Carly Carioli at the Phoenix caught the Globe in a hilarious gaffe sometime this morning. He reports:
Boston.com briefly put up this map of the final results of today’s election — some 8 hours before polls closed!
As you can see, over 2 million people voted, with Coakley eking out a 50-49 victory.
The map was fully interactive, so you could roll over and get town-by-town results — above we show Coakley taking Cohasset 56-43.
Here’s the big picture:
And here’s the roll-over on Cohasset:
Funny thing is, those numbers are probably as good a guess as any for what’s going to happen today. Let’s hope that the Globe’s crystal ball is right!
Please share widely!
demolisher says
If they had Brown winning?
sabutai says
Or is this data from an old election (I can’t recall anything that went 50-49 recently…Kerry-Weld)? It’s awfully exact stuff, and I’d expect just a system test to run numbers along the lines of 9,000 to 7,000.
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p>I particularly like how Coakley has more percentage points even though Brown got more votes. How many electoral votes does New Braintree have?
smadin says
That’d be my guess, anyway. Maybe they farmed it out to 538’s bank of simulations.
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p>But I see Coakley 1,032,450 to Brown 1,011,802 up there – Brown has fewer votes, not more. I heard on the radio that Galvin’s predicting “up to” 2.2 million votes, so those are plausible totals.
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p>[Obligatory tinfoil-hat theory elided.]
dcsohl says
I don’t even think it was projections. I think somebody was testing to make sure their map stuff still worked, made up a bunch of semi-random numbers, and was testing it. But they accidentally hit the “live” switch instead of the “test” switch.
smadin says
Not that I dispute that funny coincidences can and do happen with random numbers, of course, so you may very well be right – and I’m certain you’re right that it was an “oops, this was just supposed to be on the test site!” situation – but those are remarkably plausible numbers to be random.
hoyapaul says
while the top line numbers looked plausible, I caught a few of the town-by-town numbers and they were pretty funny. Numbers like Brown getting 47% in Boston and still losing, and Coakley getting 97% in Pembroke.
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p>So really just a bunch of random numbers that were plugged in to the town totals. No need for a conspiracy theory!
syphax says
smadin says
trickle-up says
if Kennedy only gets 1% of the vote.
dcsohl says
I think a lot of people, who would otherwise cast a protest vote, will end up voting for the “mainstream” candidate who is closest to their opinions, to prevent the other “mainstream” candidate from getting in.
sabutai says
I say a similar thing happens to Tim Cahill in October 2010.
trickle-up says
unfortunately.
stomv says
Erm… it does show Coakley with 1.03M votes, Brown with 1.01M. But, what I don’t get is this: if you’re going to populate it with data to debug/test/whatever, why not do it properly?
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p>1. Test endpoints — see what happens to a town or pct with 0 votes, -1 votes, 2^16+1 votes, etc.
2. Populate with random. Maybe random with a particular distribution, but random.
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p>Using data that could be mistaken for live is not usually a good idea…
dan-cohen says
…since Coakley lost Brookline and got 91% in Lancaster.
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p>A good laugh, now back on the doors everyone!
davemb says
I’m willing to bet a lot of money that Brown won’t carry Amherst as the Globe map has him doing. The last Republican to carry Amherst was probably Silvio Conte in 1990, if even then so I don’t think these are any kind of historical numbers.
fdr08 says
When you outsouce IT to the Phillipines!
lynne says
But I won’t get greedy. đŸ™‚
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p>Sorry, as someone who has to stage “live but not live” tests of websites all the time, this was fairly inexcusable.
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p>For gawd’s sake, Globe, has anyone in your development department heard of an .htaccess file?? Yeesh!
stomv says
Check this out:
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p>Coakley == 1,032,450 votes
Br + Kn == 1,032,451 votes == 1,011,802 + 20,649
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p>Kennedy is a spoiler!
johnd says
What would you say and what would many BMGers say of the Herald did the same thing with Brown winning. Be honest!!!!
dcsohl says
How is it anything other than a hilarious gaffe no matter who puts it up? Are you seriously suggesting that anybody’s reaction to this should be something other than pointing and laughing?
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p>Put another way, what’s your reaction to the current story?
the-caped-composer says
. . . does not pertain to the given result. It pertains to the ineptitude on the part of the newspaper, such that they would go “live” with something that was obviously meant to be only a test.
mr-lynne says
The four exclamation points are because it is pre-supposed that liberals lie.
johnd says
It is presupposed that people with a bias are too tribal to be honest.
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p>Even the smallest infraction by Scott Brown or Brown supporters was urned into conspiracy. It is so apparent to me that if the Boston Herald had made this same mistake, the Coakley army here on BMG would be calling for heads to roll. I’m sorry that BMGers like yourself cannot be honest and admit it.