Man Comes Forward As Web Site Originator
Mon Nov 1,12:46 PM ET

By The Associated Press

History may never know how many working hours were lost to Andrew Tanenbaum's Web site, www.electoral-vote.com.

The site features a map of the United States in shades of blue, red, pink and white and a tally of which way the electoral college vote will go if the most recent polls are correct. (White is for tied, light blue is for states that are weakly leaning toward Kerry, pink is for states that are weakly leaning toward Bush.)

Updated as the poll numbers from each state arrive, it has become one of the world's 1,000 most popular Web sites and gets 600,000 visitors a day, according to Tanenbaum. At 11 a.m. EST, the site had Kerry ahead of Bush, 298 electoral votes to 231.

Until Monday, Tanenbaum maintained his anonymity.

Tanenbaum, an American living in Amsterdam, where he is a computer science professor at Vrije Universiteit, posted his biography on the site Monday. He said he lives in The Netherlands because his wife, who is Dutch, "couldn't do her kind of work in the U.S. whereas I could work anywhere."

He started the Web site as a means to register other overseas voters. Until last week, the site featured a banner ad giving voter registration information to overseas voters.

A Democrat, and a former lobbyist for the Sierra Club, Tanenbaum ran for a spot as an overseas delegate to the Democratic National Convention, but lost.


--So when you log on to his website tomorrow, and he is crowning Kerry the winner with 90% of the popular vote and 538 electoral votes, and Kerry ends up losing, don't say I didn't warn you.

And, your point is? 


The point is some of the people who post on this messageboard are still trying to pass the electoral-vote.com as non-partisan and the guy who runs it as ''fair.''

The point is some of the people who post on this messageboard are still trying to pass the electoral-vote.com as non-partisan and the guy who runs it as ''fair.''


ok, how about this vote aggregator, which I've been told is non partisan:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/

here's there prediction from the last election:

http://web.archive.org/web/20001110051000/www.realclearpolitics.com/Polls/polls-EC_ALWAYS.html

if you check the electoral vote site, it shows a narrow Kerry victory, not some wide-eyed blow out like these nutbags did last time.

as for his credability, he is a guru software engineer, and that trumps any political leanings he has in my book.  He wrote the precursur to LINIX called MINIX.  He knows numbers and statistics far better than most of these so called polling experts you've pushed forth in the past few months.

I don't give a rat's @ss about electoralvote.com.  Never even been to that site.

To some bipartisan is a four letter word. (Obviously they aren't able to count either)

To some bipartisan is a four letter word. (Obviously they aren't able to count either)

ROFL!

electoral-vote.com was the best of the sites, IMO - not because it had any wannabe Democrat hidden in the wings behind it, but because it published its methods, assumptions and poll data: you could check what he was saying, and if you didn't agree with some of the assumptions, adjust accordingly... the only erroneous assumption he seems to have made is the same statistic as I've heard dozens of people quote that undecideds jump 2:1 to the contender rather than the incumbent: that is clearly what *didn't* happen this time around.  I guess the lies and innuendo had their intended effect after all.

ROFL!

electoral-vote.com was the best of the sites, IMO - not because it had any wannabe Democrat hidden in the wings behind it, but because it published its methods, assumptions and poll data: you could check what he was saying, and if you didn't agree with some of the assumptions, adjust accordingly... the only erroneous assumption he seems to have made is the same statistic as I've heard dozens of people quote that undecideds jump 2:1 to the contender rather than the incumbent: that is clearly what *didn't* happen this time around.  I guess the lies and innuendo had their intended effect after all.


He was off on one state, Florida. That state was too close to call in every poll.  Most of the rightwing leaning sites had Bush by a much larger margin.  So I'd say his methodology was pretty darn close.

Just one last barb to add about the electoral-vote.com site: there was a lot of really useful stuff linked to over the weeks, a lot to really get one thinking and gave a whole load of food for thought.  No wonder the blinkered republican majority didn't like it... thinking for yourself?  Surely not.

I did read the Votemaster FAQ he posted.  I must say that I am impressed.  For a person with such passionate political leanings and a self-proclaimed Kerry supporter, he was amazingly impartial and objective in projecting the electoral college.  If you read his methodology page, he tried several techniques to remain unbiased, used the data at hand available through news and poll sources and cited every poll used and why he used that particular poll every time, for every state.  I also went to the website he linked to that also projected electoral votes, and he was right...it was heavily Republican biased.

I don't mind that he's a Democrat at all.  He showed a lot more class and professionalism than both candidates this year combined.  He reminds me of a lot of my Democrat and moderate Republican friends...passionate about their politics, but level-headed enough to accept an alternative point of view and to understand objectivity.  I'm glad I was introduced to his site, it was definitely educational.

I am a registered Republican and I ended up, after a little flip-flopping of my own, voting for George W. Bush.

Just because he is a democrat doesn't mean he isn't fair.  Really GWB2004, is all this party bashing necessary?  It just seems petty to me.  So you don't agree with their politics, so what?  If we all believed the same this country wouldn't be as great as it is.