At 6pm EST, Vigo County, Indiana polls closed, with a final 57-41 Obama victory in its computers but not made fully manifest for several hours. Vigo County has been the bellwether county for predicting the presidential election going back to 1964. I saw the numbers shortly after 7pm EST, and I knew we were on a roll.
At 8pm EST, Barack Obama should have been the predicted (not projected) winner of the election, based on the existing electoral vote results hidden in the EV computers (186) for states with their polls closed, plus New York and California to come.
The reason is as follows. By 8pm EST, the following states had all the data locked somewhere in their computers but hadn’t reported them: IN (1st to close -- including Vigo County -- still not called), VA, NC (still not called), OH, FL, MO (still not called), MI, NJ, plus others, and most importantly Pennsylvania, the must-win for McCain if he had any hope of winning.
More...
Take another look at those states. If you had known at 8pm EST they were in the Obama column, plus Vigo County totals, plus knowing what was to come in California and New York, would you have reacted (i.e., blogged) differently? At 8pm here in California, I know I would have.
By my count, at 8pm EST, Obama needed only 84 more electoral votes to reach 270. Counting just New York and California, not yet reporting their combined 86 EVs, the election was essentially over.
But we had to wait three long, miserable, nail-biting hours (until 11pm EST when the ad-hoc results thus far, plus the projections from polls closing on the West Coast) for the unanimous call.
Can you say election voting procedure reform?
Hey, don’t get me wrong. I jumped up and cheered like everyone else, and some of the political commentary was interesting. But the fact is, we could have known at 8pm rather than 11pm, had we been in possession of an election reporting system that gave us the data a lot sooner after the polls closed with the data already locked in.
This lag in reporting results had a curious effect: From 3pm-8pm, we were all forced to listen to a fantasy time line of events on CNN, MSNBC, even Fox News. I say fantasy because ad-hoc reporting of results when the data became available did not show the true historical time line of Obama’s electoral victory. As if Indiana, Missouri, and North Carolina are somehow squeakers. They aren’t. The data was all there somewhere, just not reported when their polls closed by 8pm EST.
My historical timeline for the 2008 election says that when Pennsylvania polls closed at 8pm EST, it was over -- politically and mathematically.
Considering my state of distress since the primaries, I could have spent the next several hours celebrating, and then gotten some much needed sleep.