Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying

Before the election, I boldly ventured where I had not gone before – into the world of election prognostication. Below are two charts showing how well my predictions fared.

So, I called the Senate correctly. The Democrats picked up 6 seats. I had said that I thought Lieberman might defect after the elections – slim chance, but still makes for an interesting situation.

I missed 5 calls. Results of 4 races are still to be called. My prediction for the House was that the Democrats would pick up 26 seats and take control. So far, they have picked up 28 seats and 10 races are still to be called. It was clearly a historic night for the Democrats.

My local precinct in Loudoun County, Virginia was crowded this morning. I arrived at the polls at 9:30 am to find a long line of voters. I noticed on the election worker’s number sheet that over a 1000 voters had already voted at my precinct and many more were in line. I was in line for about 15 minutes before being able to get my ballot. If my precinct is indicative of the turnout in the rest of Loudoun County, Macaca Allen might be in serious trouble.

A Webb volunteer outside handed me a sample ballot. Interestingly, there was no Allen volunteer outside. I have to wonder if Allen was caught flat-footed by the Webb challenge and whether the much vaunted Republican ground game might not have taken the field. If Allen has conceded Northern Virginia or if he has not been able to organize, then he might be heading home to his dude ranch soon.

This year, there was one touch screen machine at the precinct and the rest were optical scanned ballots. You were given a choice of "paper or touch screen" – I chose touch screen just for the experience.

After waiting in yet another line for 20 minutes to get to the much coveted touch screen machine, I faced off against the Diebold voting appliance. This was my first experience with the world of e-voting. I can see how people can get confused by these things. It claimed that my selected candidate would have a red "X" next to his name – but in reality, there was a black box next to the selected name (on closer examination, the black box revealed itself to be very dark red with a faint "X" in the middle).

The screens on the Diebold machine were very slow to update, so that it took over 5 minutes for me to get my ballot filled in. It did give me a confirmation screen at the end of the process with the correct candidates filled in. I held my breath and pressed the screen button to submit my ballot and out popped the card to signal that I had exercised my civic duty. No paper record of the vote, just a faith in the programmers and testers at Diebold. Our democracy at the mercy of a software program.

On the drive back from the polling station, I was listening to the Diane Rehm Show on NPR. Diane was reporting on voting problems in Alexandria (Northern Virginia and heavily Democratic) where older voters were having trouble because Jim Webb’s name was truncated on the electronic voting machines.

So, Virginia is voting today. My experience is that turnout is heavy in Northern Virginia. That bodes well for Jim Webb. Now comes the hard part – counting the ballots.

Since all the pundits are doing it, I thought we could have a little fun as well. Here are my predictions for this Tuesday’s elections. Feel free to add yours in the comments.

My prediction is that the Democrats pick up the needed six seats and still not get control of the Senate because Joe Lieberman will jump ship and caucus with the Republicans.

My prediction for the House is that the Democrats pick up 26 seats and take control.