but more of a brown-green (color scheme courtesy of old US Government world maps, original map from–and hat-tip to–http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/):

McCain majorities by county:

Obama majorities by county:

“Count it,” reads the headline of this story about my student Becca Cooper, but I’ll let her expression speak for itself.  And this is before she knew who would win.

Source: Detroit Free Press, November 5, 2008

Google Image Result for http://thebruceblog.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/obama_hope.jpg

I’ve used up another 15 seconds of fame, this time in the Monday, September 29, Vitebski Kurier:

Translation:

Did expectations come true?..

Our attempt to have a conversation with one of the long-time observers of OSCE, coordinator Gary Ouellet from Canada were not successful. He providently refused by phone or other means to make any evaluations or comments on organization or process of the elections. His interpreter politely advised us to address all the questions to the headquarters of OSCE in Minsk. Nor did we manage to meet any other observers at polling stations to ask for their impressions. Nevertheless we were lucky to have a brief conversation with short-time observers Astrid Ganterer and Kevin Deegan-Krause (see photo) before the meeting of the District Election Commission of Vitebsk’s DEC #19 in the regional state administration building. It is their first time in Belarus, and they saw some parts of Vitebsk and Minsk. The representatives of OSCE mission persistently avoided all the questions connected to the elections. They kept silence, not revealing if their expectations came true or not. One could see either exhaustion or disappointment in their faces. Still, our foreign guests promised to answer all questions at the press-conference in Minsk…” (Thanks to our translator and several friends for clarifying the Russian).

Actually I am not allowed to clarify what emotion was on my face that day, but if it was reflective of the faces of those who reported for the OSCE in Minsk that day,  then “disappointment” would seem to be an appropriate choice (see http://www.osce.org/minsk/).

P.S. Search the picture above closely for the Hidden Lukashenka. If you enjoy that, you might want to try this Hidden Picture.

P.P.S. More election observation pictures (taken by others) online at:

• http://picasaweb.google.ca/garyouellet/BelarusSTO2008?authkey=TCGk_rl4T0I#
• http://picasaweb.google.ca/garyouellet/BelarusReinholdPhotos2008?authkey=n1qrHhk-Ing#
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/12766498@N03/

I saw the logo of the Conservative Democrats of Slovakia (KDS) for the first time today (apparently I live a sheltered life; or maybe it’s the party).

My first thought was that it was a surprisingly attractive and iconic design for a party that seemed to take so long to get its act together.  My second, and rather less charitable thought was that it is less than ideal for a party with less than 1% support in the polls to choose the asterisk as its symbol.  Or perhaps this, too, is just a clever way to sneak into the public opinion polls:

Smer, 44%
SDKU, 13%
…
Other*

My third thought related to the design.  Am I mistaken in thinking that this is merely the existing KDH (Christian Democratic Movement) logo

With an X through it?
You decide:

John Cleese speaks:

Also available in Slovak, here

I have occasionally expressed concern about the recent numbers coming out of UVVM, particularly those for the Party of the Hungarian Coalition.  Something is wrong there. In the spirit of my heroes at http://www.fivethirtyeight.com, I decided to take a look at the data.  The chart below calculates the total month-to-month differences in party results (up, or down) and then measures these as a percentage of a party’s average support during that period (i.e. a party with an average support of 20 percentage points and average monthly volatility of 1 percentage points would be listed at 5%).  I have done the calculations for the overall average (all of the polls within a given month) and for UVVM and for the two electoral periods for which we have good data: 2002-2006 and 2006-present.

What is not surprising here is that UVVM alone has much higher levels of volatility than the overall average which includes multiple polls that smooth out the monthly variability.  What is surprising here is the fact that the the difference in volatility of SMK between UVVM and the overall average grew (from 4% to 6%) even as the differences between UVVM and other surveys declined.  Between 2002 and 2006 the volatility of SMK was second to the bottom (after Smer) in both UVVM and overall averages.  Between 2006 and 2008, the SMK volatility stayed the second lowest in the overall averages but rose to highest in UVVM by a wide margin.

This is all particularly surprising since the overall volatility of the Hungarian Coalition’s electorate have remained remarkably stable over time, as the following table demonstrates:

There is an easy explanation for this:  UVVM has had difficulty maintaining its Hungarian sample.  This is understandable–this is a difficult task–but it is important to keep this potential problem in mind rather than to assume that all polls actually reflect representative samples.  This should be a question of analysis rather than assumption.  It also raises questions about the representativeness of this sample (and that of other pollsters) for other parties.

I am deeply grateful to UVVM for all the support they have provided to me over time. This is a problem that needs attention but I am hopeful that the institute can return to its previous levels of excellence.

UVVM Monthly Report: October 2008

Also available in Slovak, here

UVVM reverted to the mean this month, its poll numbers pulling back from extremes for most of the major parties and toward the results obtained by other pollsters.  There are gains to be made from a comparative analysis of various polls, but as usual the major papers (http://spravy.pravda.sk/opozicne-strany-si-mierne-polepsili-dvg-/sk_domace.asp?c=A081015_151947_sk_domace_p04)
present these without a hint of analysis from ČTK  which itself takes these numbers as givens rather than as a particular (and with regard to SMK, particularly troubling) survey.

Otherwise (and maybe this is why the papers do not bother to put more energy into it) there is not much to see here that is new:

Smer leads, but not as much as before.  SDKU moves slightly upward into clearer (but far distant) second place while SNS sinks toward the other three major parties:

The movement of the mid-size parties is clearer here.  Particularly troubling is the movement for SMK.  A party which has by far the most stable overall electorate and the most stable historical voting patterns has the highest level of volatility in month-to-month poll numbers of any major party in UVVM surveys (see a more in-depth post here: http://www.pozorblog.com/#/p=110).  (HZDS has also been rather volatile, and while it is possible that this party’s support is actually a bit more volatile, its major swings also seem to be more the result of survey networks than actual shifts in public opinion.)

Aggregated according to blocs, the shifts above mean a slightly closer gap between opposition and coalition, but no different than the overall average for the period.

Vote blocs, too, stay roughly the same.

And Smer is still likely to be able to build a coalition with a single party of its own choosing.

As always, the actual polling numbers are available online at Google Docs:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pdhlCClsiyAMi39bLFpY_Zg

And the most recent three months are below in tabular format (using “iframe” which may not work on all browsers).

Amid constant news of contraction and decline this week, there is (slightly old) news of yet another small but significant expansion: machine translation to and from Slovak.   Machine translation is old news these days (though it is no less remarkable for our acceptance of it) and is no panacea (it is still bad enough that without a basic understanding of the language it is easy to be deeply confused or seriously misled), but it is nice to see Slovak make the list of Google Translate languages.

For this blog it makes little difference–the population of those who are interested in what goes on here but cannot read English is infinitesimal–but it is nice to be able to make the gesture and all subsequent posts here will include a link like the one below allowing automatic translation.

http://74.125.93.104/translate_c?hl=en&sl=en&tl=sk&u=http://www.pozorblog.com/%3Fp%3D108&usg=ALkJrhgjlN7kuRnEQTuh4dfXjTjpiKFfUw

I hope in future to go one step further and install a plugin that makes that process even easier.

It has occurred to me that it might be useful for me (and maybe for others) to keep track of articles in the Slovak press that are interesting or in some way provocative and that the easiest way to do this through the social-bookmarking service called del.icio.us

I’ve therefore begun to use the tag ‘pozorblog’ in del.icio.us and all the articles with that tag are listed on a specific page:

http://delicious.com/kdecay/pozorblog

Thanks to del.icio.us this has its own RSS feed so anybody so obsessed can keep track of postings in this area. We shall see if this experiment goes anywhere.