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I agree. I don't think that was actually legal and I'm highly skeptical that these people actually confined themselves to their homes indefinitely, but I will absolutely grant that this is both the mostly likely reason for the spike and could reasonably be tolerated in 2020. My complaint isn't that it was tolerated in 2020, but that this loophole wasn't closed in 2022, which gives the appearance of bad faith and allowing avoidance of IDs.
They actually did. There probably is some cogent explanation for the weird patterns there, but they are actually are weird!
Again though, I really don't need to relitigate 2020, I would just strongly prefer that we stop using a system that's more or less guaranteed to get results that have terrible optics when it's pretty easy to just not do that. The refusal to correct these sorts of things is actually more suspicious to me than anything that I see in 2020.
It was a recent switch. Note that the other two counties in the initial picture that were still counting (Brown and Kenosha) are also on the list of counties that switched. I'm sure there is a logistical reason that they wanted to do so and it probably simplified something, but it seems more like it should be, "we tried that and it worked poorly" than something that has to be maintained for historical reasons.
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