Website gives Kerry an edge
2004-11-01 22:14
New York - A popular website that predicts the outcome of the US presidential election based on polling data, projects a victory for Democratic challenger John Kerry.
The site, www.electoral-vote.com, is run by Andrew Tanenbaum, an American living in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
It features a map of the United States in shades of blue, red, pink and white and a tally of which way the electoral college vote will go if the most recent polls are correct.
(White is for tied, light blue is for states that are weakly leaning toward Kerry, pink is for states that are weakly leaning toward Bush.)
Updated as the poll numbers from each state arrive, it has become one of the world's 1 000 most popular websites and gets 600 000 visitors a day, according to Tanenbaum.
Late Monday morning, the day before the election, the site had Kerry ahead of Bush, 298 electoral votes to 231.
A total of 270 is needed to win. Each state is awarded a certain number of electoral votes related to their population, and in all but two states, whoever wins the most votes captures all of that state's electoral votes.
Tanenbaum, a computer science professor at Vrije Universiteit, started the website as a means to register other overseas voters.
Until last week, the site featured a banner ad giving voter registration information to overseas voters.
A Democrat, and a former lobbyist for the Sierra Club, Tanenbaum ran for a spot as an overseas delegate to the Democratic National Convention, but lost.
- AP