pro-Kerry (e.g., jokes about George Bush). If you are a Kerry supporter, an independent, a moderate Republican who is fed up with the President's fiscal and other policies or even a conservative Republican who feels betrayed and who has a sense of humor, you will probably enjoy them. If you want an election site that has a pro-Bush bias from beginning to end, including all over the main page, try www.electionprojection.com.

Site Map

Acknowledgments

The site is hosted at HostRocket.com. They have fast servers, redundant fiber-optic connections to the Internet, and a knowledgeable technical staff. I recommend them highly, especially for business applications where reliability and customer service are important.

The nice colored maps with the pop-up boxes is produced completely automatically from each new day's spreadsheet by code written by Eric Paulson of Viking Web Development. The code uses a library written by Walter Zorn.

I would like to thank Tim Bray, one of the co-inventors of XML and a popular blogist for introducing me to RSS feeds and helping me get a feed going. With today's information overload, feeds are fast becoming an excellent way to manage the flows.

I would also like to thank 'Grumpy' for producing the software that makes the bar charts, state poll graphs, daily electoral college graph and more. If Kerry wins, 'Grumpy' becomes 'Happy.'

R.J. Parsons provided lots of Excel expertise to make the spreadsheets have pretty colors that change automatically as the polls go up and down and other useful features.

Colleen Shannon produced the movie on the menu. Matt Massie produced the movies on the More data page.

Brad Barrett has helped me get his web analysis program webalizer running.

I would like to thank Calin Plesa for designing the favicon.ico icon.

The base cartogram was made by Justin Boyan and supplied by Mike at www.kerryedwardslinks.com.

Thanks to Kelly Marks for poster 1 and the people at SnapFood.com for poster 2.

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