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.
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Notes -
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?
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.
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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.
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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 warnational strife? This is how you get national strife.(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.
No, what I'm saying is that this is not a partisan issue -- there's a bipartisan tradition of dangerous morons trying to tweak the system in ways that they think that will benefit them, and this should be looked down on by anyone who's not an ideological hack. (or just thinks that said morons are too incompetent to rig things effectively, if one is a PA republican I guess)
The important issue on the skewed late vote is not that it exists, it's why does it exist -- there's no particular reason it should be to the left, indeed AIR it used to be considered more likely to be to the right due to age distributions and old people not liking to leave the house.
The BC (Canada) election just had ridings flip due to ~65% left drops a week late, in ridings that were within 100 votes of 50/50 otherwise -- I'm lukewarm on both the 'people are still afraid of COVID' and the 'Joe Kennedy's ghost is pulling strings' explanations -- but the fact is, if you are rigging elections you want there to be late drops you can manipulate -- I see no particular reason for this suspicion-vector not to be stamped out.
Well in 2020 probably because Trump was saying mail in ballots couldn't be trusted. He created a partisan difference. And if you create it it, you don't get to complain when it comes home to roost is my point. Notably Trump has taken a different tack this time, and the gap is now smaller than it was last time. It isn't as you point out some immutable trend, it is a result of actions and beliefs. But it also isn't necessarily a problem. If you are counting all the votes which ones you count first or last is irrelevant. Which is why in many places they only announce the final results, not the play by play.
Unlikely that a significant number of BC residents were taking Trump's advice on this matter -- we are even letting people vote by phone starting this year Because Democracy.
It is either a weird shift in voter behaviour (for which I'd lukewarmly accept 'permanent covid brainfuck') or somebody is stuffing ballot boxes in a plausibly deniable way. (which I have no way of ruling out, other than 'just trust me bro', which is approximately what's on offer)
Election Day (tuesday): conservative-guy leads by 100 (out of like 15k) votes, we have 500 not-in-person ballots left to count which we will get around to next Sunday
Friday: oops, actually now we have 650 ballots to count, TTFN :)
Sunday afternoon: wow, left-guy pulled 66% of these totally-secure ballots that people literally phoned-in and we filled out ourselves -- left-guy wins by 20 votes, left-party now has a single-seat majority
This is absolutely a problem man -- if this happens today it's treading awfully close to a "Jan 6 but for-reals this time" problem.
It's a problem if the ballots are fake yes, it should not be a problem if they are real. If voting habits are different across different groups, then that is something that both sides must price in. If postal ballots are allowed and take longer to process and skew left (or indeed right in some counter-factual world), then that is something that must be dealt with. You can deal with it by counting the ballots first, so you can put them all in on day 1, that is a good idea, just like Florida does. But that is being prevented by Republicans in some places.
Given that restriction, what else would you suggest? Postal ballots are legal in PA, due to a law passed by Republicans prior to Covid, they vote down changes to the law to allow postal ballots to be counted early. So Postal ballots WILL be added to the count late.
With those restrictions what is your suggestion? How should Democrats deal with that to increase legitimacy?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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