absentee ballot for overseas voter

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:

Link name Description
Data in Excel format Who conducted each state poll and when
Data in Battleground states Who is strong, weak, and barely ahead in which state
Polling data, Key All polls since Sept with an explanation
Previous report Link to yesterday's page
Next report Link to tomorrow's page (except for today)
News Today's commentary by the votemaster

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


Menu item Description Category
Welcome This page Nonpartisan
FAQ Frequently Asked Questions Nonpartisan
Donations If you like this site and would like to help out Nonpartisan
Electoral college Everything you ever wanted to know about the electoral college Nonpartisan

Electoral college graph Graph of Kerry vs. Bush since May 24 Nonpartisan
Comparison of pollsters Does the poll depend on the pollster? Nonpartisan
Cartograms Daily map with state areas proportional electoral votes Nonpartisan
Movie Animation of the daily U.S. map Nonpartisan

State poll graphs State polls shown as graphs Nonpartisan
State poll graphs State polls shown as tables Nonpartisan
EVs as bar charts One bar chart per day showing electoral votes Nonpartisan
More data Additional data about this and previous elections Nonpartisan

Political humor Cartoons and jokes about politics Pro-Kerry   
Political websites Links to many political websites Pro-Kerry   
Articles and books Links to articles and books about politics and the election Mixed
Kerry and Bush records What has Bush accomplished? What did Kerry vote for? Mixed

RSS feed How to receive this website as an RSS feed Nonpartisan
Enhancements Icons, Web services interface Nonpartisan
Posters Some posters about this site you can hang up Nonpartisan

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.

Back to the main page.