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Having run a big online poll and seen some abuse, I had to share this story posted on the Music Machinery blog. Every year, Time collects their list of 100 most influential people and conducts an online poll. Most years it’s a healthy ballot-stuffing competition between Stephen Colbert fans and fans of the Korean singer Rain.

You can see the list of the top 100 this year here. Does anything look strange to you?

Through a combination of seeding forums with misdirected vote links and clever vote bots, the fans of 4chan not only got moot to the number 1 position but spelled out a message with the first letters of the following positions. That’s a truly amazing hack, and a surprisingly mild response from Time’s developers.

This is also an interesting look into the kind of tactic used by web spammers. Funny in this case, but this is the kind of thing we’re up against.

I saw an AP story on MSNBC titled Oops: Colbert wins space station name contest. I’m a bit of an expert when it comes to letting the internet vote on a name, if there is such a field of expertise, and the article strikes me as wrongheaded.

It’s not an “oops” that Colbert won, nor is it a problem or a mistake. Assuming the result is due to voting viewers and the web’s general affection for Colbert, and not a voting bot, this is exactly what NASA wants. Or at least, what it should have wanted.

The point of putting something up for a vote online is to involve people in a fun way and come out with a result you might not have otherwise. You can’t have the wisdom of the crowds without expecting a bit of whimsy.

Here’s to NASA naming their module after Colbert.

Thanks to everyone who voted and sent us your suggestions. We’re getting very close to the due date, so I’m officially shutting down votes tomorrow. We’ve decided to make the final choice once the baby is born, just in case the kid has some suggestions of their own. Watch this space for news, hopefully soon.

In the mean time, here are a few things I’ve learned:

• Spreadsheets are the next frontier in web2.0 social networking. No kidding.
• Blog posts about babies are much more popular than posts about statistics.
• Let random people vote on a baby name over the internet, and a few will spam the form or enter nasty stuff, but the vast majority will give you helpful suggestions. Way to go, Internet.

Here’s the form, get your vote in by end of day Friday, November 14th.

If you can’t see the poll, follow this link to get to it.

It’s just two days until the U.S. Presidential election.  I thought I’d talk a bit about how elections are covered with information graphics, specifically maps.

To get things started, CNN has has a map of early voting participation numbers.  For some states, they even have participation by party and by county.  This particular map is disappointing – no real effort is made to illustrate the information, all the real data is just text in callout boxes.  It might even be more efficient just to put the data in a big table like this page at George Mason University.

Real Clear Politics’ mapping application is interesting because it gives you to ability to run your own scenarios, switching swing states back and forth to see the result. You can also compare results from previous elections, all the way back to 1968.

But geographic projections don’t tell the whole story -  Political Irony has a great map demonstrating exactly why the Electoral College is a terribly undemocratic way to choose a president – voters in some states have effectively four times the influence of voters in others:

I’m not the first person to notice this of course, so there have been many efforts to show cartograms based on electoral pull.  There’s one at the Dispassionate Liberal and one at American Street, both using data from Pollster.com.

I like the analysis at FiveThirtyEight.com a little better, so I’ll show the latest cartogram from Frontloading HQ:

This map tries to keep the states in the right shapes, if they’re a bit disconnected.  Taking a cue from Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman at the University of Michigan, here’s a cartogram using the current data from FiveThirtyEight:

A couple of notes – Blue is safe for Obama, Red is safe for McCain.  I compressed “leans” and “likely” categories into one color because it’s late and my eyes are tired.  Also, I’m missing Alaska and Hawaii, I’ll try to find a base map that has them and update.

By the way, here’s another page with interesting maps of 2004 election results analyzed in a number of interesting ways.

I’m still on the lookout for the best map to watch election results as they come in on Tuesday – any suggestions?

Now that we have more than 10,000 votes in our baby name poll I can start doing some basic statistical analysis.  One of the things I’d like to do is figure out which names are popular in our poll, but still relatively unique compared to all those other babies being named out there.

Before I get to that, though, I want to make sure that our vote totals are significantly different from random.

Heads up:  What follows is a basic intro to some concepts in statistics that I’m writing mainly to keep myself sharp.  I haven’t done much research recently and I don’t want to get rusty.  Feel free to read along, at the end I’ll show you how to detect the influence of Australians.

Since the data for names included in the poll is completely different from the write-in votes, we’ll concentrate on the pre-selected names for now.

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