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Nah. It was so non-weird you could see it coming months in advance. It's reasonable to wonder whether the protections on mail-in ballots were sufficient, or whether other election rules like "Wisconsin law requires that the results of those absentee votes be reported all at once" were a bad idea, but when absentee ballots are reported all at once, in large heavily blue cities in a year when a majority of blue voters went absentee and a supermajority of red voters didn't, it would only be weird if the large vote dump wasn't massively blue.
See my other comment. In short the innocent and fraudulent answer looks similar meaning there is an easy ability to do fraud. Especially when you know what the bogey is.
If you'd said "This fucking looks weird", I would have absolutely agreed. The rules for how ballots were counted in Wisconsin were a bad idea. Democracy derives less of its value from "the median voter is super smart and should be in charge of everything" than it does from "there are a lot of people similar to the median voter who ought to be able to trust they're not being screwed over", so predictably reducing voter trust, even if the new suspicion is unfounded, is a horribly anti-democratic mistake. The Democrats used to know this, e.g. back when opposition to voting machines was left-coded, and it's shameful that they're forgetting it when they no longer expect to be the ones who might need to be distrustful.
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Weird that this effect only occurred in certain states though -- it's been a while since I dug in, but as I recall the breakdown for mail-in vs in-person ballots is available for most states. If I'm remembering right, Florida is an example of a battleground state in which:
a. the votes were counted in a prompt manner
and
b. the difference in Dem/Rep turnout for the two methods was not very large.
A lot of states didn't let mail-in ballots be processed until after election day polling closed. Reasonable if you don't want to risk preliminary count data leaking and influencing later voters, but not great if your priority is "prompt". Florida seems to have figured out how to thread the needle on that by allowing all the tricky work to be done ahead of time:
I'd still worry about possibilities of low-level fraud, since maintaining a proper chain of custody for weeks has to be a lot harder than doing so for hours, but it seems to have done wonders against possibilities of delays.
No? The first data I found claims that early voting by mail was from voters registered 31% R to 45% D (24% minor or no affiliation), versus early in-person votes from voters registered 45% R to 32% D. That's not as large as the "how could you go out in public during a pandemic" vs "are you going to be a shut-in the rest of your life" bluster to pollsters before the election would have suggested, but it's still pretty large, and that's for the state as a whole; I wouldn't be surprised if the less moderate Democrats and more moderate Republicans were disproportionately in the larger cities.
I may not have been thinking of Florida, and was definitely thinking of actual vote tallies rather than "registered as" -- but regardless, 45-32 is nothing like the 90%+ D in the late-nite Biden drops seen in other places.
Isn't "other places" apples-to-oranges, though? The city of Milwaukee was at 19.3% for Trump in 2016. If the mail-in voting included around 40% of those voters plus 60% of anti-Trump voters just like in Florida as a whole, you'd expect 14% for Trump among mail-in ballots. They saw 14% for Trump in the big "drop" of mail-in ballots, part of 19.6% for Trump on the whole. The math here really does check out.
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