Indistinguishable from Fraud

If I worked for Diebold and wanted to help republicans win, I wouldn't do something easily detectable like changing 2% of votes to be for my candidate or making some machines break down at 5pm to give the the working class a difficult time. Instead, I would work harder on usability for machines going to friendly districts.

With this scheme, blame for any election-tipping would mostly go to "user error" rather than poor design. Even better, the voters who committed the errors will mostly be democrats, which will make democrats look dumb once again.

I saw a UCSD student wearing a "Make cows, not war!" shirt from Cowparade Prague. It made me think of the phrase "guns and butter" from economics.

The LA Times had an article about the war between "Merry Christmas" and "Happy Holidays": This Season, Greetings Are at Issue. The article was followed by commentary, an editorial, and letters.

Virgin Mobile picked the right year for its "Chrismahanukwanzakah" ad campaign.

A presidential candidate could be elected with as a little as 21.8% of the popular vote by getting just over 50% of the votes in DC and each of 39 small states. This is true even when everyone votes and there are only two candidates. In other words, a candidate could lose with 78.2% of the popular vote by getting just under 50% in small states and 100% in large states.

The optimal set of states to take (the one that lets a candidate win with the smallest popular vote) is not the N states with the smallest population. It's also not the N states with the smallest value for (population/electors), which would be optimal if you could get exactly 270 electoral votes that way.

The optimal solution happens to get exactly 270 electoral votes. In this solution, the winner takes DC, the 37 smallest states, the 39th smallest state, and the 40th smallest state. (The winner takes Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, DC, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.)

Read on for my assumptions and algorithm.

Some ideas for political Halloween costumes:

• Bush supporter
• Flip-flopper: wear flip-flops instead of shoes, maybe wear a Kerry or Bush mask
• Battling green eye shades (with a partner)
• Poland
• Robert Acosta

Update 2004-10-30: Other people came up with funnier ideas for political Halloween costumes and illustrated them:

• thestranger.com: 2004's Scariest Halloween Costumes
• madblast: flash cartoon with political Halloween costumes

Some of Bush's mistakes:

Some of Kerry's mistakes:

The times refer to the Washington Post's Real stream, which I watched using Real Alternative and Gebest's Media Player Classic. Political Animal: Clip Contest, commenters on Daily Kos, and georgewbush.com caught some mistakes I might have missed otherwise. I copied some quotes from the MSNBC/FDCH transcript of the debate.

Steven Pinker, Listening Between the Lines:

In his grand jury testimony, Mr. Clinton expounded on the semantics of the present tense ("It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is") and of the words "alone," "cause" and, most notoriously, "sex."

Clinton's rebuttal to the Starr report:

Literally true statements cannot be the basis for a perjury prosecution, even if a witness intends to mislead the questioner. Likewise, answers to an inherently ambiguous question cannot constitute perjury.

A joke:

Have you ever touched Paula Jones or Monica Lewinsky?

It depends on your definition of "or".

Kerry has an impressive PageRank 8 while Bush only has PageRank 7, like me. (Via curious on IRC.)

Kerry also beats Bush in a search for kerry | bush and even in a search for president.