Boston Globe Calls Massachusetts Race–8 Hours in Advance
By Bob Ellis on January 19th, 2010

The Boston Phoenix is reporting that the Boston Globe has already called the Massachusetts election for Martha Coakley–8 hours before the polls close!

A map with election results was apparently published on the website of the Boston Globe this morning which showed results for various towns and how they voted for Republican Scott Brown and Democrat Martha Coakley. The final tally was Coakley squeaking in at 50-49%.

Carly Carioli of the Boston Phoenix pointed this out on Twitter, and the Globe quickly yanked the electoral map…but not before Carioli got a few screen prints of the map.

Carioli indicates it will be, um, interesting if the end-of-the-day results happen to match the figures the Globe published eight hours in advance.

Now, having worked several years in the IT industry with database and web technologies, I can imagine at least one scenario where this might have happened purely by accident with no indication of election monkey business. It could be that the Globe was preparing their election map for use later today and plugged some dummy (or hopeful?) records into the database so they could see how the various results would look on the map–then accidentally made the web page live with the dummy records on the newspaper’s website.

But given the inclinations and tactics of some liberals, people naturally wonder about such things. After all, “objectiveâ€