Hot off the presses (or, at least, I’m not seeing it in the news or del.icio.us links, yet): Downhill Battle has declared all-out war on Internet Explorer, piggybacking on Google’s AdSense referral program. The offensive includes cut-and-paste code to foist Firefox on visitors to your site. Every one that downloads Firefox turns into a dollar for you.

[A] few days ago, Google announced that they would pay $1 for each referral to Firefox with Google Toolbar. The idea popped back out of the idea pile. Google has just set the stage for Firefox to literally “take back the web” and go from 11% of browsers to over 50%. If people can now spread Firefox, stick it to Microsoft, and make money for each user switched, an aggressive strategy just got more appealing. So here’s the plan. Today we launched two websites: explorerdestroyer.com and killbillsbrowser.com. The first site has some free scripts that you can put on your website to encourage users to switch. The scripts will detect whether a visitor is running Internet Explorer, and if they are, it will either show a splash page telling them to switch or it will put a big switch banner at the top of the page (depending on how serious you want to get). If you sign up for Google’s referral program, you can make $1 for each person that switches. Plus you’ll be saving the world.

I haven’t been able to find much this referral program, except for this thin news article. Hopefully, all the dots connect. As the Downhill Battle folks write: “Google gave us a carrot. Now take the stick and beat IE’s ass.”

California resoundingly struck down every state-wide ballot measure, striking a severe blow to his already sagging popularity.

One of the most conentious (and non-Schwarzenegger authored) props was the restriction on abortion measure. Prop 73 would have required that all parents of underage women seeking abortions receive a 48-hour notification, before the abortion could proceed. The left coast lived up to its name by striking down this conservative measure. Interestingly, one of my roommates quipped that the likelihood of a county voting liberal/progressive (represented in red below) might be correlated to its connection to salt water:

Another one of my favorite observations was how San Francisco stands on its own. Take for example Prop 80 that would have required the state government to regulate the derregulated and fraud-prone energy industry (recall the rolling brown/blackouts of 2000). Notice the small speck of blue below? You may need to click on the image to enlarge it. Yup, that’s San Francisco County, the lone supporter of the proposition:

You go San Francisco, stand up for what you believe in!

Please being me a Brad doll for Xmas (pictures enclosed). I’ve been a very good boy this year, so please leave me something good in my stocking… Thanks Santa, -Logan

In December of 2000, Caltech and MIT performed a voting accuracy study, which calculated the “known error” rate for various kinds of voting processes. They didn’t assume any byzantine failures or malicious actors, no externalities such as roadblocks or disasters or suspiciously designed ballots. The study was simply an evaluation of the inherent faults of the vote casting and counting methods. The results showed that each method was accurate to between 1 and 2 percent, with punch cards the best, hand counted paper the worst, and e-voting at about the middle of the pack. Keep in mind that these are “known” errors, cases in which it was discovered to be certain that the vote cast was not correct. These are by definition a strict lower bound, so the real error rates are certainly higher… their exact value cannot be known.

A recent University of Washington study using these minimum criteria to examine the 2004 elections showed that the results of three Senate campaigns, one Gubernatorial election, and the presidential electors of three states were statistically useless. In other words, if you ran time backwards and held these elections again in the same exact circumstances, they would be just as likely to come out the other way.

The important point here is that falling inside the margin of error is not as simple as saying that the results are “possibly wrong.” It’s equivalent to saying that we don’t actually know what the result was. If you have a telescope that can only see objects at a certain distance at 1-meter resolution, should you be relied on to read the newspaper over my shoulder? Better analogy: would you let me (20/600 uncorrected vision) drive your car without my contact lenses?

Now take a look at the (still tabulating) results from some key referenda in tonight’s California special election:

73 N Minor’s Pregnancy 2,563,070 48.9 2,674,283

74 N Teacher Tenure 2,464,243 46.6 2,812,781

75 N Public Union Dues 2,574,991 48.8 2,695,427

These have spreads of 2.2 points, or +/- 1.1 from even, 6.8, or +/- 3.4, and 2.4, or +/- 1.2, respectively. If a scientist published these types of results from an experiment that used methods of the above error rate, they would be lucky to just have their data called inconclusive. What does that say about our voting process? Should we really be ammending our state constitution by these criteria?

Update: The final spreads ended up being a bit wider, but let’s not be fooled into thinking they are authoritative. “My side” won, but does that really mean anything? I maintain that the types of margins we see in these elections are roughly equivalent to a guess as to what the populace thinks at any given moment. The results are especially worthless when you consider the massive volatility in pre-election poll data, indicating the number of voters who voted not out of conviction, but something closer to confusion. This process does not work, and must be changed.

Obligatory-bright-side-comment: Congratulations to new Virginia governor Tim Kaine, whose victory is well beyond any statistical questioning.