The US Mapped by Population

..and electoral results looks like this.



Via Crooked Timber

Say NO to ID cards: taking it back to the shop

The Washington Post reports on the use of monster databases to record customers who return or exchange goods they find unsatisfactory, and to refuse returns automatically to people a computer decides do it too often. This is just another example of a worrying trend - using industrial-strength data mining and surveillance systems for trivial purposes, like that Spanish nightclub whose members had RFID chips implanted in their bodies to pay for drinks automatically.

The thing is, once you build the monster database, it gets much harder to prevent it being used for more serious and nasty purpose. If you build it, they will come. Reading down the article, we find a case of a website offering information on patients who have filed malpractice lawsuits against doctors. The purpose was to allow doctors to turn away patients they thought might be likely to sue. Quite a bit more serious.

World's No.1 Market Overhang

Brad DeLong reports on a Federal Reserve research paper by Matthew Higgins and Thomas Klitgaard on the way world central banks have been building up foreign exchange reserves. Up to this year, the total holdings of foreign currency assets in central banks have almost doubled since 1995. Now, there are a couple of obvious market moving factors. One is the traumatic experience of the mid-90s financial crises. Another has been the Japanese struggle to keep the yen from appreciating. A factor some years ago was a major switch from gold to currencies and securities (remember Gordon Brown selling off 300 tonnes of the stuff?), driven by the falling price of gold. With the gold surge of the last few years, this one has had its day. The big story, though, has been the combination of the US trade deficit and the various Asian currencies' links to the dollar.

This has caused heavy Asian central bank intervention to support the dollar, effectively recycling the outflow of greenbacks into US assets. This led to the second linkage, between the intervention and the US government budget. Now, the most economic way of holding dollar reserves is to buy US Government debt, treasury bills. This is because they pay interest but can be liquidated at any time. So, the central bank intervention ends up by financing the US government deficit. Higgins and Klitgaard:

"Indeed, data from the Bank for International Settlements show that at end-2003, central bank holdings of dollar assets, at roughly $2.1 trillion, were equivalent to more than half of marketable Treasury debt outstanding.


According to the authors, the central bank reserve purchases have compensated for a decline in foreign private purchases of U.S. assets. "Continued large U.S. current account deficits," Higgins and Klitgaard suggest, "raise the risk that foreign investors could eventually require some combination of lower U.S. asset prices, higher U.S. interest rates, and a weaker dollar as compensation for adding to their stock of claims on the United States.""

Now that is a polite way of saying that the plug could be pulled. What is happening is a frequent phenomenon in economics, where a particular situation is apparently stable although the market should theoretically adjust - until it happens. You might even call it a Keynesian sticky price. These days, it's more fashionable to talk about a "tipping point", but the idea is much the same. In fact, that's another frequent economic phenomenon - different and mutually hostile schools of thought whose theories explain the same phenomenon in much the same way. As well as a Keynes version of this, and a tipping point one, you could also see it in terms of games theory - neither actor in the game has an alternative strategy offering a better outcome, so neither will make a first move. If the Asian central banks pull their support, their current trade advantage will go, and they are also sitting on a huge pile of dollars that will lose value. If the US decides to let it slide, they lose out. So - no movement.

By the way, we should be wary of gloating in the event of a rapid devaluation of the dollar. If the dollar drops we - sterling and the eurozone - go up, with obvious consequences for exporters. Due to the fix between east Asia and the US, we've already experienced some of this. That would stop, but would probably be outweighed by the big story. Competitive devaluations? God, how 30s...

Voting Weirds: Florida

The Daily Kos is on the case again, and this time it's Florida that is having fun with maths. It appears, with the first sets of actual numbers in, that more people cast votes for Presidential candidates than voted at all. Not just that, but there is a mysterious surge in Republican votes in counties where as many as 75% of the registered voters are Democrats. Eh? You can get the data here: I feel your stats! (mystery voters), surge. A Florida Congressional candidate claims to have proof of computer hacking of the central tabulator and that he was "waiting for the FBI to show up." I hope that means he actually called them, but he is also quoted as saying some very odd stuff. According to a weirdo UFO site (rense.com, I'm not going to link them), he claims that "delinquents" were being trained in jail to manipulate the elections. My arse.

I'd be interested to know if he really said this and if he is quoted anywhere else, because I can well imagine a right-wing wingnut site trying to false flag the story.

There's loads more of this stuff available at the Kos, so I will simply advise readers to get it there. The blogosphere is doing a job of work on this, as does Greg Palast, here.

Wanna Buy An Atropine Fix?

Random Reality reports that thieves have stolen a decontamination vehicle from the London Ambulance Service, full of atropine sulphate syringes. As yer man points out, if they shoot that stuff up they could well die.

Yasser Arafat

Amid all the excitement, of course, serious illness seized someone else's president. Yasser Arafat collapsed in his Ramallah bunker and was, after some parley, transported to France for treatment. Something of the division this is likely to unleash was well pointed up by the political squabble that broke out over the question of whether or not he was alive. First of all, the media burst the story out that he was dead. Luxembourg's Prime Minister announced it to the European Council of Ministers, thus joining Jacques "The Hour of Europe" Poos on the very short list of memorable Luxembourg politicians. In fact the story originated on an Israeli TV station and was denied, first of all by Arafat's entourage and then (more convincingly) by his doctors. Apparently now he is in a "reversible coma". Whatever that may be.

It reminds me most of all of Monty Python's legendary Dead Parrot Sketch, in which a shopkeeper attempts to convince a customer that the parrot he's just bought is alive despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

"C: Look, I took the liberty of examining that parrot when I got it home, and I discovered the only reason that it had been sitting on its perch in the first place was that it had been NAILED there.

(pause)

O: Well, o'course it was nailed there! If I hadn't nailed that bird down, it would have nuzzled up to those bars, bent 'em apart with its beak, and VOOM! Feeweeweewee!

C: "VOOM"?!? Mate, this bird wouldn't "voom" if you put four million volts through it! 'E's bleedin' demised!

O: No no! 'E's pining!

C: 'E's not pinin'! 'E's passed on! This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker!

'E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed 'im to the perch 'e'd be pushing up the daisies!
'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off the twig!
'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!!

THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!!

Indeed. This may well be an Ex-Rais, even one with very rare Palestinian Khaki plumage. Don't assume, though, if he does die, that any positive movement will result. With very little of its former armed power or capability for patronage left, one of the few forces that drew Palestinians to the PLO rather than Hamas or Islamic Jihad was the prestige of Arafat. With him gone, the PLO and the PA are likely to fragment and drift into irrelevance. Ariel Sharon will probably think this wonderful, until the reality of a Palestine ruled by Hamas hits home.

We Don't Need no Stinking Recount!

Back in 2000, I was astonished to hear of the odd, Heath Robinsonesque voting machines of chad infamy. Being British, I was used to a voting system based on three P's - paper, pencil, public counting. I've never been very keen on e-voting for the simple reason that I don't see a benefit that outweighs the risks. What does it give us that the three P's don't? Part of the answer may now be emerging - really interesting post-election furores. Over at the Daily Kos, extremely odd figures have been reported from Franklin County, Ohio, where George Bush appears to have won by several times the total number of votes cast. Here are the numbers:

Franklin County, OH: Gahanna 1-B Precinct
638 TOTAL BALLOTS CAST

US Senator:
Fingerhut (D) - 167 votes
Voinovich (R) - 300 votes

US President:
Kerry (D) - 260 votes
Bush (R) - 4,258 votes

Remarkable, no? In all the President garnered something over 4 times the total votes cast. Even odder, this privilege was not extended to his party colleague Voinovich, who had to rub along with only 300 of his fellow citizens' agreement. It's also at least passing curious that a considerable number of voters seem not to have voted at all for a Senator. Then, there was this: USA Today

"Officials said UniLect Corp., the maker of the county's electronic voting system, told them that each storage unit could handle 10,500 votes, but the limit was actually 3,005 votes. Expecting the greater capacity, the county used only one unit during the early voting period. "If we had known, we would have had the units to handle the votes," said Sue Verdon, secretary of the county election board.

Officials said 3,005 early votes were stored, but 4,530 were lost.

Jack Gerbel, president and owner of Dublin, Calif.-based UniLect, said Thursday that the county's elections board was given incorrect information. There is no way to retrieve the missing data, he said. "That is the situation and it's definitely terrible," he said."

In this day and age, when nothing but nothing in information technology is cheaper than storage, they build voting machines with insufficient capacity. It is frankly ridiculous if not worse. Then, down in crucial Florida, there's worse.

"Broward County corrected a computer glitch Thursday that had miscounted thousands of absentee votes, instantly turning a slot-machine measure from loser to winner and reinforcing concerns about the accuracy of electronic election returns. The bug, discovered two years ago but never fixed, began subtracting votes after the absentee tally hit 32,500 -- a ceiling put in place by the software makers.

''Clearly it's a concern about the integrity of the voting system,'' said Broward County Mayor Ilene Lieberman, a canvassing board member who was overseeing the count. ``This glitch needs to be fixed immediately.''

The problem, which resulted in the shocking discovery of about 70,000 votes for Amendment 4, a measure allowing a referendum on Las Vegas-style slots at parimutuels in Miami-Dade and Broward, came to light just after midnight Wednesday when Broward's canvassing board shut down. Lieberman, Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes and several lawyers on both sides of the gambling amendment noticed votes suddenly disappearing on Amendment 4."

An interestingly similar problem, likely due to the use of a 16 bit counter for the votes. It seems obvious that the programmers of these systems gave little thought to what they were designing - they seem to have applied the sort of quality standard you might use for a video game terminal when a standard similar to those used for safety-critical applications was needed. Not only that, they apparently based the whole thing on a Windows environment running Microsoft Access. I don't believe in the Win/Mac geek wars, but I've seen enough Windows crashes and security breaches to know you would be insane to use it for anything that requires absolute reliability. Avionics? You're joking. Infrastructure? Not unless you like shit in your water. Banking? They've started putting it in ATMs now, but there's a damn good reason why the world's no. 1 commercial networking operation (VISA) doesn't. Voting?

After a little thought I came up with a list of conditions under which electronic voting would be acceptable in my view.

1. Independent analysis of the hardware prior to use.

2. All software must be open source, the source code to be provided in advance and analysed by a publicly appointed expert. Both it and the independent analyst's report must be open for challenge by the public pre-election.

3. A hard copy receipt must be issued.

4. Such a receipt must be visible to the voter before they proceed to final verification. Such a receipt must be marked at this point as verified or rejected.

5. All input to the machine must be logged electronically, by a physically independent device. That is to say, the voting device must consist of a primary voting machine whose input is mirrored on a second audit device not manufactured by the same company.

6. Both devices must provide a real time output readable by eye and displayed in the polling station, so that any discrepancy can be detected at once.

7. There must be no restriction on the number of votes recorded.

8. If it is desired to connect voting devices to a central count, both the main and audit devices must provide a simultaneous and automatic local record. Main and audit network connections must be independent of each other. At any sign of problems with the network connection, it must be disconnected and reported.

9. The initial declaration of the result can occur only after the main and audit totals have been compared. A final declaration can occur only after their comparision with the local record.

10. In the event of a discrepancy, the full audit, main and local records must be transferred to paper and cross-checked by hand. If this is not considered satisfactory, the paper receipts must be recounted.

Comments please.

Touching the limits of film

When Kevin MacDonald's film version of the tale of Joe Simpson, the British climber who barely survived an accident on the summit of Siula Grande, appeared I clearly went to see it at once. Unfortunately, Blogger fell down in a pool of its own credibility when I posted a monster review of the flick, and I never recovered the text. That was in January, 2004. Tonight Channel 4 re-screened it, so here goes.

In 1985, two British climbers set out for that Andean peak, in a corner of Peru two days' march from the nearest road. They had made a specialisation of climbing alpine style, that is with a minimum of support and kit. On this occasion, perhaps, they took this style a little far. Climbers consider these distinctions to be ideologically, vitally crucial. But in this case it could have been too much. They put their base camp into the hands of a random backpacker, "Richard", who they happened to meet. He had no knowledge of mountains or of any kind of emergency, and is perhaps the most interesting character in the whole story. Although they successfully reached the summit, the weather worsened fast on the way, and they ran out of cooking fuel and therefore water. The margin of safety was in fact almost gone by the time they arrived - in Simpson's words, because they were young and wanted to climb the world.

It was on the descent that the crisis gripped. Simpson fell and wrecked a leg. His comrade, though, began to lower him on a rope down the mountain. Later that night, Simpson slid over a cliff. His weight gradually dragged his comrade downhill. He struggled to prusik back up the rope, but finally dropped one of his cords and was forced to stop. Unable to hear his cries for help, his comrade struggled on the dark and freezelashed rockside with his conscience. And then he cut the rope. Simpson plummeted, and then burst through a snow roof into even more depth, before crashing onto a ledge in a monster crevasse. At the bottom of the crevasse, though, Simpson discovered a way out. He struggled over an insect immensity of glacier crevasses and razor rocks towards the hoped-for camp. Meanwhile his partner returned, exhausted and bathing in a stream, compulsively, as rape victims are said to. Richard says, smiling oddly, that he spent the intervening time wondering which of them he hoped was dead.

But he wasn't. Fighting geography, cold, thirst, hunger, exhaustion, injury, loss of blood and looming madness, Simpson was still moving towards them. Finally he staggered into the camp latrine, yelling. Simon plunged out into the snowstorm to help. Richard watched. They had both survived. Whatever the horrific moral dilemma, he had been right to cut the rope before the only real test. Being right doesn't help much, though. The community of mountaineers in Britain was torn apart as some wanted to offer them a heroes' welcome and some considered Simona moral traitor. When Joe wrote an account of the accident, Touching the Void, the bloodletting only worsened.

Touching The Void is a blinding epochal masterpiece of film. Kevin MacDonald chose to reconstruct the climbing in the Alps with experts, whilst taking the lower level shots in Peru with the real men back on the spot for the first time. It is a technical tour de force. The rest is in the form of interviews, mugshot without background, with the men. It is austere within technical riches, like an Adolf Loos building. Getting away from form, though, a moral question presents itself. Yes, it was the right decision, but was it right? This is extreme cinema representing an extreme situation - the screaming white of the snow is so white that the 24 frames/second flicker is visible, breaking the technical limits of film - and the morality is equally strained. There was in 20s and 30s Germany a genre known as Bergfilm, that placed heroic dramas in a mountaineering theme. There is something vaguely fascist in that utter blankness and justification by heroism. When you go right out to the limits of reason, that danger exists.

Richard is interesting for that reason. He seems to represent the deadly normality that lets them win. I don't say that the people involved are or were fascists. I am only fearful of a certain aesthetic and mindset that justifies all by heroism.

Finally, there is a film that needs making that will be at least as interesting if not more. It is about what happened on their return, the politics of the furore aong climbers and the relations between survivors. It will be very different in location - pubs in Sheffield and interviews - but only one man can do it. Kevin MacDonald.

Action!

Whilst everyone was glued to the US election, our own politicians weren't idle. No. They gave the Children Bill its third reading, and no-one did anything about its proposed database of all children in the UK. The press, for example, were too busy yelling about whether or not you could really "go to jail for smacking your child". They also put out a draft of the Organised Crime Bill including a special clause just for Brian Haw, the pacifist protestor who's been camping in Parliament Square for the past three years - just for that one little pacifist, they are changing the law so they can get rid of him.

Fortunately, though, the internet hasn't been entirely quiet. Sign the online petition against ID cards, here.

"We, the undersigned residents of the United Kingdom, petition the Prime Minister and the government to immediately cease all further development of, and legislation for, national identity cards and the National Identity Register.

We believe the proposals constitute an attack on individual rights and freedoms. We believe they will lead to institutional discrimination and to unfair and unlawful denial of benefits and services. We believe the proposals will lead to an increase in state control and surveillance over the individual, and that they will create an unacceptable imposition on every citizen. We believe the proposals are unlawful under the principles of the European Convention on Human Rights that guarantee every person the fundamental right to privacy.

We believe the identity proposals will lead to an endemic loss of privacy and freedoms. We believe they will present dangers to marginalised, disenfranchised and disadvantaged people. We also believe that an identity scheme will imperil the relations between citizen and state.

Furthermore, we believe that even if these principled concerns had been fully addressed, that the government's proposals would still constitute an enormous waste of financial resources and would achieve little or no tangible benefits.

For these reasons we urge the government to fully abandon the proposals."

Details on petitioning Downing Street online are here.

Operation Clark County - Lessons Learned Briefing

So, what effect did the Guardian's Operation Clark County, its effort to swing the key district in the key state to John Kerry by getting readers to write to undecided voters, really have? According to Ian Katz's article on the 21st of October, 14,000 voters had been contacted by the time a distributed denial-of-service attack took out the project's website and forced an early termination of the effort. Here, we have the figures on how Ohio really voted. Well, at least in so far as the votes were accurately counted.

President/Vice President of the United States

George W. Bush/Dick Cheney, Republican
2,796,147 votes 51.01%
John F. Kerry/John Edwards, Democratic
2,659,664 votes 48.52%
Michael Badnarik/Richard V. Campagna, Other
14,331 votes 0.26%
Michael Anthony Peroutka/Chuck Baldwin, Other
11,614 votes 0.21%
David Keith Cobb/Patricia LaMarche, Green (Write-In)
24 votes 0.00%
Joe Schriner/Barbara A. Marlinski (Write-In)
14 votes 0.00%
Thomas F. Zych/Paula Marie Concepcion Zych Fullerton (Write-In)
5 votes 0.00%
Richard A. Duncan/Robert C. Culbertson (Write-in)
5 votes 0.00%
John Thompson Parker/Teresa Gutierrez (Write-In)
0 votes 0.00%
James Harris/Margaret Trowe (Write-In)
0 votes 0.00%

Right, so that's a margin of 136,483 for Bush. In fact, the Guardian's intervention was worth less than that of the Badnarik campaign. Even if we make some fairly heroic assumptions - say, that each recipient told 3 other voters and all of them were switched Republican - that would suggest a maximum Grauniad factor of 56,000.
But what about Clark itself? Well, the Bush margin in Clark was some 1,620 votes, well within the possible Guardian margin. Now Ohio broke 51% - 48% for Bush, identical figures to those for the US as a whole, so it's fair to say the paper can't be blamed on that score. But Clark was even closer, 51-49. That puts Kerry marginally higher in the Gaurdina target area.

Laughter!

Matthew Yglesias has a proposed solution to all that polarisation:



Charles Peters of the
Washington Monthly provides the following useful information:

"Republicans are way freakier, probably because they are more repressed," one Manhattan sex worker told New York magazine after the recent GOP convention. Another, a dominatrix, said: "It always surprises me how many of my clients are not just Republicans but Bush supporters. I think, 'You want me to force you down on your knees when you're in a pink tutu.'" Who do you think would look best in a pink tutu? Karl Rove? Rummy? Wolfowitz?

Well, in Condi Rice they probably have their own in-house capability.

What's the difference between John Kerry and Adolf Hitler? Hitler at least tried to finish the race....joke reprocessed from one here.

The Guardian's Austin....

Polarisation?

Get this read. Thomas Friedman in the New York Times:

"At one level this election was about nothing. None of the real problems facing the nation were really discussed. But at another level, without warning, it actually became about everything. Partly that happened because so many Supreme Court seats are at stake, and partly because Mr. Bush's base is pushing so hard to legislate social issues and extend the boundaries of religion that it felt as if we were rewriting the Constitution, not electing a president. I felt as if I registered to vote, but when I showed up the Constitutional Convention broke out.

The election results reaffirmed that. Despite an utterly incompetent war performance in Iraq and a stagnant economy, Mr. Bush held onto the same basic core of states that he won four years ago - as if nothing had happened. It seemed as if people were not voting on his performance. It seemed as if they were voting for what team they were on.

This was not an election. This was station identification. I'd bet anything that if the election ballots hadn't had the names Bush and Kerry on them but simply asked instead, "Do you watch Fox TV or read The New York Times?" the Electoral College would have broken the exact same way.

My problem with the Christian fundamentalists supporting Mr. Bush is not their spiritual energy or the fact that I am of a different faith. It is the way in which he and they have used that religious energy to promote divisions and intolerance at home and abroad. I respect that moral energy, but wish that Democrats could find a way to tap it for different ends."

Via Laura Rozen.

Into a world of consequences

I suppose it's time for a WHAT IT ALL MEANS post, so let's have it.

The election tells us several things. First, and one I've blogged before, is that triangulation, third ways and the rest of the Blair/Clinton consensus are dead. The idea is that you identify the two (left/right) positions on an issue and define yourself in opposition to both of them, under a banner like "moderate" or "centrist" (but emphatically not "compromise"). Supposedly, you can then lock up the supporters of both alternatives in their own little ghettoes and secure the support of a majority in the centre. It's an idea with plenty of history - Macaulay remarked that Henry VIII "on the same day beheaded Papists and burned Hot Gospellers, for their divergence from his one central and artificial compromise", and supposedly the way to succeed in the Foreign Office's recruitment process is to buy a pipe, puff on it through the seminar, and then sum up with a "balanced appraisal of the consensus". But - and I've said it before, here - as a political operations manual it's dead.

The reason is that appealing to a centrist majority only works if the majority really is centrist. Look at the election map - doesn't look terribly amenable to compromise, does it? Look at the figures - the focus on so-called "values". These are things people consider to be of identity importance. Principles. You can't be a moderate neo-conservative, and if there's one thing the Republicans showed this time out it's that they understand and embrace and enjoy the era of polarisation we are living in. If you'll excuse self-quoting, in November last year I posted following:

"The French presidential elections last year were a fine example - the centre ground simply shrank away from under Lionel Jospin's feet, moving out to its ideological camps on both sides of him. Jospin seemed untough and lacking in clear values. In the foreseeable future, elections will be won by building out from the centre. We need to consider how to use the polarisation to mobilise our side, to play them at their game."

Some things in that direction worked. The mammoth voter mobilisation, for example. But the campaign strategy didn't take into account the reality of a polarised political culture.

One of the Great Triangulators of the 1990s, Tony Blair, can hardly be particularly pleased with this result. He couldn't have been, whatever the result, because his triangle is breaking down. Had John Kerry won, it would have been an embarrassment for Tony Blair, but the pressure from Washington to support the War and pull away from Europe, to dump multilateral institutions - in a word, the polarisation - would have let up. Blair would have been back in his old model of triangulating between a basically friendly Europe and America, and would have a valuable opportunity to dispose of some toxic waste. But now, the pressure will be back on with a vengeance. Blair tends to speak of Britain as a bridge between the US and Europe, but the position of a bridge attached to two piers moving apart from each other is highly unenviable. If you like, you can think of that metaphorical bridge as being vaguely triangular, the US and Europe being the two ends and Blair being - hey! - the keystone in the arch. And triangulation cannot co-exist with polarisation.

MARGIN OF Oh fuck it

He's given up. Called the White House and said "the country is divided enough". Look, these aren't nice people who care about that. They are revolutionaries. They want your country divided, so they can define the other half as the enemy. That's what they do. The Nation vs the Other. The Leader and the Mass.


As one of the commenters at Kevin Drum's put it:

"Gracious in defeat? You think this is fucking badminton?"

MARGIN OF ERROR: When all around are losing theirs

Keep your heads. I can't stand some of the nonsense about suicide waves, emigration and blaming gays that is circulating around some otherwise good blogs. MyDD gives the details.
In Ohio, there's a Bush lead of 138,866, but anywhere between 100,000 and 250,000 provisional, absentee and overseas ballots. In Iowa and New Mexico, there are also overhangs of these ballots. There's also a question around some areas that issued "emergency" ballots, either as an alternative to voting machines or to people in queues.

There's also concern about voting machine hacking: here. Kick and scream. You might want to look at this.


In other news, the boss of the UAE has died...I wonder where the new Bout hub will be?

MARGIN OF ERROR: What we know and what we don't know

It's down to Ohio, Iowa and New Mexico. White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card has just made a speech in which he stated as fact that Bush was winning Ohio by 140,000 votes and this was "statistically insurmountable". His source was Republican Ohio Secretary Kenneth Blackwell.

Meanwhile, Blackwell's office informed UK journalists in Ohio that they had no figures for the number of provisional ballots. Funny that. Classic Karl Rove stuff, of course. Keep repeating it and they're bound to believe it. Some of Card's remarks sounded as if he was going to have Kerry sent to Guantanamo Bay, but agin you have to remember that this is bully politics.

What else? Apart from Count the goddamn votes!, we can say that the blogosphere showed pretty badly, me included. Blogs are basically a time medium, and this introduces a bias towards chasing the very latest report. You could blog depression but not suicide.

MARGIN OF ERROR: Pennsylvania called

Reuters supposedly calling Pennsylvania for Kerry. BBC figures put Kerry just shy of 57%, why this wasn't called earlier is bewildering. Anyway I've had enough. Want to sleep. I'm not even going to drink the rest of the Black Sheep Ale.

MARGIN OF ERROR: narrowing a tad

The BBC figures in Ohio and Pennsylvania are converging on the exit polls. Positions reversed in Ohio - Kerry now 54.3%. Pennsylvania now 68% - 31%. Perhaps that early exit poll was the truth? Kerry also pulling in front by a nose in Missouri.

Now up to 71% in Pennsylvania.

MARGIN OF ERROR: Bush gets a vote!

Now reporting that Bush might get one of the 4 Maine EVs. Most calls at the moment seem to be purely exit poll or hunch based.

More exies, here. Just opened a Black Sheep Ale, and seen another chunk of calls. Nebraska, North and South Dakota, Texas, Kansas go Bush. Well, shock me. New York and Rhode Island go Kerry. Shock me.

MARGIN OF ERROR: USA Today calls Ohio....

......for Kerry, 52%-48%. Figures based on an exit poll, here. Mind you, the BBC's data doesn't bear that out. New Hampshire looks like it's going Kerry if you accept results from 5% of the state. Mind you, that's what some of the other calls have been based on.

The Washington Monthly is now agreeing. It is reported that a Democrat lawsuit succeeded in getting polling extended, but the BBC now reports that the Ohio Sec of State is objecting to the deployment of more voting machines. 5-hour queues mentioned.