Oops: Boston Globe’s premature election results
Several readers logged on to the Boston Globe website and encountered this premature graphic of town-by-town election results at around 1:00pm Eastern:
(Hat tip: Taylor and Thomas.)
They were obviously just testing out the graphic for tonight, but it’s easy to imagine many liberal staffers in Beantown praying things go Coakley’s way.
Here’s the Globe’s Joan Vennochi, for example, sneering at Brown’s military service in the Army National Guard as “pretty packaging.”
Tom Bevan has a related piece on the Boston Globe putting its thumbs on the Mass. Senate race scale (hat tip – reader Ken):
Let me see if I have this right: there have been six polls of the Massachusetts Senate race released in the last 24 hours, five of which show Scott Brown with leads of 5 points, 7 points, 9 points, 10 points and 10 points, respectively. Only one poll shows the race tied. None of the polls show Martha Coakley with a lead.
How then, you might ask, can the Boston Globe justify characterizing the race as a “dead heat?”
…I’m sorry, but citing the most favorable poll by far for Coakley and suggesting that it is “consistent” with the other polls is such a blatant distortion of the current state of the race that the Globe should be ashamed of itself. That would assume, of course, that the Globe is interested in providing its readers with the truth as opposed to putting its thumb on the scale in favor of a preferred political candidate.
Then again, people who get their political news solely from the Boston Globe are probably surprised to hear the race is a “dead heat” given that just eight days ago the Globe’s own poll affirmed to readers that Martha Coakley was leading Scott Brown by 17 points while other pollsters had the race far closer including one firm, PPP, that showed Brown up a point.
***
The Boston Phoenix also saw the graphic:
The map was fully interactive, so you could roll over and get town-by-town results — above we show Coakley taking Cohasset 56-43.
They took the map down shortly after I pointed it out on Twitter. But not before we Phoenix troublemakers got the screen shots!
Now, if the final numbers end up matching these, the Republicans may really have reason to question the integrity of the process…
It’s funny, except that it’s not.
***
On a somewhat related note, there will be no exit poll results today. John Fund explains:
The Massachusetts Senate race was a complete snoozer until January 5, when pollster Scott Rasmussen released a survey showing Republican Scott Brown trailing Democrat Martha Coakley by only nine points. That surprised many, but still wasn’t a true wake-up call that the race would be a barnburner. As late as January 10, the Boston Globe carried a headline trumpeting a poll showing Ms. Coakley with a 15-point lead. Mr. Brown’s surge was so sudden that many of the usual accoutrements of closely-contested elections are missing in the Bay State.
One is exit polls. There will be none tonight from Massachusetts, disappointing journalists and political scientists alike. As Mike Allen of Politico.com reports, the consortium of news outlets that normally organizes such surveys didn’t bother when the race was expected to be a blowout and now “wasn’t confident a reliable system could be built so fast.”
Another casualty of the expectation that the race would be a cakewalk for the Democrat will be an absence of absentee ballot fraud, the preferred method of putting an illegal thumb on the scale in a close race. Applications for absentee ballots had to be submitted by last Friday, providing little opportunity for those with ill intent to organize such an effort once they realized the race had tightened up.
Well, that’s not stopping some from trying.
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Oops?
I doubt it.
Dewey won! That was a bit premature also.
L
Aren’t they supposed to wait for election results?
ROFL.
If you add the votes for the “Kennedy” independent to the Scott Brown votes, you beat Coakley by 1.
Talk about wishful thinking!
You gotta love the news media. Is it fiction or non-fiction? You just can’t tell these days. Sigh.
At least no exit polling means that us liberals will be able to delude ourselves a little longer, as the networks won’t be able to call the race early based on them.
RCP had a good article this morning.
FTA: “Let me see if I have this right: there have been six polls of the Massachusetts Senate race released in the last 24 hours, five of which show Scott Brown with leads of 5 points, 7 points, 9 points, 10 points and 10 points, respectively. Only one poll shows the race tied. None of the polls show Martha Coakley with a lead.
How then, you might ask, can the Boston Globe justify characterizing the race as a “dead heat?”
More like accidentally on purpose.
Sure, they can claim it’s just a test of their pretty graphics, but they could/should have accomplished that offline.
The Boston Globe – not fit to be fish-wrap. It isn’t allowed in our house because it’s such toxic waste.
It was a typo, Ken. They meant it to read “dead meat” in characterizing Coakley’s chances.
But there’s still the issue of lost ballots being found in the trunk of a car that gives the election to Marcia/Martha/whatever her name is.
Thanks, Ken M. Just added a link to the RCP piece.
They may be wrong but at least they will be wrong in style. Beautiful graphics.
Good link, Ken.
A really big OOPS for Ken — didn’t read the blog post, just the title and the map. Then went back and retrieved the RCP link. Apologies for the redundancy.
dnc propoganda unit, massachusetts division. why worry about the facts, we’ll tell you what the facts are, and that’s all you need to know. BUSH DID IT.
After the coming Brown win, the next best news will be Obama admitting that US and UN bureaucrats have botched the Haiti disaster and he will have to ask the US military to take full administrative control of the relief effort. Oh the irony.
Wayfaring Stranger you are exactly correct as a former webmaster, I never ever uploaded anything to my live site…it was all done on a test system with absolutely no connection to the internet!
Tomorrow is Trunk Ballot Day!
All the little ACORN workers will be snuggled up in their beds tonight, anxious and giddy, dreaming about their morning trip to the car, where they will be sure to find that the Absentee Ballot Bunny has left them a big bag filled with exactly 1,000 ballots for their candidate. A magical day of the year!
I wonder if Google will have a special logo.
What do you want from a paper that can’t be sold?
Our little state has garnered such national interest, one could say, “Today, we are all Massholes!”
Yes, it will look like “Gregoire” written in crayon.
I expect stories like:
“Homeless man finds several hundred Absentee Ballots in dumpster while rummaging for a morsel of food” or some such tack. And by a remarkable coincidence all are marked for Coakley.
Tomorrow’s headline:
“MA Voter Turnout So Large, Some Districts Show More Coakley Votes Than Registered Voters!”
“I’d cheat to keep these bastards out”…….
And we’d be shocked to hear anything less. Acorn is working madly to get those dead voters up and in the booth.
Anyone remember Al Franken’s win in Minnesota? Keep looking for votes, keep counting.
This is what happens when the donk media become desperate and start hoping against hope: they end up looking like Dorothy on The Wizard of Oz, frantically clicking their heels together and chanting, “This isn’t happening! This isn’t happening! This IS NOT HAPPENING!” — then opening their eyes and seeing that they’re still in la-la land before closing their eyes and repeating the procedure.
It’s all they have left.
Election rigging? Who knows. Nothing would surprise me coming from that extreme left wing state of MA.
My wife just told me her boss went out at lunchtime to vote and was angry because they would not check his ID. Said the place was packed! This is in North Andover.
The DNC in MA will do everything it can to Franken the vote so that Coakley squeaks by with a win.
How many recounts will it take?
Are democrats already hiding ballots in cars to “find” later?
As many as needed to get Marcia across the line.
As far as the Dems are concerned there is no reason to wait until the ballots are actually counted to announce the detailed results. I am sure the outcome has been pre-determined some time ago. There is just no reason to wait until the last minute to get the details done…
“Franken the vote.” I like that. And if they can’t successfully “Franken the vote” in Massachusetts tonight then they will start referring to blowing an lead so completely as “Pulling a Coakley!”
It’s just as well that there will be no exit polls – how often are those things actually CORRECT?
I hear there is contest going on in Massachusetts to see who will manufacture the “winning vote” for “Marcia Coakley.”
The winner will get to spend a day looking at the windmills Obama is erecting just off Hyannis Point in front of Teddy’s old bedroom window…
dan708,
I heard from Rush that Rasmussen is going to do exit polls at his expense.
L
Also from the Boston Globe:
Brown supporters trying to suppress vote by bullying
“Scott Brown is running for U.S. Senate as a pleasant guy in a pickup truck. But a mean spirit drives some of his campaign.
At a West Springfield rally on Sunday, a Brown supporter yelled out ‘Shove a curling iron up her butt’. The remark was a crude reference to Brown’s opponent, Attorney General Martha Coakley, who was criticized in a recent Boston Globe story for failing to aggressively prosecute a sexual abuse case involving a curling iron.
After that charming rallying cry, a video clip shows Brown grinning and saying, ‘We can do this.’”
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/01/18/brown_supporters_trying_to_suppress_vote_by_bullying/
How short is the liberal media memory? I can recall much more vile comments and examples of bullying by democrats. Joan Vennochi is just another hypocritical poor loser.
They were obviously trying to influence the outcome of the race. I wonder though how that really works. If you tell people prematurely that Coakley won, maybe they won’t come out to vote for her. Conversely, maybe her opponents won’t come out because they think it doesn’t matter.
The Globe is betting on the second scenario but may be ill advised to ignore the first one.
Test? I seriously doubt it.
You don’t test things like this on the main public-facing webserver.
Given that screen capture, it looks very much as if some kind of fix is in, and the Globe is a leading player in the fixing. Is this a criminal conspiracy to fix an election? With a newspaper cooperating? For shame. (As if they had any shame.)
They are nuts. They list my town as a dark blue, a town that voted for Bush and McCain in the last two presidential elections.
FIFY
How much would anyone want to bet that the 50%-49% result will be the actual one that is reported when it’s all over. The Boston Globe’s “results” are the phony results that were decided before the people went to the polls. The whole affair is a fraud.
Well…so much for all the nonsense conspiracy theories spouted here.
The real one has a hint more red.
The Globe was simply perpetuating a graphic lie they hoped would influence voter behavior . . . it didn’t work but it says a lot about that left wing rag.
So all those dozens of times that a paper accidentally and prematurely put up some famous person’s obituary, were they hoping to influence that person’s death?
Don’t be silly (and unhinged). Even our host knows it was a simple mistake.
premature?! Try, completely fraudulant! Coakley’s numbers always trailed Brown’s since the first numbers came in.
Um. You missed he point. Online news sites make mistakes like this all the time. Like posting an obit (they have prewritten ones for most famous people that are knocking at the door) before the person is dead.
And in this case, as MM said:
You won.
Be happy.
Don’t look like an idiot by chasing boogeymen.