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naraburns  nihil supernum  16d ago (text post)   26862 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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NYT putting a Trump victory at 89%.

Assuming he wins, all of the people who've spent the last few weeks posting blackpills in the main threads about how the election is rigged and the Democrats are just going to pull "another" 2020 - I expect to see some mea culpas out of you. You know who you are.

What do you mean? Of course it's rigged. Every election Trump massively outperforms his polls; what other explanation could there be besides Republicans stuffing the ballot boxes?

Polling bias.

Just a bit suspicious that our polls are historically accurate within a small margin of error, then all of a sudden Trump comes along and we have three huge polling errors in a row, right?

Anyways, we're still waiting on Ukraine mea culpas three years in. At this point, I expect they'll be back in the next few years when Putin finally prevails to say I told you so. And the election blackpillers will be here in 2028 when the R's lose to say it's always been rigged and that you're wrong.

The last poll in 2012 projected Obama with a mere 0.7% lead over Romney. As late as November 4th, Gallup were projecting a Romney victory. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_opinion_polling_for_the_2012_United_States_presidential_election). Obama ended up winning 51% of the popular vote.

The last Gallup poll in 2004 came to a dead heat with each candidate projected to win 49% of the vote. The margin of victory ended up being less than 2.5% in Bush's favour. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polling_for_United_States_presidential_elections#2004)

(And you know, there was this as well. Also a famously close race in which the margin of victory between winner and second place was less than 5%.)

Since the turn of the century, the average margin of victory in American presidential elections has been <=5%. Extremely close races are bound to be harder to predict than landslides, and polling data is bound to be noisier. The election with the widest margin of victory this century was 2008 when Obama defeated McCain by 7 points, and pollsters consistently got this right in the months leading up to the election. I'm not sure if anything else is required to explain the phenomenon.

Thank you for the sources. To be clear, I was being facetious, although I think it's a better argument than most of the 2020 fraud ones that I've seen.

Oh I didn't realise you were being facetious, thank you for clarifying.

It will be a pleasure.

The point of talking constantly about election integrity (not just here but in the media space generally) was to motivate election watchers. Despite the inherent issues with our election system, which make it arguably the least secure of any Western democracy, the amount of Trump supporters who have prepared to ensure the integrity of this election through proper channels essentially ensured that rigging could not occur. That's regardless of whether you think rigging would have occurred in the absence of this strategy.

The likely scenario with rigging is that whoever is doing it can rig a certain amount, but not an unlimited amount. The fact that the wrong side wins doesn't disprove rigging, although it does disprove infinite-capacity rigging. This isn't Venezuela.

Also, if median-voter-theory applies then presumably every election you would need to rig harder than the previous one as the rigger party pushes more of its agenda and the alternative party adopts more of the rigger party agenda. So eventually you would naturally reach the rigger limit. But I guess the rigger limit would be reached faster due to variance caused by exceptional or poor candidates or miscalculations about the electorate.

On twitter there are already videos of ballot boxes being carried into the precincts. So us Kamala supporters have our evidence ready when she loses. Stop the steal!

I'm more invested in the "October Surprise" millenarians.

But I must admit this is cold comfort.

On the other hand, suppose Harris pulls a come from behind victory in the wee hours of the night, should we adjust our priors on the rigability of the election?

At this point? Honestly yeah.

'injecting' ballots is only feasible depending on the current margin in the target states and the overall swing. if there is some kind of late night reversal caused by an injection it would look too suspicious this time. they would probably need to inject ballots across all the states in order to make the data look less suspicious but that would mean involving more people which is a very risk endeavour.

Why would they care? This is winner take all. I'm seeing scattered reports of trucks pull up with 100,000's of ballots in Philly and Detroit. There will always be a legion of empty suits claiming this is all totally normal and you are all the bad things if you ask questions.

Zero chance those happen. Trump can't claim the election as a whole was rigged if he wins it, but he can't quietly abandon his claims of rigging either. He'll pivot to claiming some of the elections were rigged-- but that his victory was "too big to rig" and the nefarious efforts of the democratic party only succeeded in reducing his margins. And consequently, that policies to "ensure election integrity" should be put into place (where, coincidentally, those measures would have the net effect of making it harder to vote in densely populated areas, particularly in purple and red states).

I will give a mea culpa if that doesn't come to pass, so if within a hundred days of trump's inauguration it doesn't happen anyone can hold me to account and I'll research and write a 500 word essay about good things the trump admin accomplished between his first and second term.

Already drafting those in my head.

Though a lot can still happen between tonight and January.

It’s why the Vance pick was so important.

I'm still expecting to wake up to headlines about "election night miracle as millions of WW1 veterans surge to polls in key swing states: they fought to protect trans kids from Hitler, now they're back to save america from fascism"

Headlines failed to materialize.

I had my thesis. Was I right? Yet to see. Those 3 am vote dumps are still possible.

Was I right?

No.

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