What's up with electoral-vote.com?

A couple of weeks ago I sang the praises of electoral-vote.com, a website devoted to tracking state-by-state polling in the presidential race. It is a technically impressive site, making great use of maps and charts, and providing all the data for download if you want to do your own analysis.

Over the last couple of days, the webmaster has come to the conclusion that evil Republicans are trying to take his site down. I can't imagine why, as his presentation of the data has been very even-handed, even though he is a Kerry supporter. More likely his site has been deluged with visitors because it is the best at what it does.

Until a couple of days ago, he had a page showing a projected final result, based on applying statistical analysis to the poll results and projecting a trend in each state to November 2. The projected final consistently showed Bush with over 300 electoral votes, victorious everywhere except the Pacific coast, the Northeast, and a couple of Rust Belt states. As of yesterday, the projected final page is no longer linked from the home page, and may be down altogther. It just may be too depressing to put all that work into a beautiful website, only to show that your candidate is headed to certain defeat.

The webmaster, as I said, is a liberal, but has tried to be even-handed. He's bound to be overwhelmed by the success of his site and by the challenge of keeping up with the flood of state polls -- where they were once weeks apart, a battleground state may have four or five polls happening simultaneously. The webmaster has had to figure out how to account for overlapping polls in his methodology.

I'll bet he's exhausted as well as discouraged. If you appreciate his site as I do, you might drop him a note, thank him for his work, and give him permission to take a day off now and then to recharge the batteries.