The students in David Stein's Political Statistics class at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland have built a statistical model for predicting the outcomes of the upcoming midterm elections: the model makes assumptions about voter turnout and the way that polling data will translate into votes in 2018. Read the rest

Tavis McGinn came to a job interview at Facebook to do the kind of work he'd done at Google, using analytics to help advertisers refine their campaigns; instead he was offered a job as Zuck's personal pollster, tracking the CEO's approval rating in fine-grained detail as he toured America and the world. Read the rest

University of Michigan prof J Alex Halderman (previously) is one of America's top experts on voting machine security (see this, for example), and he's issued a joint statement with voting-rights attorney John Bonifaz to the Clinton campaign, advising them to ask for a recount of the Wisconsin votes. Read the rest

Is it legal to photograph and share a copy of your voting ballot online? The answer depends on a bunch of things, including what state you're in, whether you've completed the ballot, and whether you actually bring your mobile device into the voting booth. The law varies widely.

In Washington, DC, you can indeed legally "instagram the vote." Like this fellow did.

But elsewhere, doing what he did is against the law and may make it so that your vote cannot be counted.

The Citizen Media Law Project reports that in Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Nevada, North Carolina, Texas and West Virginia, there are laws banning photography or videography in polling places. Read the rest