Arnold Schwarzenegger was sworn in today as the new Governor of California. The recall election results in the Gubernatorial Section of the web site have been updated per the certified results from the California Secretary of State (the official Statement of Vote 2003 Statewide Special Election October 7, 2003). The official statement has over 1.4 million more votes than were included in the preliminary results (about 16% of the overall vote total). Interestingly, the overall percentages did not change much at all. Schwarzenegger gained about 0.8 of a percentage point overall and his decade result changed in only one county, San Bernardino, from > 50% to > 60%. Bustamante dropped about one percentage point and his decade result changed in only one county, Santa Clara, falling from > 40% to > 30%. McClintock picked up about 0.3 of a percentage point. Results for other candidates are about the same.

I have disabled the ability to create new threads in the old forum pages. Please start all new discussions in the new forum environment. Thanks.

I have installed a new forum based on the php/mysql open-source implemenation YABB SE. This will be a little painful, as you will need to reregister to use the new forum. Also, I don’t yet know of a way to import the old threads and posts.

There are a number of reasons for upgrading:
- more features!
- better reliability (old forum has a bug that “loses” threads)
- easier to remove problem posters
- hopefully faster!
- Party/Home State Avatars! (will be uploaded soon).

I encourage you to migrate to the new forum soon because I will begin locking threads in the old forum. I will keep it around only as an archive. Please feel free (as always) to provide feedback and comment on the new implementation.

I just discovered a small error in the Maine county map boundaries for the elections 1980 - 2000. It turns out that the town of Otisfield seceded from Cumberland County in 1978 and joined Oxford County. I have now refelected this border change in the appropriate maps.

It appears to be a very rare occurance for towns to switch counties. I don’t know of another example for New England towns in the 20th Century. In 1890, New Shoreham, RI (Block Island) changed from Newport to Washington County. Anyone know of other examples?

The files for the 2003 California Recall are now available. You may access them through the link below the “Special Features” heading on the home page. I plan to have the preliminary unofficial results posted early Wednesday morning. I won’t be a “real-time” source of data… but will have nice graphs and maps. Please feel free to comment on the implementation… I still have a little time to make modifications.

I have added the results of the 1999 Gubernatorial Elections. Only three states (KY, LA, and MS) hold their election for Governor in this off year. These offices are up for re-election in November. Results of the 2003 Gubernatorial races will be added to the site in the fall/winter.

Thanks to Dave (a different Dave) for pointing out the malfunctioning Bellwether page. I, from time to time, update the site and miss one of the links. Reporting site bugs is always appreciated. Also fixed 1984 mouse-over functionality.

Thanks to Eric Nyman for pointing out that the Gubernatorial pages were broken. I’ve fixed these. I also noticed that the javascript mouse-over maps for the 2000 general election summary page wasn’t functioning. This is also fixed.

Today, I updated (finally!) the 2000 Voter Registration and Turnout data and maps. Tennessee data is still not correct, though as the numbers are from December 1 and not prior to the November 7 election.
Registration data tends to be very suspect in my eyes. Differences between active and inactive (or suspense - depending on state), when and how voter rolls are purged, etc. tend to lead to significant inaccuracies. For example, Wyoming had 220,012 voters registered for 2000 and 218,351 votes cast (including the 4,625 (2.1%) votes cast as write-ins for Ralph Nader) - a whopping 99.3% voter turnout!

The main site pages have been updated again (although you should not see much difference) to improve efficiency of database maintenance. Please let me know if you find any problems, broken links, or get connection errors. I also made some minor updates to the new List of Presidents, adding party labels as suggested by some feedback.