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naraburns  nihil supernum  16d ago (text post)   26869 thread views

U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.

If you're a U.S. citizen with voting rights, your polling place can reportedly be located here.

If you're still researching issues, Ballotpedia is usually reasonably helpful.

Any other reasonably neutral election resources you'd like me to add to this notification, I'm happy to add.

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I have to get up early AF so I'm going to bed (it's 9:15 pm in Japan, yes I'm on farmer's hours).

I hope when I awake the country hasn't exploded. Good luck, my fellow countrymen and women.

I want to stay up and F5 Twitter/4chan for hot election shitposts but I have to go to work tomorrow. D:

how long before the result is declared though?

It depends on how contested it is. Often we basically know who won by around midnight on election day, so about 16 hours from now. But famously in the 2000 election, no one knew who the winner was for weeks because no one could agree over who won the state of Florida.

In 2020 PA was not called until November 7th and may well be similar this year if it is as close. We are not allowed to start counting mail in ballots in advance as some other states are (like Florida I believe), so it is likely we won't be done counting for a few days. The State might still be called in advance of the count being complete if the gap is wide enough of course.

This just seems like an odd argument for why it takes so long. Hire a few more people.

Why? Nothing changes if you don't know the outcome the same night. The switchover doesn't happen for months. Why spend more budget on counting faster when it doesn't actually change anything. It is ok if it takes a few days before the outcome is decided.

And if Republicans want the answers faster they could allow PA to start counting votes earlier exactly as Republicans in Florida decided. It was Republicans in PA that keep voting against that change. So clearly they aren't that invested in a swift outcome. So why should the city or state spend more to get it faster?

if Republicans want the answers faster they could allow PA to start counting votes earlier

But you're also defending accepting new ballots days after the election anyway, so that's not a real argument for getting it done faster. It's so transparent.

I think it is ok to either have the cut off being received by election day or being mailed by election day, depending what the state or municipality prefers. I was defending that one of those is patently wrong. I think both are defensible. The second would have the trade off of taking more time in close elections, that is true. But as I point out elsewhere that isn't necessarily a problem. It's just a problem if you choose a course of action that will make it slower, THEN claim the very slowness is evidence of possible fraud.

The maximally-cynical view here is that all three ways of resolving a election that is fucked beyond the ability of state courts to adjudicate (state legislatures nominating electors, a contingent election in the House, and SCOTUS deciding the election Bush v Gore-style) favour Republicans, so anything that fucks elections is good for Republicans and anything that unfucks them is good for Democrats. This view predicts the views of national MAGA leadership reasonably well, but not the behaviour of the locally elected Republicans who actually administer elections.

Because in the world in which we live, for whatever reasons the late-counted votes seem to lean pretty heavily to the left -- the impact of a narrow win from the right on election day with 98% of polls reporting or whatever shifting to a narrow Kamala victory a week later on election confidence would be quite profound I think, especially in PA.

Do you want civil war national strife? This is how you get national strife.

(Not sure why you are so supportive of PA Republicans -- maybe they have undesirable goals here?)

Not sure why you are so supportive of PA Republicans -- maybe they have undesirable goals here?

Well my point is that they obviously don't think counting the votes faster is necessarily better. They also didn't think that mail in ballots were less secure, when they thought that increase would help them.

So if Republicans claim to be worried about the length and security of the process, but do things that make it longer and less secure when they believe it is of benefit to them, then it points to a certain direction about their motivations.

So given that, it is up to the Republican party to manage those expectations about how long it will take and that yes, later counted votes will skew Democrat, and that this is entirely normal given the situation they themselves set up. If they don't want to make it easier/more secure, but won't tell their supporters what that outcome will entail, then they are part of causing the problem themselves.

Otherwise what you are saying is that the actions of Republicans in PA will lead to an increase in civil strife therefore the state governments must spend more money and time, in order for Republican supporters not to think the election is rigged. You can see how that is potentially an issue? It leaves no incentives for the party to actually do things better.

More comments

Does the US media release exit poll results soon after polls close, or is the "calling" of states entirely based on partially counted results?

In the UK the national exit poll drops a few seconds after polls close at 10pm, so we know the results to within 20 seats or so before any votes are counted. Obviously the exit poll isn't always accurate - the exit polls in 1992 predicted a hung Parliament rather than a small Tory majority - but the actual error was only 30 seats. (The UK only has one race to count in each constituency, so we can count by hand overnight and the only results that aren't in by breakfast time are where multiple recounts were needed and a few Scottish seats where it isn't safe to transport ballot boxes in the dark on iffy rural roads.

As a keen election watcher from the UK timezone, I would stay up for an exit poll and then catch the real results on Wednesday morning my time (2-3am EST). I suspect we will know if PA is the tipping point state by then. We won't know which way it is going to tip because there isn't an obvious Dem bias to the postal votes the way there was last time.

Typically there will be exit polls, but with an increase in mail in voting, they are less and less accurate. in PA at least there will be around 2 million postal ballots to count, which is lower than 2020 by about half a million. About 20% of registered voters are using mail in ballots. So far about 56% are from Registered Democrats and 32% from Registered Republicans (although that of course does not mean that is who they are voting for). But mail in ballots are likely to lean Democrat still, by around 2 to 1 or perhaps slightly less.

is the "calling" of states entirely based on partially counted results?

Partially counted results, but they are at least smart enough to weight the partial count by source precinct, so when Trump's solidly winning the rural Wisconsin in-person votes but the Milwaukee mail-in vote count hasn't been finished they're still not going to call the state for Trump.

Well, they're probably not? There's always tension between "if we call a state first we get a lot of attention" vs "if we call a state too early we might horribly embarrass ourselves". Fox called Arizona for Biden in 2020 with 73% of the votes counted and a 8.5 point Biden lead, despite the expectations for uncounted votes heavily favoring Trump, and Biden only ended up winning by 0.3 points. I'm not sure whether the takeaway from that by 2024 media is going to be "we might also piss off a lot of people and risk having to backpedal embarrassingly if we call it that close" or if it's going to be "they got away with it last time so we might want to play the odds too".

By far the most serious embarrassment I can remember was Florida in 2000. Networks called Florida for Gore before voting in the panhandle region of the state (which is in a different time zone) even closed, then had to retract the call, then called it for Bush, then had to retract that call - after which point Gore, who had already called Bush to concede, retracted his concession.

I also remember CNN's refusal to call Ohio for Bush in 2004, even though it was clear by the time I stopped watching the results that Kerry had no chance of winning. It was a lot less close than 2000 Florida.

The whole calling of states thing is a mix of exit polling, turnout analysis, guesswork about the outcomes in other similar areas, and early results. It's a lot of sausage making, it's normally correct, but it has a tenuous relation to concrete facts.

The over/under from the pros is basically Saturday as when we will know. Usually actually “calling” a state is based on some decent statistics, not infallible but a state being “uncalled” is typically rare.

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