I've been away for a while, and I've also meant to write this for several weeks now, but deadlines in school have kept me away.

I really want to say a general thank you to all of PF for existing and being supportive of people pursuing studies in the sciences. As I said when I first stumbled upon this forum, math isn't my best subject and being in a correspondence school where you are teaching yourself (for the most part) the concepts of math can be especially daunting.
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My main purpose here is to help keep an appropriate and narrow focus on what will determine the winner in the upcoming 2012 election. That is, NOT the nationwide popular vote that polls often report in the months leading up to the election -- rather, the individual states and their electoral votes.

With that in mind, I look for the states that (1) are pretty well split in terms of which candidate they will vote for, and (2) have a lot of Electoral Votes. As I did 4 years ago, I'll...