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naraburns  nihil supernum  12d ago (text post)   26777 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 still cannot fathom how any reasonable, good-faith interlocutor thinks this is a good way to run an election. Not having a denominator for vote count on election night is just staggeringly irresponsible if you actually care about legitimizing your democracy.

FWIW, usually the justification has been that the margin of victory of the winning candidate in most races is much higher than the total volume of mail-in votes, so it doesn't actually matter. At least besides the pseudo-religious justification of having those mail-in voters believe that their vote "counted".

It remains to be seen just how many more mail-in votes (legitimate or questionable...) will take place in this election.

2022 was a drop from 2020, but we still had 30% of votes cast by mail. Even before the pandemic there were mail-ins by the tens of millions, in numbers rapidly increasing. "There's still some to count but not enough to change the Presidential result" was a thing I recall hearing in 2000, back when they were called "absentee ballots" and they were just a thing for invalids and active-duty soldiers and out-of-state students and such, but that time is past.

I’m predicting fewer mail-ins than 2020, even if the total is higher.

Not counting valid votes from legitimate voters, can also be irresponsible for legitimizing your democracy. That's the tension. There is nothing special about election night. Nothing changes for a couple months. It's just an arbitrary cut off point, and if it takes days afterwards to declare a winner, it doesn't actually cause any real problems.

So there is nothing fundamentally wrong with saying that if you allow mail in ballots, those posted by the election day should count. You could even build that into the process. Election day is today. The Election decision day is November 10th. There doesn't need to be an expectation we will have a winner overnight. Indeed in close elections probably you want to take a few extra days for recounts and the like.

I don't think it a huge deal to only count those received on or before the cut off, but I don't think it a huge deal to choose mailed by the cut off either. They are both reasonable choices on how you are determining what makes it in time, based upon your preferences.

Whatever Florida is doing is clearly right and everyone else should copy them.

I wouldn't disagree to be honest. If you are going to have mail in and early ballots and you want an outcome quickly then doing some work to them prior to the election is just good sense.

This all just seems absolutely bizarre to me. Like, I'm capable of understanding the words and following the train of thought, I'm not saying that you're being incoherent, but I'm just completely baffled that this doesn't seem insane to others. The idea that it would delegitimize democracy to tell people that they need to vote by election day seems quite literally crazy to me. The idea that we keep accepting votes that come in well after election day just seems like something that everyone knows is wrong. The fact that states can't even tell you how many people voted a couple days after the election seems impossible to justify. I feel like if I explained that process to someone that was voting for the board in the local running club, they would be confident that I was doing something janky to steal an election, that obviously everyone should cast their vote by the time the polls close on election day.

I don't know man; this just seems like an unbridgeable divide.

I think it is certainly fine to prefer the former. I am just pointing out it isn't that insane as long as you don't count election day as something special. It is just a day we choose votes to be cast by. Therefore if we choose to allow mail in votes (and we don't have to!) and we want to make sure that the most eligible votes are counted, then saying votes must be sent on or before election day isn't in and of itself crazy. Predicated on the idea you are not expected to have a result on election day.

For the running club let's say you told them votes must be cast on or before November 3rd. And you can cast them at the club in a box, or by handing them to Walterodim or SSCReader for people who live closer to them than the club house. We will then get together on November 5th and count the ballots.

At that point the ballots given to me or you would not reach the club house until November 5th, where we would add them to those in the box and count them. So as long as the ballots were entrusted to us (or the box) by November 3rd, the fact they don't get added to the big pile until we go to count them is not a problem. They are still eligible ballots cast by the members, who found it easier to give them to us than put them in the box themselves. November 5th is then the important day. November 3rd is just the cut off for them being submitted to the process set up.

And if that process was instead the mail then it is certainly feasible to say it must be mailed by November 3rd and received by November 5th when we actually go to count them. That they are received by the time the count is expected to end is really the important part. Having a cut off, is just a way of trying to ensure we aren't counting ballots until December. The cut off isn't the ends, it is the means.

Everyone does have to cast their vote by the time polls close on election day. Just some states think it's good enough for the ballots to be in the custody of the postal service (i.e. requiring a postmark by election day) as opposed to requiring ballots to be in the custody of the elections organization by that time. The argument is approximately that in a mail-in voting system, the postal service is effectively part of the elections organization.

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