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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Notes -
It's Better to be Lucky than Good
I’m not a practiced Bayesian, and to be honest this is as much as a victory lap as it is a reflection on my priors. Oh lets, be honest. This is mostly a victory lap.
My major election posts in the lead up:
I noted Joe Rogan had solidified his status as a Kingmaker after the Trump interview. This seems to have been born out by Trump’s quick acknowledgment of Rogan’s endorsement and the large shout out by Dana White in Trump’s Victory speech. Even before the interview, I noted Trump going on Rogan was a Big Deal. I realized I was right about the impact when NBC of all things made multiple references to the ‘Joe Rogan Army’ during their election coverage when noting the young male turnout.
After going on Rogan, the McDonalds photo op, and Kamala’s failure to resonate in her campaign, I made a Trump win prediction at 55-60% certainty 10 days before the election.
I quickly noted the Selzer poll was likely bullshit.
Things I got wrong:
I underestimated the impact of the Garbage fiasco. I thought it was just more random flotsam in the election and would probably be quickly forgotten. To be fair I didn’t know Trump’s team would use meme magic to force the MSM to cover Trump speaking from a garbage truck. The nail in the coffin was when he honked the horn (rare footage)
I didn’t post about this, but I did upvote Blackpill posts about Democrat election fraud. I really did expect 3am mystery trucks, election officials putting up paper over the windows and keeping monitors outside, gas/water leaks and restarting the count after monitors had gone home etc etc at about 65-70% certainty. That didn’t eventuate thankfully.
Takeaways:
I’m not an American citizen/resident so I’m not immersed in the election. I am ‘very online’. I rate my election prediction performance as ‘not bad’ for this one, but I put that down to my information diet curation. My major aggregator was actually here at the Motte (with some other centrist non-MSM sources) and I would then go down rabbit holes myself for further research. I leveraged the screening and arguments of this forum to better inform myself, so I consider myself pretty lucky to be here.
One last point is that I’m upgrading my view of betting markets to consider them a credible source. They won’t be my only source, but I’m now taking them seriously. Polymarket got this one right.
Scoping out, an election needs more than to be an accurate, secure accounting of votes; it needs to have the appearance of such. People need to perceive that it is legitimate. It is very dangerous to have systems which allow people to even think that these things are possible. Not even that they're probable, but are even possible. That I could wake up in the morning with enough states undeclared (by two of the three organizations used to resolve Polymarket) to plausibly swing the result is horrific optics. It allows the imagination to run wild. It lets people think that it is at least possible that there are potential people in potential counties who might have a backup plan to pull these sorts of shenanigans, and who are up in the middle of the night, closely monitoring the developments, carefully calculating whether they can make a difference by implementing their backup plan, cautiously waiting until the perfect moment in the wee hours when just enough people have run out of gas and given in to sleep. That I could wake up and even imagine that such a person might have existed and might have finally given up at 4am, realizing that too much would have to happen in too many different states to make a difference, that it would have been sufficiently hard to pull off or sufficiently hard to hide... just that I could imagine this happening is a huge, dangerous fault line.
@jeroboam is absolutely right on this. Florida has solved this problem, and every swing state which hasn't is playing a treacherous game. They report everywhere, all at once, so there is very little ability to calculate how much risk you might need to take to swing the result. They do so extremely quickly, so folks can be relatively confident that there is constant, alert, bipartisan monitoring of everything that happens in that short window. There is very little room for the imagination to run wild. I did not like the vast majority of the flavors of election denial that occurred in 2020, but it is apparently not that hard to preemptively shut all of that shit down in the future. Both sides really ought to be able to agree on this.
Completely agree with you. This was my greatest fear, should not be possible at all. With more resources and organisation it should not be possible. I wish at the very least that the FEC sent 'flying squads' to the swing states to act as a QRF for any of these bullshit anomalies. As soon as any of this shit pops up on a radar, that counting office gets 20 Feds dropping in to stand over them. There needs to be consequences for even looking like you're trying something funky.
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The thing about Florida is that due to the incentives down there, they actually by and large have very competent and well paid people working at the county level.
Unfortunately that's not true in the vast majority of states. For most places the human capital operating the local government offices, even and especially the election offices, is pretty damn low quality.
Can you go into some more detail about what the incentives are in Florida and how they lead to this result? I'd love to learn more.
A few things:
I think I bundle your first three points under "more local authority", where I presume the argument is that more local authority means more important local elections, meaning better vetted/better quality candidates. I am sympathetic to this. However, it doesn't seem sufficient. My guess is that if one brought more local authority to other states, they might get better quality local officials, but it's not clear that they would actually execute toward this vision. My further guess is that in order to get the amount of uniformity they seem to have, there would have to be significant state-level carrots/sticks.
So, I guess my question is, what is the long pole in the tent? What carrots/sticks did the State of Florida use to get the local officials to execute? If we brought just those carrots/sticks to another state, would local officials just be too incompetent to execute? If we just brought more local authority and got more capable local officials, would they just not all care to execute in a similar fashion? Or are either sufficient? If we had another state use the same carrots/sticks, would the local officials grudgingly get it done? If we brought more local authority and got more capable local officials, would they just execute in a competent distributed fashion? Or do you truly need both, otherwise it's a hopeless cause?
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