Elections 2012 - Browser Edition

[Pitkin]

Good day and welcome to our post-election day special.

Yesterday finally saw the end to several hard-fought US Browser Election 2012 campaigns when the American visitors of OS-tan Collections got to choose between a number of candidates. Despite the recent global trends looking extremely promising to Google ideology and therefore to their candidate Chrome, Mozilla's nominee Firefox remained a clear front-runner in polls leading to the election day. Meanwhile, third-party candidates, notably the former strongman Internet Explorer of Microsoft and the former-rebel-turned-hipster Safari of Apple, were optimistic about causing an upset or two in individual states and therefore leaving their own marks in 2012 election history.

Results

The race outcome turned clear very quickly. Let us take a look at the electoral college map:



Final results with 100% of votes counted:
-Firefox (Mozilla group) 321 electoral college votes (40.5% of popular vote),
-Chrome (Google Inc.) 173 electoral college votes (36.9%),
-Internet Explorer (Microsoft Corp.) 30 electoral college votes (8.9%) - see below: Peculiarities,
-Mozilla Maryland independents 10 electoral college votes (0.7%) - see below: Peculiarities,
-Android independents 3 electoral college votes (2.0%) - see below: Peculiarities,
-Safari (Apple Inc.) 1 electoral vote (7.3%) and
-Opera (Opera Software) with no electoral votes but 3.7% of national popular vote.

Despite the electoral votes showing a major landslide for Firefox over Chrome, the country was bitterly divided between the two camps, with Chrome picking up Delaware, Hawaii and Utah with astonishing 100% record and Missouri and Nevada with 91.7% and 80.0% respectively. Firefox on the other hand dominated Mississippi and Montana with perfect records and the traditional bellwether state Iowa with a stunning record of 90.7%.

New Mexico turned out to be the most exciting of all the battleground states with Firefox and Chrome locked in an exact tie even after six recounts, which were conducted after initial results. The counting process took historically little time, considering only two votes had been cast in the entire state.

Google's Chrome admitted her defeat already early into the count as exit polls had indicated Firefox leading in the powerful states of Ohio, Texas and finally California. She seemed indifferent in her speech, stating that "I'll be the biggest and richest anyway". It was reported that the third-party candidate Safari called Chrome soon afterwards, only to remind her that it was Apple still the richest.

Of the third party candidates Internet Explorer carried Tennessee, with experts speculating it to be due to TN being an anagram of NT and therefore a natural selection for the local population. Safari carried a congressional district in Nebraska, however doubts were soon raised on whether it was due to the popular support of the browser itself or the fact that a local travel agency Safari Voyages had been running an extensive TV advertisement campaign in the city promoting its late-fall African trips.

Peculiarities of 2012

Many unexpected details colored this year's election. Bizarrely, five states in the country, namely Idaho, Maine, South Dakota, West Virginia and Wyoming, failed to collect even one accepted ballot. In Idaho, confusion took place as the browser election ballots had accidentally been swapped by International Day Against Homophobia organization's Mr. Gay USA voting ballots. No browser received therefore any popular vote, but this was greatly compensated by the amusing moments at nearly every voting station and the local radio.

South Dakota administration had decided to move all their electoral procedures online this year in order to reduce the amount of paper waste from ballots. Unfortunately, no one in the state had an internet connection available on the election day, and therefore the voting activity proved disappointing.

West Virginia and Wyoming both suffered from a programming error in the federal ballot printing software, which crashed due to a memory leak just before reaching W. The states of Washington and Wisconsin were originally affected by this problem as well, but clever voting officials managed to work around the issue by allowing the potential voters to write the name of their candidate on a blank piece of paper.

Finally, every single vote cast in Maine was given to Windows ME, who did not run in the election, and therefore rejected. Instead, the four electoral college members cast their votes to the browser ideologically closest to ME, which was naturally Internet Explorer. The four other states not having any votes cast either decided to follow Maine's example to respect Maine's earlier voting schedule under normal circumstances. The combination of the aforementioned problems and solutions, Internet Explorer managed to secure nearly three times as many electoral college votes as they had been given in pre-election polling.

Another detail worth mentioning during the elections were the two independent main-party candidates stemming either from unsatisfaction towards Firefox and Chrome, or because they simply wanted to have photos taken of them as well. Run-away Google independents carried District of Columbia's 3 electoral votes while the Maryland Mozilla group carried their own state. This development was naturally shunned by the mainstream Mozilla and Google officials and political browser journalists, if only because it meant that two more colors had to be added to the electoral college map.

-- edit: Mistake in Opera's popular vote figure. It was marked 2.0 instead of 3.7%.

[Nichi]

$20 says all the results from Texas are just me logging in from damn near anything >:3

[stewartsage]

I voted for Telnet.  ROCK THE VOTE!

[Chocofreak13]

PRAISE MOTHER OPERA!!!!