AP
How elections forecasters became political ‘prophets’
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FILE – Minnesotans United for All Families who oppose the gay marriage amendment watch a video feed of a ” What If?” scenario on the presidential race at an election night party Nov. 6, 2012 in St. Paul, Minn. (AP Photo/Jim Mone, File)Read More
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FILE – In this Nov. 4, 1948, file photo, President Harry S. Truman at St. Louis’ Union Station holds up an election day edition of the Chicago Daily Tribune, which – based on early results – mistakenly announced “Dewey Defeats Truman.” (AP Photo/Byron Rollins, File)
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FILE – U.S. President Harry Truman and his wife, Bess, arrive in Philadelphia, aboard the special presidential train “Magellan” during his 30-state whistle-stop campaign tour on Oct. 6, 1948. (AP Photo, File)
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FILE – Nate Silver sits on the stairs at Allegro hotel in downtown Chicago, Friday, Nov. 9, 2012. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh, File)
BY LEAH ASKARINAMUpdated 1:17 AM GMT+6, October 9, 2024Share
WASHINGTON (AP) — Before there was a FiveThirtyEight model, or a New York Times election night needle, or 13 keys revealing “how presidential elections really work,” there was an economist named Louis Bean.
Bean achieved a sort of political fame for a book he wrote in 1948 that suggested, contrary to conventional wisdom, that Democratic President Harry Truman was favored to win the election, not Republican Thomas Dewey, the governor of New York.
“It is here, presumably, where the experts fall out, that the tea leaves and intuition enter in,” said a Times review of Bean’s book, “How to Predict Elections.” “The intuitive school has already counted Governor Dewey in by a landslide.”
Truman won.
When Bean predicted that Sen. Robert A. Taft, R-Ohio, would lose reelection in 1950, The Washington Post printed the headline: “Political Prophet Sees Taft Defeat.”
Today, there are more of these “prophets” than ever.
It may be no surprise that people seek certainty before elections happen, given what they see as the stakes: One recent Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found that about 7 in 10 Americans believe that the future of democracy is at stake in this year’s presidential election, and another found that about 6 in 10 Americans described themselves as being “fearful” about the possibility of Democrat Kamala Harris winning, Republican Donald Trump winning, or both.
Yet often the forecasters themselves are the first to push back on the characterization that they can tell you what’s going to happen.
“People I think are looking for oracles, right?” said Nate Silver, the founder of FiveThirtyEight and author of the Silver Bulletin, a new site analyzing elections. “They’re looking for people that seem to have some magic formula or have some almost quasi-mystical understanding of elections and trends.”
Charlie Cook, founder of the Cook Political Report, said he flinches “at the term ‘prediction’ because it suggests saying, ‘I think Smith will win.’” But, Cook said, ”In close races, how can someone say that without knowing precisely what will happen between now and the last vote is cast?”
Most people, Cook said, “don’t really understand probabilities, they want it to be definitive, either Smith or Jones, no hedging, no qualifying, no conditions, don’t give me nuance” and “they want us to say something that is unknowable.”
In a recent column, the Cook Report’s publisher and editor, Amy Walter, issued a “plea” to stop “attaching your hopes, dreams, and fears to one poll or a poll model on any given day.”
“Just take a breath and accept the fact that this election will be won on the margins,” Walter said in an interview.
Even Bean, whose election predictions made headlines for decades, cautioned against reading his analysis as gospel. A year before the 1968 election, he predicted, with a caveat, that Democratic President Lyndon Johnson would defeat Republican Richard Nixon: “If the Republicans win, you ought to forget it and say it was a good, tentative early analysis.”
Johnson ended up dropping out and his vice president, Humbert Humphrey, was the party’s nominee. Nixon won.
Before the 2022 midterms, a Q-and-A with David Wasserman appeared in New York Magazine with the headline “‘A Category 2 or 3 Hurricane Headed Democrats’ Way.’” The quote wasn’t wrong. It just wasn’t complete.
“Today, we’re somewhere between an asterisk year, where there’s a minimal wave, and a classic midterm election, where Republicans do quite well,” Wasserman said at the time. “I think this is probably a Category 2 or 3 hurricane headed Democrats’ way, just not a Category 4 or 5.”
Wasserman, senior editor and elections analyst at the Cook Report, said he was trying to convey that, despite the conventional wisdom, a massive Republican wave wasn’t imminent at all. But that’s not how many readers interpreted the headline. Republicans ended up making only modest gains.
“I have to be very careful on how I communicate our elections analysis because it’s so prone to misinterpretation,” Wasserman said.
Before the internet took off, analysts such as Cook and Stu Rothenberg offered their analysis in newsletters. Part of that included putting individual races in categories, on a scale from “safe” to “toss-up.” Those designations come from a combination of access to polling data, reporting in battleground states, in-person assessments of candidates and other factors that have made Cook and Rothenberg some of the foremost elections experts.
The ratings, however, are only a small part of the analysis these outlets provide.
Rothenberg, the founder of the Rothenberg Political Report, approached his newsletter as a venue to tell subscribers what he had observed and analyzed in the world of elections, communicating directly with the readers who knew and trusted him.
Sometimes news outlets would mark his ratings as news events, rather than as expert analysis.
“It was like I was coming down from Mount Sinai with the truth,” Rothenberg reflected.
The current surge of elections predictions is centered around models that use a combination of factors — polling, demographics, historical results, to name a few — to put a number on the probability that a race will turn out one way or the other. That can make it seem like forecasts are objective measurements, when in fact they rely on many subjective decisions, said Natalie Jackson, a longtime pollster who is now vice president at Democratic polling firm GQR.
“They’re treated as a lot more concrete than they should be,” Jackson said.
Nathan Gonzales, who runs Inside Elections, calls the process of placing races in a category to denote competitiveness “a combination of art and science.”
Accepting the uncertain
Paradoxically, even though the most reputable analysts urge caution, it’s those who present their predictions most confidently who tend to receive the most attention.
The digital era has made people even more uncomfortable with uncertainty.
“There’s information, and a lot of it, and there’s an industry constantly creating more information, and that makes us think we should have everything at our fingertips, including future election results,” Jackson said.
“Everyone is jockeying for attention, and there are some perverse incentives as well,” Wasserman said. “If your model shows a strong probability for one side, that’ll get the most ‘likes’ and ‘retweets’ on that side. A lot of the most nuanced and thoughtful approaches get drowned out.”
That need for certainty may also be one reason for a field of elections forecasters that is dominated by men, despite the large number of women who work in polling and political journalism.
There’s not a single reason that fully explains the gender disparity, though Silver believes that “men are given license to be more aggressive” and that sexism likely plays a role in who gets taken seriously.
Studies also suggest women are more cautious in professional settings, Jackson noted. It’s a quality that can be critical for conveying uncertainty of elections predictions but doesn’t necessarily get rewarded on social media or in headlines.
“People don’t like uncertainty,” Jackson said. “They like the person who tells them what’s happening.”
That human tendency is especially problematic in the elections forecasting business. Silver actually describes his forecasts as “models of uncertainty.”
“A definitive prediction,” Silver said, “is usually a sign that someone’s a charlatan.”
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Read more about how U.S. elections work at Explaining Election 2024, a series from The Associated Press aimed at helping make sense of the American democracy. The AP receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
AP
The final day of voting in the US is here, after tens of millions have already cast their ballots
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People stand in line during the last day of early voting, Saturday, Nov. 2, 2024, in Charlotte, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)Read More
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Voters line up to vote as a early voting location opened in Carmel, Ind., Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy)
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A person walks past a sign during early voting in the general election, Friday, Nov. 1, 2024, in Fall River, Mass. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)
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An election worker demonstrates mail-in ballot processing during a media preview at the Philadelphia Election Warehouse, in Philadelphia, Friday, Oct. 25, 2024. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
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A voter fills out their their ballot during early voting in the general election, Friday, Nov. 1, 2024, in Fall River, Mass. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)
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People line up to vote at the Chicago Early Voting Loop Supersite in Chicago, Thursday, Oct. 24, 2024. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)
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Bennett College student Zairen Jackson listens to a fellow student answer a question during a roundtable in Greensboro, N.C., Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton)
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FILE – A Delaware County secured drop box for the return of vote-by-mail ballots is pictured, May 2, 2022, in Newtown Square, Pa. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)
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An elections official sorts counted mail-in ballots on the first day of tabulation, Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2024, at the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Matt York)
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People wait in line to cast their ballots at an early voting location, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024, in Blue Springs, Mo. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)
BY CHRISTINA A. CASSIDY AND ALI SWENSONUpdated 11:05 AM GMT+6, November 5, 2024
WASHINGTON (AP) — Election Day 2024 arrived Tuesday — with tens of millions of Americans having already cast their ballots. Those include record numbers in Georgia, North Carolina and other battleground states that could decide the winner.
The early turnout in Georgia, which has flipped between the Republican and Democratic nominees in the previous two presidential elections, has been so robust — over 4 million voters — that a top official in the secretary of state’s office said the big day could look like a “ghost town” at the polls.
As of Monday, Associated Press tracking of advance voting nationwide showed roughly 82 million ballots already cast — slightly more than half the total number of votes in the presidential election four years earlier. That’s driven partly by Republican voters, who were casting early ballots at a higher rate than in recent previous elections after a campaign by former President Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee to counter the Democrats’ longstanding advantage in the early vote.
That included in the parts of western North Carolina hammered last month by Hurricane Helene. State and local election officials, benefiting from changes made by the Republican-controlled legislature, pulled off a herculean effort to ensure residents could cast their ballots as they dealt with power outages, lack of water and washed out roads.
By the time early voting in North Carolina had ended on Saturday, over 4.4 million voters — or nearly 57% of all registered voters in the state — had cast their ballots. As of Monday, turnout in the 25 western counties affected by the hurricane was even stronger at 59% of registered voters, state election board Executive Director Karen Brinson Bell said.
Brinson Bell called the voters and election workers in the hurricane-hit counties “an inspiration to us all.”
Besides the hurricanes in North Carolina and Florida, the most worrisome disruptions to the election season so far were arson attacks that damaged ballots in two drop boxes near the Oregon-Washington border. Authorities there were searching for the person responsible.
The absence of any significant, widespread problems has not stopped Trump, the Republican nominee, or the RNC, which is now under his sway, from making numerous claims of fraud or election interference during the early voting period, a possible prelude to challenges after Election Day.
He has mischaracterized an investigation underway in Pennsylvania into roughly 2,500 potentially fraudulent voter registration applications by saying one of the counties was “caught with 2600 Fake Ballots and Forms, all written by the same person.” The investigation is into registration applications; there is no indication that ballots are involved.
In Georgia, Republicans sought to prohibit voters from returning mailed ballots to their local election office by the close of polls on Election Day, votes that are allowed under state law. A judge rejected their lawsuit over the weekend.
Trump and Republicans also have warned about the possibility that Democrats are recruiting masses of noncitizens to vote, a claim they have made without evidence and that runs counter to the data, including from Republican secretaries of state. Research has consistently shown that noncitizens registering to vote is rare. Any noncitizen who does faces the potential of felony charges and deportation, a significant disincentive.
One case of noncitizen voting was caught during early voting last month and resulted in felony charges in Michigan after a student from China cast an illegal early ballot.
This is the first presidential vote since Trump lost to Joe Biden four years ago and began various attempts to circumvent the outcome and remain in power. That climaxed with the violent Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol to halt certification of the results after Trump told his supporters to “fight like hell.”
Even now, a solid majority of Republicans believe Trump’s lie that Biden was not legitimately elected, despite reviews, audits and recounts in the battleground states that all affirmed Biden’s win. A survey last month from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research showed Republicans remain much more skeptical than Democrats that their ballots will be counted accurately this year.
Seeking to rebuild voter confidence in a system targeted with false claims of widespread fraud, Republican lawmakers in more than a dozen states since 2020 have passed new voting restrictions. Those rules include shortening the window to apply or return a mail ballot, reducing the availability of ballot drop boxes and adding ID requirements.
On the last weekend before Election Day, Trump continued to falsely claim the election was being rigged against him and said a presidential winner should be declared on election night, before all the ballots are counted.
Vice President Kamala Harris urged voters not to fall for Trump’s tactic of casting doubt on elections. The Democratic nominee told supporters at a weekend rally in Michigan that the tactic was intended to suggest to people “that if they vote, their vote won’t matter.” Instead, she urged people who had already cast ballots to encourage their friends to do the same.
Through four years of election lies and voting-related conspiracy theories, local election officials have faced harassment and even death threats. That has prompted high turnover and led to heightened security for election offices and polling sites that includes panic buttons and bullet-proof glass.
While there have been no major reports of any malicious cyberactivity affecting election offices, foreign actors have been active in using fake social media profiles and websites to drum up partisan vitriol and disinformation. In the final weeks, U.S. intelligence officials have attributed to Russia multiple fake videos alleging election fraud in presidential swing states.
On the eve of Election Day, they issued a joint statement with federal law enforcement agencies warning that Russia in particular was ramping up its influence operations, including in ways that could incite violence, and likely would continue those efforts well after the votes have been cast.
Jen Easterly, the nation’s top election security official, urged Americans to rely on state and local election officials for information about elections.
“This is especially important as we are in an election cycle with an unprecedented amount of disinformation, including disinformation being aggressively peddled and amplified by our foreign adversaries at a greater scale than ever before,” she said. “We cannot allow our foreign adversaries to have a vote in our democracy.”
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The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Swenson reports on election-related misinformation, disinformation and extremism for The Associated Press.
AP
Georgia high court says absentee ballots must be returned by Election Day, even in county with delay
Updated 5:13 AM GMT+6, November 5, 2024
ATLANTA (AP) — Thousands of voters in Georgia’s third-largest county who received their absentee ballots late will not get an extension to return them, the state’s highest court decided on Monday.
Cobb County, just north of Atlanta, didn’t mail out absentee ballots to some 3,400 voters who had requested them until late last week. Georgia law says absentee ballots must be received by the close of polls on Election Day. But a judge in a lower court ruled last week that the ballots at issue could be counted if they’re received by this Friday, three days after Election Day, as long as they were postmarked by Tuesday.
The Georgia Supreme Court ruling means the affected Cobb County residents must vote in person on Election Day, which is Tuesday, or bring their absentee ballots to the county elections office by 7 p.m. that day.
The high court ruling instructs county election officials to notify the affected voters by email, text message and in a public message on the county election board’s website. And it orders officials to keep separate and sealed any ballots received after the Election Day deadline but before 5 p.m. Friday.
Board of elections Chair Tori Silas said the board will comply with the Supreme Court order, but it’s still up in the air whether ballots received after Election Day will be counted. The order only addressed a motion for a stay, so election officials will have to wait for the court’s final ruling to see whether votes received after Tuesday will be counted, she said in a statement.
To deliver the ballots on time, election officials in Cobb County were using U.S. Postal Service express mail and UPS overnight delivery, and sending the ballots with prepaid express return envelopes. The Board of Elections said that more than 1,000 of the absentee ballots being mailed late were being sent to people outside of Georgia.
Silas last week blamed the delay in sending out the ballots on faulty equipment and a late surge in absentee ballot requests during the week before the Oct. 25 deadline.
The original ruling extending the deadline stemmed from a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Southern Poverty Law Center on behalf of three Cobb County voters who said they had not received absentee ballots by mail as of Friday.
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Elon Musk is pledging to give away $1 million a day to voters for signing his political action committee’s petition backing the Constitution. The giveaway by the Donald Trump supporter is raising questions among some who say it’s a violation of the law.Read More
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America PAC lawyer Chris Gober speaks with members of the media ahead of a hearing at a City Hall courtroom in Philadelphia, Monday, Nov. 4, 2024. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
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Elon Musk speaks before Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden, Sunday, Oct. 27, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
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Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner arrives for a hearing at a City Hall courtroom, in Philadelphia, Monday, Nov. 4, 2024. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
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America PAC lawyer Chris Gober speaks with members of the media ahead of a hearing at a City Hall courtroom in Philadelphia, Monday, Nov. 4, 2024. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
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Elon Musk speaks before Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden, Sunday, Oct. 27, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
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Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, third from right, arrives for a hearing at a City Hall courtroom, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024, in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
BY MARYCLAIRE DALEUpdated 4:19 AM GMT+6, November 5, 2024Share
Follow live: Updates from AP’s coverage of the presidential election.
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The $1 million-a-day voter sweepstakes that Elon Musk ‘s political action committee is hosting in swing states can continue through Tuesday’s presidential election, a Pennsylvania judge ruled Monday.
Common Pleas Court Judge Angelo Foglietta — ruling after Musk’s lawyers said the winners are paid spokespeople and not chosen by chance — did not immediately explain his reasoning.
District Attorney Larry Krasner, a Democrat, had called the process a scam “designed to actually influence a national election” and asked that it be shut down.
Musk lawyer Chris Gober said the final two recipients before Tuesday’s presidential election will be in Arizona on Monday and Michigan on Tuesday.
“The $1 million recipients are not chosen by chance,” Gober said Monday. “We know exactly who will be announced as the $1 million recipient today and tomorrow.”
Chris Young, the director and treasurer of America PAC, testified that the recipients are vetted ahead of time, to “feel out their personality, (and) make sure they were someone whose values aligned” with the group.
Musk’s lawyers, defending the effort, called it “core political speech” given that participants sign a petition endorsing the U.S. Constitution. They also said Krasner’s bid to shut it down under Pennsylvania law was moot because there would be no more Pennsylvania winners before the program ends Tuesday.
Young also acknowledged that the PAC made the recipients sign nondisclosure agreements.
“They couldn’t really reveal the truth about how they got the money, right?” Summers asked.
“Sounds right,” Young said.
In an Oct. 20 social media post shown in court, Musk said anyone signing the petition had “a daily chance of winning $1M!”
Summers grilled him on Musk’s use of both the words “chance” and “randomly,” prompting Young to concede the latter was not “the word I would have selected.”
Young said the winners knew they would be called on stage but not specifically that they would win the money.
Musk did not attend the hearing. He has committed more than $70 million to the super PAC to help Trump and other Republicans win in November.
“This was all a political marketing masquerading as a lottery,” Krasner testified Monday. “That’s what it is. A grift.”
Lawyers for Musk and the PAC said they do not plan to extend the lottery beyond Tuesday. Krasner said the first three winners, starting on Oct. 19, came from Pennsylvania in the days leading up to the state’s Oct. 21 voter registration deadline.
Other winners came from the battleground states of Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Michigan. It’s not clear if anyone has yet received the money. The PAC pledged they would get it by Nov. 30, according to an exhibit shown in court.
More than 1 million people from the seven states have registered for the sweepstakes by signing a petition saying they support the right to free speech and to bear arms, the first two amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Krasner questioned how the PAC might use their data, which it will have on hand well past the election.
“They were scammed for their information,” Krasner said. “It has almost unlimited use.”
Krasner’s team called Musk “the heartbeat of America PAC,” and the person announcing the winners and presenting the checks.
“He was the one who presented the checks, albeit large cardboard checks. We don’t really know if there are any real checks,” Summers said.
Foglietta presided over the case at Philadelphia City Hall after Musk and the PAC lost an effort to move it to federal court.
Krasner has said he could still consider criminal charges, as he’s tasked with protecting both lotteries and the integrity of elections.
Pennsylvania remains a key battleground state with 19 electoral votes and both Trump and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris have repeatedly visited the state, including stops planned Monday in the final hours of the campaign.
Krasner — who noted that he has long driven a Tesla — said he could also seek civil damages for the Pennsylvania registrants. Musk is the CEO and largest shareholder of Tesla. He also owns the social media platform X, where America PAC has published posts on the sweepstakes, and the rocket ship maker SpaceX.
Dale covers national legal issues for The Associated Press, often focusing on the federal judiciary, gender law, #MeToo and NFL player concussions. Her work unsealing Bill Cosby’s testimony in a decade-old deposition led to his arrest and sexual assault trials.
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