It's the most...wonderful...time...of the year.  That is, the time when the data for the 2008 elections finally comes in.  There's more...

Via Steve Benen, Politico is reporting that the RNC will launch an in-house think tank to get its policy groove back:

The think tank will be called the Center for Republican Renewal, and it has been mentioned as part of RNC Chairman Mike Duncan's platform for reelection, but was begun shortly after the election as a new RNC office, separate from the campaign, a Republican official said.

Though Washington has many conservative think tanks, many inside the party and the conservative movement viewed November's failures as, in part, a product of stale ideas, and like the Democrats after 2000, some in the GOP have called for a revival of the conservative intellectual infrastructure.

Read more...

Portfolio, oddly enough, has a good interview with David Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager; it's a good backgrounder and has some interesting thoughts.  Worth checking out.

Democracies use elections to transfer power from one regime to the next (in other locales they have different methodologies to promote regime change). Elections are only viable when the electorate (you, me) believe the reported results are accurate. Of course, American history is full of stories where various officials and powerful persons attempt (sometimes successfully) to manipulate the outcomes of elections. Another source of error in the electoral process is random chance. People, including election officials, make honest mistakes. Many have suggested that computers should be used more extensively in the election process to minimize the number of mistakes made. Unfortunately, people program the computers and anyone reading this page knows well the peril of computer glitches.

Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold) manufacture custom terminals for elections. They handle the data collection (voting) and voting results (addition). At first blush, this seems like an ideal solution to the problems of hanging chads and paper ballotts. Unfortunately, the software these computers use to count and tabulate the results are proprietary. As voters, we must "trust" Premier to build reliable machines. Of course, election officials run tests on these machines, but it's difficult to design a comprehensive test for the machine without knowing how it operates internally.

After reading this, I must confess that I do NOT trust these machines. The computers "lost" 197 ballotts in a single county in CA. It appears to be an honest mistake, not intentional fraud. But, the implications of this error are enormous. Although I love statistics, election results should NOT include a margin of error above zero. In practice I realize that this is nearly impossible to achive, but imagine a scenario where half of the counties in the nation "may" have "lost" upwards of 200 ballotts. In a tight election, the official returns would become meaningless. The election of 2000 could become an example of good governance by comparison.

I am planning on writing my congressional representatives about this. Personally, I want the government to require ALL computer systems used in elections to run exclusively on open-soure software. If I can not see the source code with my own four-eyes, I am unable to determine the veracity of election returns. The transition to computer based elections is an opportunity to increase transparency in the process, not stifle it.

-pluribus

Hat-Tip to the guys at RedState.

This is the kind of toy that could entertain me for days. It's a map of America, with red and blue pieces for each state!  Everyone should buy one now.

DD

Normally, we like to provide our own analysis, but there is absolutely nothing we can add to this.

Before we start making ridiculous generalizations about black people, it helps to do a little research.

DD

Normally, we like to provide our own analysis, but there is absolutely nothing we can add to this.

Before we start making ridiculous generalizations about black people, it helps to do a little research.

DD

In the Arkansas ballot initiative to ban gay adoption, 58% of those voting for the ban were white, while 42% were black.

I'm sure that we'll see Andrew Sullivan and others write about how this is due to lingering white reliance on uneducated church leaders and blatant homophobia in indie rock.

DD

I've always been a fan of Chuck Todd, going back to when he was on Hotline TV with John Mercurio. Unlike most political journalists, Todd really got heavily into numbers and data when he was making his prognostications. So, take a look at this video, and we'll follow along with something:

There's more.

In a rare occurence, Nate Silver writes something today that is, at a minimum, imprecise.  Explaining why he's optimistic about an Obama victory, he says that "McCain is pushing back against the fact that Obama is banking votes every day with a substantial national lead."  This is not the only time I've seen this argument, so I don't mean to pick on the 538 crew.  But in my view, this really oversimplifies the difference between early and regular voters.