Vote 2004 [Bush Wins]

If you think you should be voting today, you can cast your vote at BetaVote from any place in the world. The server is extremely slow but just as fast as waiting in a polling place. It’s interesting to look at tallies from around the world. Or you may want to express your vote in Technorati fashion for John Kerry or George Bush.

Blogs are reverberating the vote–and affecting the New York Stock Exchange. According to Yahoo News, “shares of defense, pharmaceutical, health care and medical technology companies led a reversal that sharply trimmed gains and moved major indexes lower at mid-afternoon after traders heard about the exit poll speculation” by bloggers. And right about the time that people started checking the veracity of those reports, blogs began vaporising under the load. The ones that collapsed often serve up dynamic pages. That is not smart if you want to handle more than 10 connections to the same page every minute. If you want the facts, you need to check with sites that can handle more than 2500 views an hour. Think wire services, NYT, WSJ.

“Apparently the blogs are saying that Kerry is ahead in one or two of the swing states and that’s why the market dipped,” said Lisa Hansen, head trader at Transamerica Investment Management.

As I went to sleep in Ireland, I marveled at the length of queues in Florida. Pensioners, students, moms and office workers don’t show up early, sacrifice lunch and queue for hours (even though it’s in the sun and in a place where Bush knows how to win the count) to support the status quo. I expect some interesting reading tomorrow.

Update 0330 Irish Time: In a phone call, mom says the local radio stations are predicting a Kerry win in Pennsylvania. This could indicate that more Goldbach brothers voted for change than I thought. There are six brothers who voted in Pennsylvania, some voted in the homes of friends. Most of the brothers' wives are terror-striken with Bush. That is, they think the only way out of terrorism is through the Bush camp. I hope they learn there’s another way.

Update 0630 Irish time: My Iowan cousins and the major news networks are giving Bush both Ohio and Florida. Both candidates saw them as swing states and critical to win. It’s probably just as critical to lose them. My Iowa connections say the Kerry message didn’t triumph in the Corn Belt. If any of the morning pundits want an ex-pats opinion on the result, I’m putting Bush in the winner’s circle.

Update Evening Drive Time Ireland: Most Americans must believe in a fundamentally different set of values than I defended in uniform. I think I will stay in Ireland.

Update the morning after:

Kaseryn reported “former alcoholic and functional illiterate George W. Bush has won re-election and will retain his office as 43th President of the United States of America, despite a proven inability to pronounce the word ‘nuclear’. The final tally of electoral votes was updated live throughout election day by Andrew Tanenbaum of Electoral-Vote.com, where he stayed up all night hopefully tabulating the votes, only to sob bitterly at the sheer monstrous ratfuckery of it all. He then asked to be excused to the bathroom, from which a single gunshot was later heard.

Update two weeks later: American political campaigns have become much more tribal since political viewpoints now appear more ardent than religion–or as Angelina Sciolla puts it, “something that suggests a certain moral superiority and which should not be questioned.”

Update three weeks later: Moby announces the Revocation of Independence declaration, returning the colonies to the monarchy and annotating the second of November as “Indecisive day”.

Via Dervala who points out that Kerry carries 89% of Ireland from Leslee and Jon. **Yahoo election slideshow. Or would you rather download movies with partisan messages like we do in class? Before we study best practise in constructing election graphics.

New York Times election coverage.

Herbert Lash – “Dow Drops as Exit Poll Talk Hits Market”

Reuters — “Pennsylvania Votes for Kerry, Networks Say”

Anne van Wagener – “Election graphics” that measure the “electrical votes.”

Technorati vote tracking

Wil Wheaton – “Voice of America”

Angelina Sciolla – “Make love not war”

Good Grief! – “Published again”

Bonus Link**: interactive map from Boston.com. But the best election results map is from ESRI.