Electoral-vote.com
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Type of site
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Opinion poll analysis, blog |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Owner | Andrew S. Tanenbaum |
| Created by | Andrew S. Tanenbaum |
| Website | electoral-vote.com |
| Registration | None |
| Launched | May 24, 2004 |
Electoral-Vote.com (formally, Electoral Vote Predictor) is a website created by computer scientist Andrew S. Tanenbaum. The site's primary content is poll analysis to project the outcome of U.S. elections. The site also includes commentary on related news stories.
The site was created during the lead-up to the 2004 U.S. Presidential election to predict the winner. The site tries to improve on national polls usually reported in the media, by instead analyzing the most recent polls on the state level, thus simulating the process by which Electoral College votes are determined in the actual election. Updated throughout the campaign, visitors can see who is "ahead" at any time.
Through most of the 2004 campaign Tanenbaum kept his identity a secret, only acknowledging that he personally preferred John Kerry. Tanenbaum, a civil libertarian who is a member of Democrats Abroad, and generally supports Democratic candidates for office, revealed his identity on November 1, 2004, as well as stating his reasons and qualifications for running the website.
In 2015 Tanenbaum was joined by Christopher Bates, who contributes to the site under the name Zenger. Their respective contributions are differentiated by (V) and (Z).
The site began operating on May 24, 2004 with a simple map and a few links to other pages. The information available grew over time, though. During the months leading up to the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, the site was updated daily to reflect new state polls. The site was immensely popular, attracting nearly 700,000 daily visitors as election day neared and was the most popular election site in the country, in the top 1,000 Web sites in the world, and in the top 10 blogs in the world.
The main page consisted of a map of the United States with the individual states colored varying shades of red or blue, based on the polls for that state. For instance, Illinois, a state that was polling strongly for Democrat John Kerry was colored dark blue, whereas Michigan where Kerry's lead polled by a small margin was colored light blue. Analogously, Texas was dark red during the whole campaign, indicating Bush's strong lead there. All of the polling data were provided in multiple formats, including HTML, Excel, and .csv for downloading. Other features included historical data on previous elections, charts and animations showing the polls over the course of time, cartograms, and links to hundreds of other pages and external Websites with tables, charts, graphs, and other election data and information.
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