The Other Election Night Winner: Perplexity (techcrunch.com) 54
AI startup Perplexity demonstrated strong performance in real-time during Tuesday election coverage, while rivals failed by predicting wrong outcomes before polls closed, marking the first major test of AI systems in U.S. election reporting, TechCrunch reports.
Perplexity launched an election hub featuring live maps powered by Associated Press and Democracy Works data, contrasting with major competitors like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, which declined to provide election information. Despite some minor data display issues and occasional inaccuracies in state-level analysis, Perplexity's coverage largely matched traditional media outlets, potentially intensifying its ongoing legal battle with Dow Jones over audience competition.
Perplexity launched an election hub featuring live maps powered by Associated Press and Democracy Works data, contrasting with major competitors like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, which declined to provide election information. Despite some minor data display issues and occasional inaccuracies in state-level analysis, Perplexity's coverage largely matched traditional media outlets, potentially intensifying its ongoing legal battle with Dow Jones over audience competition.
Finally a good use for AI (Score:5, Insightful)
Part of the coverage was legitimate (Nobody wants to predict too early and look silly). Part of it was, of course, wanting to keep viewers watching for ratings. But part if it also seemed to be that the broadcasters were holding out false hope since most of the media liked Harris better. (No surprise as she did exceptionally well among educated voters) Having an AI run models keeps the emotion out of it.
As always the NYT needle was pretty accurate as well.
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Need a horse race (Score:2)
/. is forgetting that nearly everyone needs a 'horse race' to either make money, bring in readers/viewers, sell consulting services, get your voting base out to vote, rake in campaign donations, build social media stars, and have something to talk about (politicians) other than how poorly they are doing their job (e.g., no US federal budgets for years and paying by continuing resolutions).
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Part of it was, of course, wanting to keep viewers watching for ratings.
Bah, they have also spent weeks claiming "It's too close to call", "It's a coin toss".
I actually did not know who is going to win, but I was pretty sure it won't be as close as the polls claim.
Either they really have no idea how to poll or they spent weeks messing with the polls to make it look so 50-50.
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JD Vance was right about one thing. Much or rural America had disengag
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See below for black men. No, they won't. As for white men, the vast majority would not vote for Harris for a multitude of reasons. WTF is "legacy media"?
- The 'brothers' are the problem (Obama)
Which is absolutely true. Black men are generally brought up that they are superior to women, particularly black women. The idea that they would vote for a black woman to be president was anathe
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Ok, so let's unpack this shall we. Legacy media is the collection of media companies that operate predominately as newspapers, television, and radio, the "legacy" technology of the previous 70 years(older for radio and newspapers). The very same pe
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When the white man VP says he doesn't understand why women don't want to have kids, who is with a convicted felon who has assaulted multiple women and raped at least two, not to mention was best friends with a white guy who ran a pedophile sex ring, tell me who the misogynist is. This article [afro.com] explains the issue of black men not voting for a woman.
Obama made a point that a small but vocal contingent of men, including Black men, refuse to support any woman candidate for president. Many of them have unrealistically high expectations for Kamala Harris but donâ(TM)t hold Trump to the same standards. One Black man in Pennsylvania told reporters he plans to vote for Trump because Harris âoedoesnâ(TM)t come from a background similar to the majority of Black Americans.â That makes no sense. Does he think a White man who spent his career refusing to rent to Black people and spreading racist lies about us understands the Black experience better than a Black woman who grew up in Oakland, attended Howard University, and joined AKA sorority? Iâ(TM)m sorry. I call bullshit. That man just doesnâ(TM)t want to vote for a woman.
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It would be interesting to know if the campaigns' internally-commissioned polling is more accurate.
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It isn't. If it was they would make a lot fewer unforced errors and do a lot better job at spending time where it matters.
The thing with polling is they don't just look at we called 1000 likely voters, 514 said x; x is polling at 51.4%
They all have models which include assumptions like well party x is 10% less likely to answer polls. People who answer calls from 'unknown' tend to be older, y will do better with that group.. The Urban voters are more motivated this time; counties e,r,y count as urban, its
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https://kalshi.com/elections [kalshi.com]
Re: Finally a good use for AI (Score:2)
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By about 7:30pm Eastern Time, I already knew (as did most viewers) that Trump was going to win the election. But the pundits kept saying "We don't know the outcome yet." That's true because anything can happen.
By 7:30 pm Trump's election victory was also quite assured in 2020. There still remains a big difference in votes counted depending on which batch are being counted and at what point they came in.
You are suffering from survivorship bias.
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In 2024, we had, by 7:30, entire country returns that could be compared to the 2020 entire country returns. Comparing county-by-county complete counts told us everything we needed to know. Yo
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since most of the media liked Harris better. (No surprise as she did exceptionally well among educated voters)
The media did an amazing job of sanewashing Trump. Imagine the headlines if Kamala spewed word salad for answers or stood on stage listening to music for 40 minutes. This op-ed piece explains it well. https://link.motherjones.com/p... [motherjones.com]
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Intermediate results should be banned (Score:4, Interesting)
Posting intermediate results (vote totals) should be banned, it opens the door to election cheating.
Note: Not saying that cheating happens or did happen, only that in a security sense posting intermediate results makes cheating easier.
Also Note: This is relevant to the article, an AI system that predicts the outcome in real time before the polls close.
If you know your candidate is losing, you can calculate by how much and arrange to have the minimum number of fake ballots delivered to push your candidate over the winning line. A smaller number of fake ballots makes it less likely that the ballots will be discovered as fake, and the "very slight margin of winning" reduces suspicion.
We already have accusations of fake ballots entered, ballot box dumps in the middle of the night, extra boxes found late in the evening... all of these give the viewer low confidence in the election outcome. We also have cases where registrations exceed the number of people living in the county, zillions of examples of registrations from non-residences and so on.
If you don't have real-time intermediate results it's much harder to gauge how much effort you need to swing the ballot count, or even if you need to cheat or whether cheating will do any good.
Don't start counting until *all* boxes from remote polling have arrived, don't accept extra boxes once you start counting, make the "percentage of votes counted" public, but don't publish the actual counts until you're done.
That rule alone would go a long way towards installing confidence in our elections.
Re:Intermediate results should be banned (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Intermediate results should be banned (Score:5, Insightful)
Ranked Choice would resolve this. You can't start counting things early, you have to do it all in one pass.
And it'd resolve a TON of other problems with our election system. Like it'd all but remove the whole "vote against a candidate you dislike" behavior we see, rather than voting FOR one you want.
But it's scary and confusing and isn't what people know, so of course we can't get it. Despite the fact it really would resolve a TON of problems.
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Not quite. [wikipedia.org] At least not without using a better algorithm than RCV/IRV.
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False. The elections are auditable. You have the machine count which can be cross-referenced against the paper ballots. Any mail-in ballots can be hand counted. All of this is done under the eye of the election officials, representatives from all the parties, and observers from the Department of Justice.
Except for Florida, Texas, and Missouri which don't allow independent observers [nbcnews.com] to watch what goes on at their
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Nonsense - you have box ballots; but you have no way to if they are even the same ballots as the ones voters checked in cast. About the most you can do is compare check in totals to the ballot counts. They should be about the same but they won't always be because a voter may chose to spoil a ballot.
While it might be technically not allowed, I certainly could just wad my ballot up stuff it in my pocket and walk out of my polling place. Why I would do that and not cast an under-vote (abstention) if that is
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American elections are are unauditable because they're designed to be unauditable. You think we couldn't do if it we wanted? But they want it this way, so that they can cheat. It's jut that this election was a landslide, so it wasn't within the margin in which they could cheat. My own ballot was rejected because the signature was fake, despite it coming from my own hand. Thankfully the election was too big to rig.
Depends on where you are. Here in deep red east Tennessee my relatively poor county has electronic voting systems (which I would normally be suspicious of, but) which also produce a paper record that is printed before you confirm your vote. You double check the paper against what your intended vote was, then hit the "vote" button and your vote is tallied, while the paper roll is advanced so that it cannot be read by the poll worker/next voter.
Suspicions of cheating? No problem, audit the machine against
I've never understood (Score:2)
I've never understood the whole 'we, a random news outlet with incomplete information, are now calling X for Y' thing.
Let the votes be counted.
Re: I've never understood (Score:2)
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It's not that hard to understand. In an election that isn't particularly close, eventually the vote gap between first and second becomes insurmountable, even if every remaining vote is for the second place candidate. At that point, you can call it without counting the remaining votes.
Of course, there are points before that where in order for an election result to flip, the remaining votes would have to skew so far for the second place candidate to be outside the realm of statistical possibility. It's that p
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I've never understood the whole 'we, a random news outlet with incomplete information, are now calling X for Y' thing.
Let the votes be counted.
It's the electorial college, so it can be pretty easy to call it once the candidate has enough states going for them that there is no way the other candidate can catch up. California is being... super slow to count (currently still 55% according to google) and might take weeks, so why wait for them? It'll be interesting to see how the popular vote shakes out (California certain has enough remaining votes to flip Trumps current 4.5 million lead for what its worth) but that's about it
You can make the argument
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The data shows it was close in many states. The margin for error with polls is extremely high. And some of the polls use bad methodology, and we constantly pointed this out. Ultimately the polls you saw were there to get you to look at websites and see ads and hopefully buy a subscription. We do live in a capitalist society after all. The so-called mainstream media are here to make a profit.
For campaign managers. Polls represent important information that they can act on. They can redirect efforts to places
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Reverse Hanlon's razor?
The same ones who got 2020 wrong?
Three articles in as many days? (Score:2)