Imagine you were a political analyst who time traveled from 1990s to November 5, 2012. A quick look at the national polls for the presidential election, you would probably have thought that Republican nominee Mitt Romney had a pretty good shot at claiming the presidency. 

Obviously, you - like many of the Republican faithful - would have been dead wrong. 

President Barack Obama and his team, though, likely knew that he would win, and by precisely how much, days before the actual voting even started. 

In the first of a three-part series on how Obama used technology to win the election, MIT Technology Review breaks down how the President’s team used Big Data and sophisticated analytics at an almost unprecedented scale to track voters, and nudge them in the direction that the Obama team wanted them to go.

What the Obama team did was little short of amazing. It essentially created a cohort-analysis system of data to judge every single voter it wanted to get to the polls. Obama’s team took the usual system of analytics and reduced it to the most granular level: the individual voter. 

The analytics campaign, led by chief analytics officer Dan Wagner, was able to assign voters individual scores based on if and how they would vote. In doing this, Wagner’s team could accurately predict human behavior. 

“But underneath all that were scores describing particular voters: a new political currency that predicted the behavior of individual humans. The campaign didn’t just know who you were; it knew exactly how it could turn you into the type of person it wanted you to be,” wrote Technology Review’s guest contributor Sasha Issenberg. 

Florida election results 2012 In contrast, the Romney campaign was still in an earlier mode of data analytics, focused around larger cohorts such as campaign topics (the fall of Obama-backed solar energy provider Solyndra, for instance) and how individual ads affected the voter mindset.

In part two of Issenberg’s series, he notes that the Romney team understood it did not have the depth of ground-level analytics that the Obama team had and was forced to be reactionary to how the Obama campaign deployed its resources. For instance, why did Obama run 68 ads in a small Alabama town that traditionally voted Republican?

Obama was likely targeting voters in Florida with his Alabama media buy, trying to sway voters in key counties like Holmes, Jackson, Walton and Gadsen. The Obama team likely knew that the state of Florida would come down to several thousand votes (which it did) and that eroding Romney’s base there would be important to win the state. Of those counties, Obama won only Gadsen. But winning those counties was not as important to the Obama team as was making sure that people that supported him in 2008 also did so in 2012.

For instance, in Jackson county, Obama received 7,342 (35.1%) votes in 2012 against 7,632 (35%) in 2008. Obama's goal in 2012 was to make sure that everybody that voted for him in 2008 also did so in 2012 while adding new voters as well. Even though he lost those counties, by matching his numbers in those two counties in an election where the Republican base was emotionally invested against him, Obama can count those Florida counties as a win. Considering that Obama beat Romney by only about 73,000 votes in Florida, those votes counted for a lot. 

Predicting Human Behavior Through Data Analysis

By taking an approach to individual voter targeting and setting up the algorithms and databases to do it, Obama’s team put itself on the forefront of a growing field of innovation: predictive analysis of individual human behavior and reaction.

The largest technology companies and a growing number of advertisers are seen as leaders in this field. People like to joke that, “Google knows everything about me.” Well, it probably does. 

In a mobile application, for example, what buttons are the users most likely to push? Are they more or less likely to tap on an advertisement? What can the app publisher do to get users to open the app more often (increasing the likelihood of clicking an ad or buying in-app goods)? The next step is to apply those questions to specific cohorts. Is a woman aged 18-21 years more likely to re-engage with the app than a man of the same age? How many times does a 25-year-old man need to open an app before he makes his first in-app purchase?

Companies like Apsalar, Flurry, Localytics, Sonamine and others are working on this type of cohort data - not just to understand how people use mobile apps, but how they can be influenced to perform particular actions. By analyzing millions of data sets created by touching items within an app, companies can guess with a very high degree of accuracy what you are going to do next. Once a company knows what you are going to do, it can then influence you to perform the actions it desires.

This is almost exactly what the Obama team did, except instead of mobile apps, it was millions upon millions of voters. The Obama team figured out what type of person a voter was and how that person would respond to certain types of stimuli - such as direct mail, person-to-person interviews, social media, advertising, and so on. Obama was then able to deploy his massive volunteer network (some 500,000 people) and other campaign resources as needed.

Ultimately, this approach is what set apart Obama's campaign. It was not just having a smartphone app as a “walk list” (the list that volunteers use to see who has come to the polls) or keeping track of media sentiment through in-depth analytics. It was about having the most granular data possible and then knowing how to act on it.

Some of the biggest tech companies in the world that specialize in behavioral data could not have done quite what the Obama team did by mixing social science (how users react to different stimuli) to structured big data. 

Top image: tree graph of 2012 election results county by county, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Maine Democrat Colleen Lachowicz made gaming history twice this year:

First, when she was attacked by the Republican Party last month for being a computer gamer.

Second, when she won her election on Tuesday, becoming the first Senator whose gaming habits led, in part, to her victory.  

Hear that, negative stereotypes about gamers? Your days are numbered. Gamers can be doctors, lawyers, and now, even state senators. 

Gaming Is Now Mainstream

Luddites take note: Attacking a candidate just because they play video games will not only backfire in the form of bad international press and an outpouring of support from fellow gamers, but the move also paints you as incredibly out of touch with modern society. The backlash will be even worse if that candidate plays World of Warcraft, the planet's most popular massive multiplayer online game - with some 10 million players. 

As Lachowicz pointed out on her site, 65% of American homes now house a gamer, and the average age of a gamer is now 34 years old. Questioning if a candidate is fit for office because she plays video games is the 21st Century version of complaining about someone for liking that loud “rock and roll music.” 

Back in October, Republicans created the attack site Colleen’s World, complete with the tagline “Maine needs a State Senator that lives in the real world, not in Colleen’s fantasy world.” The site collected forum posts Lachowicz made on various sites, including Daily Kos, in an attempt to show how “crude, vicious and violent” she was in her “time-consuming,” “disturbing” and “bizarre double life.” It also criticized Lachowicz’s World of Warcraft character, a level 85 Orc assassin named Santiaga "who stabs things a lot." Maine GOPers took offense to the term “teabag,” too.  

The attacks on Lachowicz and Santiaga led to segments on CNN, coverage in outlets like TIME and Slate, and even internationally on the BBC, where a gaming researcher named Ladan Cockshut weighed in on the controversy and negative stereotype of gamers:   

"In my work, I've spoken with many people who in their regular lives have roles of significant responsibility (as doctors, managers, or educators) but who choose carefully with whom they disclose their gaming activity," said Cockshut to the BBC. "And disclosing their gaming activity is often accompanied by a degree of apology or embarrassment."

Presumably, that's what Maine Republican Party spokesman David Sorensen was going for when he said Lachowicz’s activities “raise questions about Lachowicz’s maturity and her ability to make serious decisions for the people of Senate District 25.”

Smear Campaign = Epic Fail

The smear campaign, however, backfired as it mobilized gamers tired of “gamers = bad” mantra in support of Lachowicz. A fundraising page set up for her on ActBlue raised more than $6,000 for Democrats in Maine before it was shut down by an ethics complaint from Republicans. (As a Clean Election candidate, Lachowicz is forbidden from accepting donations, but the ActBlue page clearly stated as much, and was raising money for the Democratic party in Maine.)

Lachowicz told the Ethics commission she did no more than link to the ActBlue page as she was “overwhelmed” with the public response and it was a way to  get “people to stop calling me, stop messaging" her. (Lachowicz was cleared by the ethics panel on November 1.)

Back in October, during the height of the controversy, Lachowicz told Joystiq in an interview all the press has actually increased her profile in her own district, especially among 18 - 30 year olds. “I knock on the door now and some people recognize me,” said Lachowicz, even a 64-year-old who plays EverQuest.  

“It just really goes to show that I think those of us who do play games are eager for it not to be stereotyped anymore” added Lachowicz, in reference to all the support. Her quote could easily have been about last night’s win, too.

In case you missed it, the United States elected a president yesterday. I try to stay away from politics — it’s only fun in Chicago, anyway — but last night, I anxiously tuned in.

Election night television, it seems, hasn’t changed much in the past four years — the same guys in the same bad suits, pointing at maps, reading wire updates, and trying not to screw up. The biggest difference, I noticed, is how the main tool I really used was Twitter.

To the daily Twitter user, this, by now, seems obvious; a cliché barely worth repeating. But step back for a second and think back to an era — not long ago — when this didn’t exist. When the only analysis and opinion you had instant access to was from your friends in the room and the mouth-breathers the TV producers had picked for you.

Then look over at Twitter, where the room is bursting with fresh news, links, photos from everywhere, alerts that Karl Rove is melting down or that Diane Sawyer seems wasted, jokes coming so fast that you can barely keep up. (Many of them even funny.) You control the content, the sources, the volume, the pace, and your drink. Sometimes, it’s wrong, but it’s quickly corrected, and you should be more skeptical anyway. And if you want, you can participate. You’re not just watching.

Over the past ten days, with Hurricane Sandy and now the election, I’ve spent an unusual amount of time at home, sitting on my couch. The TV was often on, and sometimes useful: Some stuff is still better and faster observed in live video format. The emotion of an extended human speech will probably never travel well in 140-character text messages. Likewise, a television meltdown is still more memorable and lasting than a Twitter meltdown, perhaps because of its relative improbability.

But these days, if I had to choose one media tool to rely on — a cable box with 200 channels or a well-curated Twitter feed — Twitter now wins every time, no contest. And when I have both, I’m mostly paying attention to Twitter, with the TV providing background noise. The “second screen” is now my first screen. And compared to Facebook, which has been a relative disappointment over the past few big events — stale news and links, lame comments from distant relatives or acquaintances, too many sponsored Greek yogurt recipe links — Twitter is mostly doing it right.

While you’re here:

• Obviously, most people still aren’t using Twitter. This is really Twitter’s biggest job — getting more people to use it. The service is stable, the product is good, and the business is coming along. But most people still aren’t using it. So: How? A mix of distribution, marketing, product design, and magic, I guess. One likely problem: It’s still too hard for people to get started with Twitter. I’m generally happy with my view of Twitter and the 2,200+ people I follow, but I’ve spent the past 5 years refining that list. This seems to be why Twitter is pushing things like curated Twitter pages for big events like the election and the Olympics. They’re so much better than an empty timeline, or 10 random celebrities, but there’s so much more to do here.
• This is where Twitter’s “cards” thing might actually be interesting. When NPR tweets out an election news update, for example, it might be cool to be able to attach some sort of live or interactive version of the state-by-state “big board” it was keeping on its website. This might get annoying — Twitter’s all-time best feature is its simplicity — but we’ll see. Likewise, companies will have to weigh the costs and benefits of displaying this sort of information within Twitter, rather than using Twitter to drive people to their own websites. (What’s my attention worth to NPR on their website vs. on Twitter? Is it a big difference or a small one? How to really measure?) But it’s at least worth thinking about.
• That whole Twitter developer drama shitstorm feels like it happened ages ago. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t been using Twitter less since then. Nor have I felt any urge to use App.net, or some other alternative. If anything, Facebook and Instagram seem less exciting to me these days, but that’s another post. And this isn’t to say Twitter is perfect — many of the company’s decisions are frustrating or annoying — but relative to most companies and services I deal with, it’s pretty solid.
• The iPad mini was great on election night. It’s almost the perfect Twitter device: Light enough to hold for hours, but more tweets on the screen than an iPhone. And it was easy to switch to handheld TV mode, via the Time Warner Cable app, when I wanted to watch two channels at a time. This sort of living-room-couch usage is where a bigger iPad “classic” is also great, especially if you’re mostly resting it on your lap or a table. (I’d still like to consider an even bigger iPad for this sort of situation, see Forget The iPad Mini - Is There Room For An iPad Maxi?) But the mini definitely didn’t feel too small for couch surfing; I’d still recommend it as the go-to iPad. (More here.)

At 9:47 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday, my mother texted me. 

“Nate Silver is a rock star,” she said. 

“Not yet,” I replied.

President Barack Obama had not yet sewn up his re-election in the campaign against Mitt Romney and the contest was a narrowly run affair. Virginia, a state that I called home for many years, was still up in the air and Romney held the advantage, if ever so slim. Florida, as is its wont, was too close to call. Ohio, the lynchpin of Obama’s “firewall” hung in the balance. There was still a chance that Silver, the New York Times statistician and author of FiveThirtyEight, that predicted Obama had a 90.5% chance of winning the election on Tuesday morning, could be wrong.

At 11:26 p.m., my mother texted me again; “Once again, Nate Silver = rock star.”

This time, I held no reticence. “Indeed,” I said. “I’ve known that since 2003.”

Silver’s victory was a triumph of logic. A vindication of simple math and data analysis over emotional ideologues and punditry. 

“The wizards and alchemists are being exposed and done away with,” ReadWrite Editor-in-Chief Dan Lyons said of Silver. “It's the new Age of Enlightenment.”

When it was all said and done, Silver’s win was total and complete. The degree of accuracy with which Silver’s model predicted the final outcomes of races across the country was almost stunning. Many people and polls predicted that states like New Hampshire, Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin would fall to Romney. There was corollary evidence to suggest that it might end up that way, with Romney picking up endorsement from large local newspapers in both Iowa and Wisconsin in the days heading up to the election. 

As the night went along, Silver’s prediction for the winner of just about every “battleground” state on the board was not only correct, it was stunning in its degree of accuracy of the final vote count. 

Take a look at the map at the top of the article for the actual election results. Now, look at Silver's prediction map below. No coincidence, they are very similar.

Let’s take a look some of Silver’s predictions to the actual results in battleground states.

North Carolina

• Silver’s prediction: Romney 50.6% -- Obama 48.9%
• Actual results: Romney 50.6% -- Obama 48.4%

Virginia

• Silver’s prediction: 50.7% Obama – 48.7% Romney
• Actual results:  50.8% Obama – 47.8% Romney

Iowa

• Silver’s prediction: 51.1% Obama – 47.9% Romney
• Actual results: 52.1% Obama – 46.5% Romney

Florida

• Silver’s prediction: 49.8% Obama – 49.8% Romney
• Actual results (pending): 49.8% Obama – 49.3% Romney

As of the time of this article, Florida is the only state that has not declared a winner in the presidential election. Silver not only predicted the correct winner in just about every swing state to a high degree of accuracy, his model predicted the tie that became Florida. 

After Silver made his now-infamous bet with MSNBC morning news anchor “Morning” Joe Scarborough, the political pundits of the country came out of the woodwork to decry Silver as some type of fraud, a stooge of the liberal-leaning New York Times and in the pocket of the Obama campaign. None of that was ever true, no matter how much you wanted to believe the talking heads on Fox News or CNN. Silver’s approach has nothing to do with punditry. There is no emotion in his model. It is the logical approach to predictive data analysis taken to the nth degree. 

“Those of us in the pundit-ocracy make our bread and butter by telling people what the truth is as we see it from our gut,” comedian and faux-pundit Stephen Colbert told Silver in an interview on The Colbert Report on Monday. 

“I am not very pro-pundit, I have to say,” Silver said. “If pundits were on the ballot against, I don’t know [Ebola], I would probably vote Ebola. Or third party.”

In the end, Silver gets the last laugh. He correctly picked the winner in all 50 states, many times hitting the exact percentage of votes for each candidate.  After proving his predictive statistical model in baseball, he has now refined it for politics. And made a whole lot of people look like fools along the way.

Read How Statistician Nate Silver Threw A Wrench Into Traditional Election Metrics.

Instagram is all grown up. Not just because it now has a big, publicly-traded parent company. Nor am I referring to its unprecedentedly rapid user growth or new Web-based user profiles. In just the last few weeks, something significant has happened. Instagram became a mainstream social network, checked by everyday users during major news events and embraced by media outlets who previously weren't sure what to make of it. 

If there was a watershed moment in Instagram's rise to mainstream legitimacy, it was the arrival of Hurricane Sandy last week. As the superstorm wreaked havoc upon New York and New Jersey, Instagram saw a record-breaking ten photos posted every second. Before long, more than 800,000 images were tagged #sandy, leading to what CEO Kevin Systrom called "the single largest event taking place that was captured on Instagram.” 

Instagram's Twitter Moment

It wasn't just the sheer volume of Sandy photos that made this significant. For the first time, the mobile photo-sharing service was being used and talked about during a major news event - the same way Twitter has been for years. Twitter and Facebook remained every bit as chatty as they've tended to be during events like this. But the uniquely visual nature of Instagram lent itself perfectly to a news event that was all about images - from flooded city streets and ransacked store shelves to the eerily dark Manhattan skyline. 

For the most part, these image were authentic, even if some were mis-tagged and off-topic. Perhaps because it's so closely tied to the functionality of actual cameras, Instagram was less of a breeding ground for deceitfully Photoshopped images than social networks that exist on the desktop first. It was still entirely possible to get fake photos onto Instagram, but not as effortlessly as they could be posted to Twitter or Facebook.

Instagramming The Election

Election day was another watershed moment for Instagram. As Americans headed to the polls to get their free "I Voted" stickers, many were whipping out their smartphones and documenting everything from long lines to their own ballot (which may or may not be legal). 

The last time we had a presidential election in the United States, the iPhone was a year old, Android was brand new and there was no such thing as an iPad. Instagram was still two years away from being launched. How things have changed in four years. 

For its Instagramming the Election feature The New York Times is using the Storify interface to display hand-curated, user-generated images tagged with #NYTelection. That the nation's 161-year-old newspaper of record is utilizing a 2-year-old social network to solicit reader-submitted photography is a testament not just to Instagram's explosive growth, but to its rapid rise to legitimacy. When the app first landed in the App Store, it was something many professional photographers frowned upon. 

That began to change only within the last year or so. At the Online News Association (ONA) conference in September, educator and popular Instagrammer Richard Koci Hernandez led a panel about how media organizations can use Instagram, trying his best to explode the myth that doing so was somehow "cheating." His audience was mostly receptive, but not everybody at ONA was sold on Instagram as a tool for news publishers.

Across the industry, it's still something media outlets are figuring out what to do with, and the payoff is not immediately clear. Still, with more than 100 million users and its prominence in two recent historic events, Instagram is now officially impossible to ignore.  

If you have a Facebook or Twitter account, there is a very good chance you have been bombarded with campaign news and opinion just about every minute of every day for the last year and a half. Most of the chatter likely comes from your annoying, politically minded friends and followers, but the campaigns have also taken to social media like no election before. The campaigns for President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney have fought a bitter battle of memes, opinions, insight and slander in 2012 - and it has been hard to ignore. 

President Obama Sent Direct Messages To All His Twitter Followers The question is, though, who won the social media battle this year, Obama or Romney? See some examples of each and take the poll below. 

The Second Social Media Election

In 2008, the presidential contest between Barack Obama and John McCain was considered the first true “social media” election. Many pundits believed that one reason Obama trounced McCain on election night was his superior and ubiquitous social media campaign. In 2012, the social media winner in the presidential election is not so clear cut.

The campaigns and their official supporters have been… interesting. Among other things, we have seen:

• Samuel L. Jackson telling voters to “wake the &%#! up” in a YouTube video sponsored by The Jewish Council for Education and Research.
• Obama’s campaign make pithy jokes over Facebook about Romney’s Big Bird snafu.
• Romney create memes over Obama’s “you didn’t build that” line from a stump speech.
• Daily updates of information or misinformation from both parties.

If you like this type of political banter, the last six months or so has been a series of treats in your daily news feed. If not, well, it is almost over. 

Whose Message Is It?

It has been increasingly difficult this year to separate official campaign messages from the messages of the political action committees from the random warblings of your friends. That makes it tough to proclaim a winner of the social media side of this election. The sheer volume of pictures, status updates, meme generators, infographics and the like has been overwhelming from both sides. Even if you do not follow a single candidate on Facebook, Twitter or other social network, your friends probably do, and they have no doubt been sharing these status updates, pictures and videos for months on end. We might look at 2012 as the year when the volume of viral network effects of politically minded online sharing increased by orders or magnitude over previous election cycles. 

A Lot Of Pictures Of Mitt On Facebook

Can we declare a winner for the best social media campaign? We put that question to you. Take the poll below and let us know what you think in the comments. What was your favorite social media moment of the election cycle?

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

For the first time in history, nearly every citizen of a U.S. state will be given access to participate in their general election today via email and faxing. But this special event is overshadowed by serious doubts as to security of all types of electronic voting, much less relying on email.

The New Jersey Experiment

New Jersey's Christie administration made the announcement for the emergency policy change on November 3, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. The idea is to permit registered voters in the Garden State to vote electronically using a system that Military and Overseas voters already use under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA). Actually, Jersey's emergency plan is even less restrictive than the state's existing procedure, which usually requires absentee voters under UOCAVA to mail in a signed affidavit.

According to the Governor's office, "displaced voters may submit a mail-in ballot application either by email or fax to their county clerk. Once an application is approved, the clerk will electronically send a ballot to the voter by either fax or email in accordance to the voter's preference. Voters must return their electronic ballot – by fax or email – no later than November 6, 2012, at 8 p.m."

New Jersey voters can also vote by provisional ballot in counties other than their original residence if they prefer.

The Garden State's extraordinary efforts come in direct response to Hurricane Sandy, which made landfall in New Jersey a little over a week ago and caused widespread damage to polling places and residents' homes in a critical moment on the electoral calendar.

If such a storm had hit at any other time of the year, or even in an off-election year, it is not clear New Jersey would have taken these dramatic steps. For election watchers, though, New Jersey's move is a grand experiment, a chance to find out how well the process works and what, if any, flaws crop up.

Hacking The Electronic Vote

This is a big deal. Online voting is not something that happens with any regularity in the U.S. Currently, only 28 U.S. states allow email and fax voting - even for for UOCAVA-eligible voters. Another five states allow fax-only ballots for the same demographic. Of these 33 states that have electronic absentee voting in place for Military and Overseas voters, only one - Arizona - also provides a Web portal for qualified voters to use.

In fact, despite promises of convenience, fast tabulation of votes and improved ease-of-use, there are big issues with all kinds of electronic voting (online or at the polling place). The biggest issue: security. 

According to Verified Voting, a non-partisan watchdog site, the best election processes are those that include some sort of paper record of voting activity that can be audited if there is ever a question of fraudulent activity. But most electronic voting options don't leave a paper trail.

Given that many state legislatures seem so concerned about voter fraud that they are enacting voter ID laws, it seems odd that the same groups seem more than happy to use voting systems that could be potentially hacked on a much larger scale - with no way to gather evidence to prove whether it happened or not.

On Monday, Roger Johnston, head of the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory, posted an article on Popular Science outlining how simple it would be to grab some equipment from an electronics store and execute a man-in-the-middle attack on a touchscreen voting machine - for as little as $10 and a Saturday afternoon.

"The attacks require physical access. This is easy for insiders, who program the machines for an election or install them. And we would argue it's typically not that hard for outsiders," Johnston wrote. "A lot of voting machines are sitting around in the church basement, the elementary school gymnasium or hallway, unattended for a week or two before the election."

Decentralization Limits The Damage

Elections in the U.S. are typically handled at the county level, with individual Clerk's offices managing voter registration and the election process in the various counties and parishes. The good news is that would require hackers to break into a multitude of different machine types - a one-attack-fits-all strategy would not work.

The bad news - as mentioned above - is that with the exception of optical scan devices and electronic voting machines capable of printing a record of a voter's choices, there's no paper trail to audit. If these machines were tampered with, there is very little chance for such tampering to be immediately detected, unless the hacker is dumb enough to over-weigh the tampered votes of one candidate over another. Given the relative ease in which Johnston and his team created hacks for voting machines, this kind of tampering is very much a real danger.

A Really Big Target

This, more than any reason, is why the U.S. electorate has not attempted a "pure" online election. With electronic voting machines, at least there's still a physical device you have to hack, which does not scale very well from the attackers' viewpoint. But a truly online election, hitting one central server? That might be too tempting a target for hackers to resist. And a successful hack could change millions of votes.

Take the District of Columbia Board of Elections and Ethic's rather daring public challenge in 2010: After setting up an Internet voting pilot to enable overseas voters to cast their ballots, the District invited all comers to try to break into the system and compromise its results.

In just a few hours, a team from The University of Michigan found a vulnerability and had inserted fictitious characters into the mock election's ballot, even gaining control of the cameras watching the election servers to make sure their activity wasn't visually spotted. The winner of the election? Futurama robot Bender.

"Our experience with the D.C. pilot system demonstrates one of the key dangers in many Internet voting designs: one small mistake in the configuration or implementation of the central voting servers or their surrounding network infrastructure can easily undermine the legitimacy of the entire election," concluded the academic paper outlining the attack.

Today's New Jersey experiment is a last-minute attempt to cope by a state battered by Hurricane Sandy. Given the very real security concerns surrounding electronic elections, don't expect it to be the norm anytime soon. Hopefully, at least, it won't be another object lesson in what can go wrong with electronic voting.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Sports and politics are remarkably similar. Both have billions of dollars at stake, engender profound emotions and revolve around larger-than-life individuals. And they both share a culture of data devoted to making predicting future results more accurate than ever. Don't just ask Moneyball's Billy Beane - ask statistician Nate Silver, a man who has led the charge in changing both baseball and political forecasting over the last decade. 

I have been following Silver’s work for years - he helped inspire me to write for a living. Silver is now best known for his work at FiveThirtyEight, a political blog owned by The New York Times that uses advanced statistical analysis to predict the outcome of elections. Silver has come under fire within the last week when his model predicted that President Barack Obama was a heavy statistical favorite to be elected in Tuesday's election. Silver bet MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Scarborough $1,000 last week that Obama would be re-elected.

Many people lambasted Silver for the bet and his belief that Obama will win. But if you have read Silver over the years, you know that he is not necessarily betting on Obama. He is betting on the accuracy of his model. 

Lies, Damn Lies, And Statistics

Silver may now be a national name, especially after his bet with Scarborough, but his roots and methods are not based in politics. Before dishing out political insights on “Morning Joe,” Silver was a baseball man.

Silver first foray into the controversial world of predictive analysis came at Baseball Prospectus (BP), a publication devoted to the study of advanced baseball statistics (known as sabermetrics). From 2003 to 2009, Silver was responsible for BP’s prediction engine, known as PECOTA. Named after MLB journeyman Bill Pecota, the full name of the prediction engine is Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm. By 2005, PECOTA was recognized by top baseball minds as one of the most accurate prediction tools in the game. 

From an outsider’s perspective, there is nothing simple about how PECOTA works. But you do not have to be a baseball historian to see how the model functions as a tool for statistical analysis and projection.

PECOTA projects an individual baseball player's career based on his similarities to other baseball players in the past. For instance, PECOTA will project a three-year probability of a player’s performance taking into account his age, handedness, past performance and periphery statistics (such as position and fielding metrics). So if you have a shortstop approaching his age 35-37 seasons with a .249 career batting average, the engine will look for similar players and see how they did at that age. Turns out that approach predicts the shortstop's performance with a fair degree of accuracy - better than other methods. 

The Model Works - Mostly

The important thing here is the way Silver creates his models. Essentially, he is takes data sets and applies logical analytical methods that take his conclusions to deeper understanding. Like any good statistician, he is not looking for a specific outcome, but rather looking for the most finely tuned pattern recognition engine to predict future results. 

To people that understand analysis of complex data sets, Silver’s conclusions make perfect sense given the information he has. The day before the election, Silver’s model gives Obama an 86.3% chance of defeating former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. According to Silver’s numbers, Obama will reap 307.2 electoral college votes to Romney’s 230.8. Silver’s prediction is the result of running his analytical model on poll results from individual states, weighting individual polls in each state based on its past history. 

Essentially, Silver applied Moneyball analysis to politics. But just as traditional baseball types rejected sabermetrics when it told them things they didn't want to hear, much of the political establishment - especially those who disagree with FiveThirtyEight's conclusions - decry him as a fraud.

Silver’s PECOTA days demonstrate that he is not a fraud, but his method is far from foolproof. FiveThirtyEight’s reliance on polling numbers (which are often volatile or biased) creates a margin of error that could make Silver's analysis completely wrong. But Silver has a lot on the line: his reputation, and probably his career, depend on his model accurately predicting the outcome of this election. 

There is a bigger story here. This is the second time Silver has used big data and smart algorithms to drive a movement that turned an entire industry on its head. In both cases, these industries had long and storied traditions and conventional wisdoms ripe for disruption by smarter, more efficient analysis of existing data. That doesn't mean Silver is always right. But it does mean that you can't analyze baseball - and possibly by Wednesday, politics - the same way again.  

Will Silver’s election predictions prove accurate? Will Marco Scutaro ever be an All-Star again? Let us know what you think of Silver's methods in the comments.  

Call this the first Post-PC U.S. presidential election.

Sure, in 2008 we had iPhones and Android was celebrating its first birthday, but the smartphone revolution was just beginning and the iPad was still a gleam in Steve Jobs' eye.

Online TV Has Come A Long Way

We've come a long way. But as radically as mobile devices are changing our relationship with media, the experience still has a long way to go before it matches the power and convenience of plain old TV.

In 2008, I had a presidential-debate-watching party at my house. As somebody who has never seen the appeal of shelling out hundreds of dollars to a giant corporation for content in which I'm mostly disinterested, I needed a way to get the debate onto my HDTV without subscribing to cable or fidgeting with rabbit ears. Fortunately, CNN.com was streaming the debates between John McCain and Barack Obama for free. I hooked up my MacBook to the back of my TV, fired up CNN.com and got as close as I could to full-screening the video player. The picture wasn't great, but it worked. 

This year, the debate live-streaming options were practically limitless. YouTube, Hulu, PBS, Al Jazeera, Huffington Post, CNN and a list of networks and cable channels all offered their own streams, some of them with interactive, social media-fueled components and other bells and whistles. Most of these streams were geared toward desktop browsers, but plenty of outlets crafted their debate-night strategies with our second and third screens in mind. Apple has sold 100 million iPads and competing tablets are popping up constantly. The markets for smart TVs and streaming set top boxes is maturing more slowly, but technologies like Apple's AirPlay and Google TV's equivalent hint at an interesting future. It's amazing how much TV has evolved in the last four years.      

Mobile TV Still Has A Long Way To Go

Still, as I learned when I sat down to stream the third debate earlier this week, the experience remains far behind the old-fashioned way of watching things on screens. 

Armed with my iPad and an Apple TV, I sat down on my couch to watch Barack Obama and Mitt Romney argue about foreign policy. At first, it felt flawless. I just AirPlayed my tablet to the TV, launched the CNN iPad app and started watching.

But the good times didn't last. A few minutes in, the stream went black.

I checked Twitter and I wasn't the only one. Others were complaining about issues with CNN's lifestream, and @CNNMobile tweeted at me and confirmed that they were having issues with mobile streaming. I switched to the Al Jazeera app, but couldn't get the audio to play (which some people say is the best way to watch a presidential debate). I checked Hulu and the Huffington Post on the iPad, both of which were streaming the debate on their websites, but neither app had a readily-tappable link to the lifestream. 

At this point, I could have searched the App Store for another news app that was likely to be streaming the debate. But I wasn't about to start hunting for apps, only able to make educated guesses about who would be streaming to the iPad and then waiting for downloads. The fragile magic of democracy was unfolding in real-time on television screens everywhere and I wasn't going to miss another minute!

Finally, I turned to the browser. NBC was live-streaming the debate on the Web in what was thankfully an iPad-friendly format. I full-screened it, leaned back and watched. 

Ultimately, the Web came through and worked like a charm. And if I had lined up a stronger arsenal of apps (or owned an XBox 360, or AirPlayed my MacBook to the TV, or used the WSJ Live app on Apple TV, etc.), I might have been able to avoid the hiccups. 

Still, I couldn't help but picture my mother. What would she do if she were in my position?

People in the technology industry might be accustomed to hunting for livestreams to tune into a live television event. My mother? She sees no reason to fiddle with such nonsense. With traditional TV, you just sit down, turn it on and watch. Internet TV doesn't yet come close to matching that unquestioned ease of use.

So what will watching the debates look like in 2016, when Mitt Romney is debating Joe Biden? Who knows, but given the progress in the last four years, streaming the debates to the Web and mobile devices should be smooth as butter, but getting it to work on your Google Glasses might have a few hiccups. 

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.