

Watch Twitter users say who they voted for in real time - majia
http://twithinks.mit.edu/ivoted

======
btilly
The categorization is somewhat...suspect. This is from the latest tweets "for
Romney".

\- _hate Americans who are like 'I always vote republican so of course I voted
for romney'_

\- _I'm not afraid to say who I voted for. I voted for Obama cause lets face
it, Romney's just a dickhead._

\- _Sweet satire. "Why I voted for Mitt
Romney"[http://www.salon.com/2012/11/06/why_i_voted_for_mitt_romney/...](http://www.salon.com/2012/11/06/why_i_voted_for_mitt_romney/..).
_

That said, from polls we know that the overall vote is going to be very close
to 50/50, so the lopsided totals are a sign of skew in Twitter users, not the
country.

~~~
fl3tch
I saw one that said, "I would have voted for Obama if he had accepted my
Farmville request", and it ticked up for Obama.

~~~
tarice
I just saw one talking about the website itself. Both sides ticked up one.

So yeah, it's not exactly accurate, but hey - it's fun to watch.

~~~
nashequilibrium
I agree but dont you thing that there is value to be extracted from the two
phrases "voted for Obama" and "voted for Romney"?

~~~
brk
No, because those phrases do not appear to be linked to who voted or how they
voted in any statistical meaning way. All you can derive from this is that on
election day people are talking about the election in high volume. Hardly a
revolutionary insight.

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majia
What we used for counting is slightly different from what you see in the
Twitter widgets (yeah, those tweets are from Twitter directly). In our
backend, we have a pretty conservative filter that matches a bag of phrases,
such as "voted for barrack obama", "voted for pres obama", etc. The accuracy
is over 95%. Of course, political tweets are full of sarcasm and humor, and
Twitter is full of demographic bias. This is just a fun project for us.

~~~
dangrossman
How many of the votes are from the 25,000+ people that retweeted Michelle
Obama saying 'voted for President Obama'?

<https://twitter.com/MichelleObama/status/265906946530496513>

You'd probably clean up a whole lot by ignoring tweets containing "RT". That
seems to be much of the stream.

~~~
majia
We don't remove RT tweets, but instead, we only count each user once. If a
user retweeted Michelle, s/he probably will vote for Obama. But if a user have
a few tweets in favor of Obama, it's counted once only.

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kristopolous
To me the most interesting thing is that it slightly resembles my gold
standard for polls:
[http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2012/president/2012_...](http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2012/president/2012_elections_electoral_college_map.html)

That site, btw, seems to be out of the damned future with their predictions.

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jeremiep
I saw one saying "I voted Romney because he is white."

My faith in humanity just lost a few more points here.

Watching these is kinda depressing, how is a vote supposed to mean something
when so many meaningless people are using it?

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tlrobinson
Of course this is very much subject to selection bias.

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jschmitz28
My favorite one so far under the people who "voted for Obama" is:

I couldn't sleep at night had I voted for Obama or Romney. #IVotedGaryJohnson

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sritch
I wonder if this is skewed at all based on whether more twitter users are Dem.
or Repub already.

~~~
travem
I would say that given Obama is leading in Utah according to this we can
safely assume there is some skewing going on.

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Xcelerate
Very interesting. Of course, the map is biased to those who use the internet
(which is why it shows Obama winning every state), but I wonder if this could
still be used for predictions by normalizing each state to a known percentage
for the "safe" states.

~~~
calciphus
Fortunately, we'll have the data to compare against actual state or county
results, since most of these folks leave their location settings enabled, too.

While it won't predict this location, correlational data could be applied for
future elections assuming the primary political leanings of the electorate
don't change too much in 4 years.

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nivertech
looks like Romney voters don't use twitter ...

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siculars
Twitter users vote blue 2 to 1. Not surprising, incorrect classification
aside.

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chaz
Here's one from Bluefin Labs: [http://thecrowdwire.org/post/35128521367/our-
live-social-med...](http://thecrowdwire.org/post/35128521367/our-live-social-
media-exit-poll)

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ninetax
There seems to be some mistakes in identifying who voted for what...

"I'm not afraid to say who I voted for. I voted for Obama cause lets face it,
Romney's just a dickhead"

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curiousDog
Ha!In the 'I voted for Romney' section:

"Jack kelly @tweeterjak I'm not afraid to say who I voted for. I voted for
Obama cause lets face it, Romney's just a dickhead."

~~~
calciphus
Looks like they parse for "voted" and the last name mentioned in the tweet.
Similar ones show up on both sides.

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trhtrsh
Seeing tons of these at the moment:

    
    
        RT @MichelleObama: RT if youve already voted for President Obama today! #VoteObama

~~~
lukasb
Those seem valid though, no? The intent of the RT is to say "I voted for
Obama"

~~~
endoself
Well they would be mostly actual votes, but it causes Obama voters on Twitter
to be more likely to mention having voted than Romney voters. You'd probably
get more accurate results if you eliminated all these.

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grecy
Do tweets like this scare the s--t out of anyone else?

 _I voted for Obama but if Romney win the election, i would still be happy,
because God says He will elect the best..._

~~~
tkahn6
No. For all you or I know this person is a better, happier, more intelligent
person than you or I.

They did their civic duty and will accept the democratic will of the people
regardless of the outcome.

~~~
grecy
I personally find it scary when people think that "Gods will" has anything to
do with electing the leader of the most powerful country in the world for the
next four years.

It starts to sound a lot like fundamentalism, and makes me wonder how
different this is than parts of the world in constant violence due to "gods
will".

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d23
Looks like Obama's going to take every state.

