Late night links.

* Here comes your Seinfeld reunion. God bless Larry David.

* You won't have Dr. Sanjay Gupta to kick around anymore.

* From My Unfinished Doctoral Dissertation on Breakfast Cereal.

* The artist-less art of Tim Knowles.

* ...each extra close friend in high school is associated with earnings that are 2 percent higher later in life after controlling for other factors. I had no idea I was so deeply disliked. (via MR)

* The headline reads, 'Diebold Voting System Has 'Delete' Button for Erasing Audit Logs.' No way that could be abused. Via MeFi.

Elections officials, party leaders and voters are wondering what happened this Tuesday in the Last Frontier, where turnout was surprisingly low and two lawmakers who have been the focus of FBI corruption investigations appear to have been reelected despite polling suggesting they would be ousted.

I saw it from Alex Greenberg first, but now everyone is asking: WTFAlaska?

The Onion is on the scene with news of an election upset in the making.


Voting Machines Elect One Of Their Own As President

It's funny because it's (still!) true, but it might be more funny if it weren't true...

A judge in Pennsylvania has the common sense to rule that backup paper ballots must be provided in the event of extensive voting machine failure.

A federal judge has sided with Pennsylvania voter groups and ordered election officials to provide paper ballots if half the machines break down Tuesday. The state had provided paper ballots only if all machines at a polling place broke down.

Why, oh why, are we using these things at all? The voting machines don't work.

Politics Monday.

* A funny thing happened to Michele Bachmann: after her neo-McCarthyite rant on Hardball, her opponent raised almost $400K overnight, with her primary opponent re-entering the race as a write-in candidate in protest. Bachmann's now desperately trying to backpeddle.

* Republican arrested for voter-fraud registration. ACORN still exonerated.

* West Virginia electronic voting machines don't work, either: purely by accident, they keep switching votes to McCain.

* Indiana gave us Shankar D and it currently feeds my good friends Brent and Lisa. But will it give us President Obama?

* Memo to the McCain campaign: the hate isn't working and your Hail Marys bombed. Try something else.

* Or, you know, don't: John McCain doesn't really seem to mind losing. A lot of "moderate" conservatives, too, seem okay with it, most of them rightly blaming Sarah Palin. I tell you this, I sure hope the far right manages to make her the nominee in 2012.

* It turns out McCain's also made himself far less available to the press than even Palin, having not taken any questions since September.

* Early voting starts in Florida today, where the right-leaning RCP average puts the race at +3.2 Obama, who will spend the next three days there campaigning with Hillary Clinton.

* More early voting facts and figures at The Caucus and (especially) elections.gmu.edu. TPM reports that the numbers so far favor Obama.

* Encouraging signs: McCain has $47 million left to spend. Obama has much, much more.

* In the New York Times, Dr. Lawrence Altman has concerns about the candidates' health, McCain's in particular.

* Al Gore will host an election night webcast for the Obama campaign as part of its "Building the New Energy Economy" theme.

* And Obama is your marketer of the year. Seems about right.

Eight years after the Recount, the voting machines still don't work. Via MeFi.

Hooray for Mondays.

* Yesterday we went to New York to see After Nature at the New Museum and Rififi—the film that singlehandedly gave birth to the very idea of French film noir, according to a quote Ryan saw in the newspaper—at the Film Forum's French Crime Wave series. I officially pronounce both things Worth Doing™, with an extra-special deliciousness shout-out to Kate's Joint at 58 Avenue B in the East Village.

* Rest in peace, Isaac Hayes.

* YouTube video tribute to Jack Kirby, king of comics. Via MeFi.

* I've already made what I consider the definitive comment on election polling, but in case you need more I recommend Matthew Yglesias's post today on tracking polls:

Or maybe none of that happened. As everyone knows, there’s sampling error associated with polling. As a result, if you poll 1,000 people on August 1 and then you poll 1,000 different people on August 2 you shouldn’t be surprised to see the results differ by several percentage points even in the absence of any change in the underlying public opinion. Beyond that, doing one poll per day throughout a long campaign would mean that you’d expect to see one or two relatively rare outlier results per month even under circumstances of total stasis. And as Alan Abramowitz points out if you look at the daily results this is actually what you see — incredible volatility with Obama’s lead oscillating violently around an average of 3-4 points. Since it’s not plausible that the public mood is really swinging anywhere near as rapidly as a very naive reading of the Gallup daily results would suggest, people could see that this is basically statistical noise in a stable race.

But Gallup doesn’t report its daily results, they report a multi-day rolling average. Abramowitz notes that if you report a ten day rolling average, you get a chart where nothing happens — Obama maintains a flat lead of 3-4 points. Again, a stable race. But if instead of doing either of those things you do what Gallup actually does and report a three day rolling average, you get these pleasant looking peaks and valleys in the race. The change over time here is large enough in magnitude (unlike on the ten day chart) but also slow enough in pace (unlike on the one day chart) to be plausibly interpreted as public opinion shifting in response to events. And since the human mind is designed to recognize patterns and construct narratives, and since it suits the interests of campaign journalists to write narratives, people interpret the peaks and valleys of the three day average as real shifts in public opinion. But while I have no way of proving that it’s just statistical noise and nothing’s really happening, the “nothing happening” narrative is completely consistent with the data, and it’s telling that the conventional narratives collapse when the data is presented in different ways whereas the “noise” narrative is consistent with multiple ways of displaying the information.

I'll only add that given the extent to which polls serve as a bulwark for functional democracy and accountable elections, the increasing sensationalization of polls as a means to drive news ratings rather than to reliably monitor public opinion is a very, very disturbing trend.

Polls should be boring. They should be so boring no one cares what they say.

* And Jesse Taylor has the best hypothetical history of the presidential primary I've seen:

Any number of things could have swayed the primary. But at the end of the day, Clinton apologizing for her Iraq vote (or just not having voted that way in the first place) would have guaranteed her the nomination. Or her running for Senate in Illinois.

I really think that's right. If she'd decided to run for Senate in Illinois rather than New York, she'd have had it.

* This whole "Democrats for Mitt" idea is probably kos's single stupidest self-inflicted wound since the whole mercenaries debacle. Given that his plan won't work, it's irrelevant—and even if it somehow does work, how does this idiotic game benefit any Democrat anywhere? That's assuming it doesn't completely blow up in the Left's face by accidentally propelling Guy Smiley to the White House. In any event, this sort of nonsense invites, legitimately I think, cries of "dirty tricks" from the right, which is something we have no reason to invite. Kos should either promote the "Vote Uncommitted" movement on the grounds that Clinton should not be rewarded by her failure to remove her name from the Michigan ballot, or else do nothing at all.

* Arizona governor Janet Napolitano has endorsed Obama, a significant endorsement not only regionally but also because of the way it plays into the gender dynamics that are now characterizing the Democratic race.

Meanwhile, bestsellers Anne Rice and Michael Chabon have each chosen a favorite, Clinton and Obama respectively. Call me when Lethem weighs in.

* And of course there's Kucinich's decision to pursue a recount in New Hampshire. For what it's worth, as someone who believes that both the 2000 and 2004 elections were influenced and perhaps stolen outright through manipulation of the apparatus of voting—cleansing of the voter rolls, selective closing of precincts, suspicious last-minute swings always redounding to Republican benefit, see RFK Jr. for more—I can perhaps regain some of my "sensible centrist" cred by saying I'm not at all impressed by the claims New Hampshire was stolen. For one, the exit polls I saw bandied about before the results began being reported already indicated that a blowout was not in progress; obviously the telephone polling missed a late surge in Clinton support probably generated in equal parts by sympathy for the beating she was getting in the press and by a belief that Obama couldn't lose. Likewise, the difference in results between hand-counted precincts and machine-counted precincts, despite the many shouts of Diebold!, is almost certainly a function of the demographics of those areas, not prima facie proof of malfeasance. In short, there's almost no comparison to 2004, where the exit polls were consistently wrong well outside the margin of error, and the irregularities were both more local and more pronounced.

The assertion of fraud whenever the results don't go our way only serves to discredit valid claims about electoral fraud and suspicious results.

Still, if I'm wrong and it turns out Kucinich is somehow onto something, I'll be the first one to admit it.

My dad is in town for a few days, so posting will probably be light even for a weekend. But there are a few interesting things going on today on the blogotubes:

* Diebold Election Systems is now Premier Election Systems. Please adjust your slogans and conspiracy theories accordingly. Via MeFi.

* Time to send a 'knowledge ark' to the Moon? I have a better idea. Also via.

* Modern Cosmology: Science or Folktale?, by the appropriately named Michael J. Disney.

* Lenin's Tomb looks at 2007 and 1929. With charts! For what it's worth, I think this overstates the case pretty significantly, but only because I place collapse a little further in the future.