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 -
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?
The problem is independent of whether the ballots are real or not -- I think that they probably are in this case! (if only because the NDP is not competent to do fraud)
It's still a problem, in that "make your election look exactly like it was stolen" is probably not a good move for anyone who isn't actively in favour of armed rebellion? (I am not -- not yet at least -- but I seriously doubt this is something the people at Elections BC are after?)
I suggest that you not do that, for starters -- all ballots are DUE by election day, postmark or not -- so there are no ballots not in your possession whenever you begin counting.
Then you report the number of ballots you have in your possession, before you start counting. (I don't think the law says you can't, like count the ballots ahead of time? It's just that you can't open & tally them? If not, determine how many there are before you start opening any -- report this number)
Then you, like -- count the ballots. All at the same time, not saving the postal ones up for the middle of the night after
you kick all the poll-watchers out on some pretexteveryone has gotten tired and gone home totally of their own accord -- just mix the postal boxes in with the in person ones at the counting location at which they were received.This seems easy?
That is the problem in some cases that is the law. For example in PA they cannot pre-canvas with Postal ballots until 7AM on election day. But they do give a count of how many there are already. "The election code also stipulates that the county board of elections will announce the unofficial number of absentee ballots and mail-in ballots received for that election by 12:01 a.m. on the day after the election."
Postal ballots also take longer to count because they have to be opened, signatures checked and that all the various steps have been taken (envelope dated etc.) which don't have to be done for the ballots on the day. The Florida approach is much superior I agree, but all attempts to change that law in PA have failed. And even if you could, what could you do about it when it emerges that some of your municipalities actually missed some ballots they had in a box so your tallies ARE actually out? It's not like all the ballots in PA are physically moved to a single location. All central counts are predicated on the accuracy of the local reports. There are 67 counties tallying votes in PA alone, all with varying levels of resources. Northampton county will be counting in their cafeteria for example. It is likely at least one of them will make some kind of mistake.
Even if you start counting both sets of ballots at the same time, you will end up taking longer to get through an equal number of mail in ballots than those on the day. And this is in tension with speed. The quicker you get more ballots counted the quicker you can declare a winner. So if you count the normal ballots first, you'll get closer to being able to declare faster. If there is a big enough gap the mail in ballots may not even matter. But if you do that, then you'll be skewing when the results drop if there is a difference in preference between on the day and mail in ballots.
Remember those running the polls are not unilaterally in charge of the laws, and those laws differ state by state. They may HAVE to count those post marked by Election Day. They may HAVE to not do a thing with a million ballots in advance even though it would make sense to do so. They are not operating without constraints. The poll workers are largely trying to deal with counting millions of votes with multiple things being voted on, with all the normal things going wrong that happen in something of this scale, all with varying court cases going on to determine if say a ballot received on November 2nd, can be counted because it looks like the voter dated the envelope as November 7th or not.
Having run elections myself and been in charge of the central counting facility for a mid-sized city. I didn't have time to think about, "Oh maybe it would look suspicious if we counted this box from X before this box from Y." I am just trying to get all the votes counted with as few errors as possible while dealing with volunteers, people on overtime who want to go home, and the pressure of not messing up a national election. And that was without having to contend with the complexity of US ballots. For mine, I had 1 pile for votes for each candidate and we were done. Easy peasy in comparison.
And the problem is that lets say you fix that, you figure out to assign 2 counters to on the day ballots for every 3 on mail in ballots such that you will count them roughly at the same speed. Well now you will run out of mail ins first, so that the opposite will happen and now the LAST batch of votes you count will skew the other way. (PA only has approx 20% of votes by mail in for example). Which the other side will see as suspicious. Because now in the middle of the night the other share will start going up faster than it was earlier.
Once people are suspicious of the voting process, I do not believe it is possible to placate that suspicion, without having unilateral control over how the ballots are counted, handled and due, and setting a nationwide standard. And neither side has that. And couldn't have that without changes to the Constitution. Indeed they don't even have control over their own local parties, seeing as how PA Republicans did something that ended up causing problems for their own side in 2020 and probably this year as well (though the skew appears to be less heavy).
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