Elections

Among the top election quants, Nate Silver reigns supreme

While there's already been whole swimming pools of ink devoted to the Election Day prediction performance of polling aggregators like FiveThirtyEight blogger Nate Silver, CNET is ready to hand out one more round of kudos to the king of the quants.

By now, anyone following the presidential election knows that Silver successfully predicted the winner in the race between President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in all 50 states. That performance was one for the ages, earning him worldwide admiration and validating a polling aggregation model that had drawn mockery and ire from many pundits.

But … Read more

The post-election tech tally: Winners and losers

Elections are all about winners and losers, who is up and who is down. Here's a CNET look at the winners and losers in the 2012 election in which President Obama bested former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, from a tech perspective.

WINNERS

Nate Silver: The FiveThirtyEight forecaster's algorithms correctly calculated that on election day President Obama had a nearly 92-percent chance of winning, and accurately projected the voting outcome in 49 states (Florida has not yet been called).

Read: Obama's win a big vindication for Nate Silver, king of the quants

Big data: Many, especially … Read more

Obama faces piracy, privacy tests in his second term

The most controversial technology topics in President Obama's second term are likely to be two political flashpoints: piracy and privacy.

When Internet activists allied with an hastily assembled coalition of Silicon Valley companies blocked votes on a pair of Hollywood-backed copyright bills early this year, they didn't end efforts to slap stiffer anti-piracy sanctions on the Internet. They merely postponed the fight.

The Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act are dead, of course. Those names have become radioactive on Capitol Hill, thanks to a broad public outcry that involved millions of Internet users and actually … Read more

Pennsylvania e-voting machine casts wrong ballot. Oops

An electronic voting machine in Pennsylvania was briefly taken offline today -- and apparently reconfigured and placed back in service -- after a YouTube video showed evidence of voting irregularities.

The video, which received a flurry of attention after being posted at Reddit.com, appeared to show an attempted vote for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama being reflected as a vote for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

Republicans have also warned of voting machine glitches going in the other direction. In a letter (PDF) to state voting officials last week, the GOP's top lawyer said the party has received … Read more

Sergey Brin's political bonfire

It's election day in America, and Google co-founder Sergey Brin isn't happy about the situation. In a Google + post he wrote:

...no matter what the outcome, our government will still be a giant bonfire of partisanship. It is ironic since whenever I have met with our elected officials they are invariably thoughtful, well-meaning people. And yet collectively 90% of their effort seems to be focused on how to stick it to the other party.

He pleaded with the victors in today's election to "please withdraw from your respective parties and govern as independents in … Read more

CNET Tech Voters' Guide 2012: Romney vs. Obama on the issues

Technology topics can mark a rare bipartisan area of political agreement: Both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama say they would make cybersecurity a priority, and both like to talk up government funding of basic research.

If you look a bit more closely, however, differences emerge. They're perhaps most marked over federal regulation, where the two major parties have long-standing disagreements, but also exist on topics like WikiLeaks, copyright legislation, and whether to levy a new tax on broadband providers.

Keep reading for CNET's 2012 Tech Voters' Guide, in which we highlight where the four candidates -- we've … Read more

Sergey Brin: Put out 'giant bonfire of partisanship'

Dipping his toes into political waters, Google co-founder Sergey Brin today asked elected officials to withdraw from their parties so the United States can move beyond what he sees as a political climate crippled by hostility.

"I must confess, I am dreading today's elections...because no matter what the outcome, our government will still be a giant bonfire of partisanship," Brin said in a Google+ post early on Election Day in the United States.

Brin pleaded that winners of today's elections therefore ditch their political parties so they can be more constructive:

It is ironic since … Read more

Google learns its Democratic political ties have bounds

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Few Silicon Valley companies have ever embraced a political party as passionately as Google has. Its executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, has been described as a "kind of guru" to President Obama's campaign manager, and Google employees emerged as the No. 2 donor to the Democratic National Committee in the last election.

That love affair has now become a bit one-sided. Obama's pick to run the Federal Trade Commission, Jon Leibowitz, a Democrat and former aide to Democratic senators, has been carefully preparing a legal assault on the search company.

Leibowitz took the unusual … Read more

Campaigns chew on cookies to see if you watch porn

Is he one of us?

That's the question both the Romney and Obama campaigns will be asking as election time rolls near.

Every last vote will count. Every last nuance will matter in determining which candidate will steer America through the next four joyous years.

So how are the campaigns trying to identify those who might be on their side? Why, cookies.

According to the New York Times, many, many voters can look forward to calls from campaign workers who will, for once, be armed with very personal details about their targets' predilections.

The Times boldly declares that these … Read more