By Orestis Papakyriakopoulos, Christelle Tessono, Arvind Narayanan, Mihir Kshirsagar With the 2022 midterm elections in the United States fast approaching, political campaigns are poised to spend heavily to influence prospective voters through digital advertising. Online platforms such as Facebook, Google, and TikTok will play an important role in distributing that content. But our new study […]
The Silver Effect: What We Can Learn from Poll Aggregators
November 9, 2012 by
For those who now think Nate Silver is god, here’s a question: Can Nate Silver make a prediction so accurate that Nate Silver himself doesn’t believe it? Yes, he can–and he did. Silver famously predicted the results of Election 2012 correctly in every state. Yet while his per-state predictions added up to the 332 electoral […]
Voting technology issues in Virginia on election day
November 8, 2012 by
I spent Election Day in one of the command centers for the 866-OUR-VOTE hotline. The command center was accepting calls from New Jersey, Maryland, DC, and Virginia, but 95% of the technology issues were from Virginia. I was the designated “technology guy”, so pretty much everything that came through that center came to me. This […]
Get Out the Vote, Cee-Lo Style?
November 6, 2012 by
This semester, Ed Felten and I are teaching a Freshman Seminar called “Facebook: The Social Impact of Social Networks.” This week, the class is discussing a recent article published in the journal Nature, entitled “A 61-Million-Person Experiment in Social Influence and Political Mobilization“. The study reveals that if Facebook shows you a list of your […]
Grading the absentee-in-person experience in Virginia
November 5, 2012 by
[Each year, I write a “my day as a pollworker” report. This year, I’m not a pollworker, or election officer in Virginia parlance, for a variety of reasons, so I decided to write about my voting experience.] I just got back from “in-person absentee voting”. This is similar to but not the same as early […]
