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naraburns  nihil supernum  9d ago (text post)   26700 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 will never wrap my head around the American electoral system. Why in Jesus' name do statements from press associations carry weight on this issue?

This is an odd statement to me. News reporting agencies report...news? Like isn't this self evident?

AP doesn't actually decide the election, they just "call" it as in: they report the results. They're not inaugurating the president, they're telling people who won.

Even the news agencies are quite conservative. Earlier in the night when Pennsylvania was about 90% counted I did the math and found that remaining votes would need to break about 2:1 Kamala for her to make up the difference. All remaining votes would need to have come from Dem strongholds, but the remaining votes were distributed all across the state.

News wouldn’t call it for a few hours more.

Because, due to the Constitution, each state is essentially in charge of its own election. Some of the state governments are incompetent (or potentially corrupt) and take forever to count the votes.

It's not really that hard, of course. Florida counted all the votes in a couple hours.

But it would be impossible for the federal government to impose standards on all 50 states unless there was some constitutional issue at stake like racial discrimination. And, given that it's now become a partisan issue, Democrats seem to think that loose practices give them an advantage so it's a non-starter anyway.

Because they are ultimately backed by statistical analysis, and those analyses are often sufficiently (and explicitly) tuned to avoid mis-calls. While there's some mild pressure at TV networks to call states "first", there's some strong pressure to avoid making a mistake. And the people actually doing the calls are actually somewhat competent at their jobs.

Organizations like AP often have direct lines of communication between key government officials and agencies, with more or less formalized roles in being a designated source to disseminate government pronouncements of certain types. The AP carries weight because it is being a mouth piece, not an evaluator, and it is being a mouthpiece because (a) it makes money doing so, and (b) the governments don't want to rely on everyone going to their own websites to learn the same thing. Publishing via AP is often easier and quicker.

This isn't unique to the US. If you ever go to South Korea, Yonhap will often be reporting on emergent north korea incidents in English within minutes of events that would be reported through military channels to national leadership. The UK also has some fairly well established government-media relationship, up to and including nuclear war doom of the nation stuff.

Not quite the same thing, but Yes Minister always used to joke that the Foreign Secretary and the PM get all their news from the television - official channels don’t put the information through for hours.

Yes Minister has always had a special place in my heart. I've known a lot of Americans who liked West Wing because it was what they wished government was like, whereas Yes Minister had far more cutting insights behind its satire.

I just watched it for the first time last month. It's amazing how well it held up.

Because they create common knowledge.

Well... in other countries we rely for an official electoral bodies to call the results. But if it works for you...

We’d be waiting potentially for weeks for an official call. So the major news networks use statistical modeling to project a winner within a reasonable timeframe.

Moldbug is hated by normies for a reason.

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