News from the Votemaster

New Design Launched Today

If you have been here before, you will probably notice the design has been changed. After 8 years almost to the day (and 103 million visits), it was time for a bit more modern look. In addition to the new user interface, a number of the underlying pages have changed as well. Even if you are a long-time visitor, it is suggested that you click on each of the items on the new menu, which is now to the left of the map. Items 3, 4, and 5 are especially interesting.

The Senate races now have their own home page, reachable by clicking on "Senate" on the blue bar. This page also has a menu with various goodies. Check them out. From any page on the site, you can get back to the main page by clicking on "electoral-vote.com" in the red bar on top of the page.

Another change is that the old site was optimized for windows of 1024px, whereas the new one is optimized for 1152px. From the statistics, I know that > 90% of the visitors have at least 1152px, often much more. Adding this new real estate made it possible to put the menu on the left and reduce the depth of the top part of the page. Some sites are even more aggressive about size. For example, the NY Times requires 1188px to prevent a horizontal scroll bar and Salon.com requires a whopping 1400px to view the main page, so 1152px seemed like a small step. For people with 1024 x 768 monitors, you can do one of these things:

• Nothing-- then you lose the legend and ads but no content
• Type CTRL -/CMD - to reduce the page size (and font)
• Click on the Smartphone icon on the right to get a simplified page intended for PDAs and smartphones.

To the extent this is an inconvenience to a small number of people, I do apologize.

Designing a Website for a very wide variety of platforms and monitors is much harder than you might think. There are no doubt errors in this one. If you find one, please report it. Thanks.

If you have a blog or Website and would like a little icon that give your visitors the up-to-date scores for the electoral college and Senate, all you have to do is visit the Icons for bloggers page and copy and paste a few lines of HTML onto your blog or Website. From then until November, your visitors will see the current scores when they visit you, with no additional work on your part. And of course, it is free and there are no ads on the icon.

The "Permalink" buttons are gone. To link to a specific news item, click on the headline and then copy and paste the URL that appears in the address window. This is similar to other news sites.

App for iPhone and iPad Available

There is an app for this site that runs on the iPhone and iPad. To get it, click on the icon of the iPhone in the "social media" box below and to the right of the map. There are also Twitter and RSS buttons there. At the end of the blog there is a Share-It button for other sharing sites.

Texas Primary Is Today

Texas is primary today. It was delayed because under federal law, certain Southern states, including Texas, have to get permission from the Dept. of Justice before their redistricting maps are official. If recent history is any guide, Mitt Romney will get about 60-65% of the primary vote, even though he has no opponents.

One Texas race everyone is watching is the primary to nominate the GOP candidate to run for the seat of retiring senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. The establishment choice is Lt. Gov. David Dewhurt but there is a tea party candidate in the race as well, Ted Cruz. Finally, the former mayor of Dallas, Tom Leppert, is also running. Leppert is unlikely to win but he might draw enough votes to keep the other candidates below 50% and thus force a runoff. The Republican establishment is not looking forward to a one-on-one race between Dewhurst and Cruz, given what happened in Indiana 3 weeks ago, where a tea party candidate beat a six-term senator and turned a boring relection of a solid conservative Republican senator into a real horse race.