| It’s time to assess who guessed right and who guessed wrong. Let’s keep in mind that people who made bad guesses still deserve more credit than people who only announce their “predictions” after the polls are closed and the ballots are counted. |
| Grebner :: Prizes for Punditry |
| First: the actual results. It may surprise you to hear we don’t have entirely accurate numbers available at this point. The figures available from the Secretary of State – as always – are wrong. (When they’re certified by the State Board of Canvassers, they’ll be “official” – but still wrong.)
According to the Secretary of State website, as of 4am, 1-18-07:
Dems: 592261 Repubs: 868002 neither : 21066 TOTAL VOTERS : 1481329 [UPDATE: 1pm 1-18-2008 – The Elections Division has been tipped off, and is in the process of revising their results. I’ll post the revised totals when they settle down, with a discussion of the errors they leave uncorrected.] The first problem is that the “Democratic total” doesn’t include anybody who selected the Democratic ballot, but failed to cast a ballot for any of the listed candidates. That is, the supposed total number of Democratic voters is actually the sum of votes cast for the Democratic candidates listed on the ballot, and does not include people who failed to cast a countable vote. I guess that group – primarily people vainly trying to write-in their choice – amounted to 20,000 people statewide. Given the nature of the Republican race, perhaps they lost 3000 voters in the same way. Next, the number of people who deliberately skipped both parties’ primaries, but only voted on local issues is understated. Wayne County, which has never reported any election result correctly in my 30 years, reported a total of 261,389 voters, which happens to be exactly equal to the sum of the votes cast for Democratic (162358) and Republican (99031) candidates for President. In other words, contrary to instruction, they failed to report the number of people who signed in to vote, but instead simply reported the total number of votes they counted as if it exactly equaled the number of voters. I’m sure I’d find lots of other (but smaller) discrepancies if I spent the time looking. Anybody who knows of such should feel free to post them in a response. Fudging the “official” numbers, I get the following: Dems: 612,000 Repubs: 871,000 neither: 40,000 TOTAL VOTERS: 1,523,000
It will be at least two months before we have a fairly accurate count of absentee ballots, but according to the data I obtained from the Elections Division the day after the election, 318,604 ballots were mailed out, with 289,857 being returned by election day. (91.0%). These numbers omit Clerks who don’t use the centralized absentee ballot system, which I estimate handled 11.1% of all absentee ballots this year. They also omit a handful of absentee ballots which have not yet been counted which were mailed by members of the Armed Forces with a valid pre-election postmark. In all, I estimate 322,000 absentee ballots were cast in the 1/15 Primary – 21.1% of all votes.
Enough preliminaries! Who won my pool?
I asked for guesses back on December 6. My scoring below is the sum of the absolute value of the natural logs of ratios of guess to actual. When a person omitted one of the three categories (D/R/other) I adjust the score accordingly. Lower numbers are better. Grebner: 1,000,000 R/ 300,000 D/ 100,000 other. 1.76 points. Hildy Johnson: 750,000 R/ 250,000 D. 1.57 points. Michmark: 950,000 R/ 500,000 D 0.43 points. JPowers155: 800,000 R/ 350,000 D/ 100,000 other. 1.56 points. Memiller: 1,100,000 R/ 550,000 D/ 50,000 other. 0.56 points. Round 1: Michmark wins! Memiller finishes well! Self-important pundit finishes dead last!
On January 7, I solicited a second round.
Grebner: 900,000 R/650,000 D/ 20,000 neither. 0.79 points. Michmark: 1,000,000 R/500,000 D. 0.51 points. Michmark wins again, with self-important pundit finishing strongly! (I posted a last-minute adjustment to my guess, which made it fall even farther from the mark, but I’m willing to overlook that additional failing.)
Finally, although it wan’t an official part of my challenge, I had an exchange with Nazgul35 regaring the number of absentee ballots that would be cast. My estimate, that 350,000 AV ballots would be cast, compares reasonably well with approximately 322,000 actually received. My guess that “almost 90%” of the ballots mailed would be returned matches the actual 91.0% well enough. |