National student election picks Obama as next president

An online poll taken by millions of American students that has picked four presidential elections correctly says Barack Obama will defeat Mitt Romney on Election Day.

OneVote project is maintained by Channel One, the education media service, and its polls in 1992, 2000, 2004, and 2008 correctly picked each election’s winner.

Channel One tells us that President Obama won the matchup with Romney by a 50 percent to 44 percent margin.

In terms of electoral votes, Obama received an equivalent of 412 votes to 124 votes for Romney, with two votes in Maine tied.

Romney only took Virginia among the nine swing states tracked by election watchers.

Middle- and high-school students across the country filled out ballots last week, which were inspected in the classroom by their teachers.

The final results are listed at onevote.channelone.com.

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The OneVote project mimics other institutions in the mainstream voting world. Teams of students work on videos throughout the fall, which classes watch as students prepare to research issues.

The candidates have student “surrogates” who write about their parties, and there will be a post-election spin room where the results are argued about and analyzed.

The results from past elections, though, varied greatly from this year’s election.

For example, in 2000, Bush won the student election with 58.9 percent of the 877,497 middle- and high-school students who voted. The biggest issue to students then was crime and violence.

In 2004, Bush won again with 55 percent out of 1.4 million student votes. He even won Pennsylvania and had a near sweep of the swing states.

In 2008, Obama won with 58.5 percent of the student vote, according to OneVote’s press release. The economy was the biggest issue, followed by the war in Iraq.

Currently, the economy is the biggest issue on students’ minds, based on survey data from OneVote.