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2020 Presidential Election part 2

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BobTheCoward said:
As far as I am aware, they are not citing some report by a state commission, but some website's vote tally display?
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I'm pretty sure no one posting about this has any idea of how the voting data upload process actually works. I certainly don't. But I guess everyone loves to play kid detective, thinking they uncovered a great conspiracy by watching numbers change on their screen :rolleyes:.
 
Strong red (note that even the strongest red were a lot less certain than the strongest blue states):
Wyoming|Red
West Virginia|Red
Oklahoma|Red
Arkansas|Red
Idaho|Red

Less strong red (less than 60%)
North Dakota|Red
Alabama|Red
Louisiana|Red
Kentucky|Red
Nebraska|Red
South Dakota|Red
Tennessee|Red
Mississippi|Red
Utah|Red
Kansas|Red

Leaning red (less than 55%):
Indiana|Red
Missouri|Red
Alaska| Pending
South Carolina|Red
Montana|Red
Texas|Red
Iowa|Red
Ohio|Red

So as far as I can tell, FiveThirtyEight has been mostly accurate, although a lot of these were admittedly safe bets, and most of the weakest blue states are still pending.
eta But of course, since it turned out there were a lot more trumpkins voting than expected, the red snake is probably more accurate than the blue.
 
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Skeptic Tank said:
In my view, it is absolutely criminal and insane that this country hasn't been requiring voter ID and tracking everything in a systematic, fairly unified way for decades. I think the push back against these measures has been quite consciously so that there would remain room for shenanigans.
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Voter ID. National level or state level?

I’m guessing 8-20% of the country would go ape **** at the prospect of the prospect of the federal govt issuing IDs that are required to vote. From a selfish standpoint, I can see the advantages to CTists refusing to vote. But I’m not really prepared to cut them out.

Some states have gone to the gold-star system on drivers licenses. All renewals require proof of citizenship. The gold star in the corner of one’s license would probably be a good measure of who is eligible to vote (although extra work would be needed to ensure all citizens had such proof.)
 
One thing we'll have to unpack when all this is said and done is it seems, in counter to all accepted knowledge and predictions that a massive voter turnout has lead to... the election being within the margins of the last election and made very little difference.
 
I watched the news conference with the governor and Secretary of State of Pennsylvania, and I just found it inspirational. The governor's message was simple. This is about democracy, and we are going to count the votes. That's how we do things.

Awesome. Some Americans don't get that. All they care about is that their guy wins, but they're wrong. What matters is that every vote gets counted as accurately as humanly possible, and whoever gets the votes, gets put into office.

The guy sitting in the Oval Office doesn't get that, which is a pity, but he won't be able to do anything to stop the process. Assuming it goes the way it looks like it's going, he'll be out.
 
Skeptic Tank said:
Looks like there are some very suspicious "vote infusions" which have happened throughout the night with completely implausible percentages for Biden vs. Trump (sometimes over 100,000 votes coming in at once, ALL of them being for Biden or Trump getting fewer in the batch than the frigging third party candidate got.)
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It appears that the source of this is one tweet by someone named Matt Walsh. Their tweet consists of an image of two national maps with a curser over the state displaying the vote totals. They don't say what map they are looking at.


Do you see why it is wrong to cite this as interesting? There are a ton of problems with saying this is suspicious.
 
JoeMorgue said:
It's gonna be close. Either Biden or Trump are going to win in the margins. We might not get the final results for a few days. That was all known. What "new" are we reacting to?
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I think it's because a lot of people started to think that if Biden could flip a few places like Texas and Georgia, that meant they could flip the Senate as well.

But now we're in a place where the best case scenario of a Biden win means we're still stuck with a GOP Senate dominated by Moscow Mitch, which means, best case scenario, is another 4 years of GOP obstructionism, as we saw with Obama.

So absolutely nothing is going to get done, even in the best case scenario. And we're still going to be stuck with 4 years of Trumpian Whining about a "stolen election".

And that's our best case scenario today.
 
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Ladewig said:
Voter ID. National level or state level?
I’m guessing 8-20% of the country would go ape **** at the prospect of the prospect of the federal govt issuing IDs that are required to vote. From a selfish standpoint, I can see the advantages to CTists refusing to vote. But I’m not really prepared to cut them out.

Some states have gone to the gold-star system on drivers licenses. All renewals require proof of citizenship. The gold star in the corner of one’s license would probably be a good measure of who is eligible to vote (although extra work would be needed to ensure all citizens had such proof.)
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I'm not talking about a new, specific Voter ID - though that may make more sense, I was just simply talking about requiring a valid state ID / driver's license / Social Security Card / passport or something be presented to prove identity.

I walked in and voted this year and was required to present precisely zero evidence of who I was, like every year before. That is incredibly stupid.
 
JoeMorgue said:
One thing we'll have to unpack when all this is said and done is it seems, in counter to all accepted knowledge and predictions that a massive voter turnout has lead to... the election being within the margins of the last election and made very little difference.
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You're right. The high voter turnout certainly led me to think Biden would win by a fairly wide margin, even a possible blowout. That obviously didn't happen. I mean, I think he's going to win, but the EC count will be a squeaker.

Geoffrey Skelley on 538 is suggesting that AZ may still be in play. Some sort of error in reporting made it look like the vote counting was nearly complete, but it isn't.

Still, if Biden gets the states he leads in right now, he's got it.
 
Skeptic Tank said:
I'm not talking about a new, specific Voter ID - though that may make more sense, I was just simply talking about requiring a valid state ID / driver's license / Social Security Card / passport or something be presented to prove identity.

I walked in and voted this year and was required to present precisely zero evidence of who I was, like every year before. That is incredibly stupid.
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How would you exploit the current system in a way that actually mattered and wouldn't be found out immediately?
 
One thing that did come up in the press conference that I hadn't though of, but which could be a mess to sort out, and could even result in the "wrong" answer (i.e., it could cost Biden votes, and conceivably shift a state back to red.)

There will undoubtedly be people who voted by mail and then checked whatever tracking method was available in their state, and saw that their vote hadn't been received. So, they went and voted in person, but their mail in ballot was received and processed at some point.

I know that there are supposed to be checks to prevent that sort of thing, but I'm sure those checks are not perfect, so there will undoubtedly be some people who voted twice. And, of course, a few weeks ago Trump actually encouraged people to do this, so it's a safe bet that will happen. That could be a mess to figure out.

I see also that a lawsuit has been filed complaining that election officials did not notify every single voter whose ballot had been received and rejected that it had been rejected. Some states have laws that say that a mailed in vote which is flawed, and so won't be counted, requires the state to notify the voter. Undoubtedly, this is true. There will be cases where that system didn't work. How many, and what to do about it, is pretty difficult to answer.

So, there will be courtroom dramas trying to sort this all out. There will be recounts as well, it appears, and the second count will not match the first. Trump supporters will be upset I'm sure, because Biden will pick up votes in the recount. (I followed the Minnesota senate race with Al Franken pretty closely. It seems Democrats aren't as good at following directions. They cast a lot of perfectly legal ballots, but which machines couldn't read.)

So anyway, the lawsuits are part of the process as well. Everyone gets their day in court. I'm confident that while people will try and twist it, in the end I have faith that the goal will be to get an accurate count, and elect the people who won the election. I think that will be Biden/Harris, but if it ends up Trump/Pence, so be it.

And if Biden wins and Trump tries to steal it? (Biden won't do that, but Trump would.) Well, I have faith he won't succeed. There's only so far that Senators and judges will go.
 
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I'm not even going to try to catch up on the thread, but I'm feeling pretty depressed right now. Trump judges will overturn any state where Biden's lead is even a little close.
 
Skeptic Tank said:
Twitter and other tech companies mark Trump's tweets with "warning: this may be misleading, click here" and such for the same reason that poll workers / election people around the country would feel completely justified in doing whatever it takes to get him out of office.

These people fundamentally see him as a completely illegitimate, evil figure and they feel this sense of historical responsibility to get him out, by any and all means.

They've been raised their entire lives to believe that there is no virtue higher than "being nice" and that "being nice" is achieved by not having any discriminatory or exclusionary thoughts about anything. So when someone comes along and is brash and mean spirited and talks about limiting who can come into the country, etc. - their childish little worldview is thrown into a complete tailspin.

It breaks their brains. They were sure that from now on, everyone would just be nicer and nicer. Any interruption to an unbroken pathway to eventually having the first wheelchair bound, transsexual black lesbian furry president is - for them - an unforgivable affront.
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This kind of thinking is what is wrong with the world, not just the USA.

Civility, equality, opportunity for all...these are bad things?
 
Trebuchet said:
I'm not even going to try to catch up on the thread, but I'm feeling pretty depressed right now. Trump judges will overturn any state where Biden's lead is even a little close.
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I'm worried about the lawsuits, too. Just as it starts to appear that Biden has a decent chance EC-wise, the next spectre looms.
 
Skeptic Tank said:
And what if you've got compliant and/or "don't give a crap" people manning the polling stations, and you have a lot of motivated activists who are willing to go multiple times as multiple people? I mean, I certainly am not comfortable just writing it off as "well yeah they probably won't do enough for it to really matter"

How about we just have an ID requirement like a sane country would?
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The short answer is people have put out calculated estimates for people disenfranchised by voter ID laws and you have, "what if."
 
dmaker said:
This kind of thinking is what is wrong with the world, not just the USA.

Civility, equality, opportunity for all...these are bad things?
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Absolutely.

Have you met humans before?

90% (and I'm being generous) are worthless pieces of crap.
 
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