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Cont: 2020 Presidential Election part 3

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Meadmaker said:
What's going on that there are still 2 million votes left to count?

I understood it would take longer this year, but it has been almost three weeks since the election. If the votes haven't been counted yet, that's kind of embarrassing.
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It's kind of bizarre isn't it? But some states don't allow counting until the election day. They may also have a window that allows ballots to be accepted weeks after election day as long as they are postmarked on or before election day.

A real clue are the deadline dates for certification.

Wisconsin (Dec 1)
Kansas (Dec 1)
New Hampshire (Dec 2)
West Virginia (Dec 3)
Washington (Dec 3)
Texas (Dec 3)
Oregon (Dec 3)
Connecticut (Dec 3)
Illinois (Dec 4)
New York (Dec 7)
New Jersey (Dec 8)
Missouri (Dec 8)
Maryland (Dec 8)
California (Dec 11)
 
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Meadmaker said:
But the certification process is different. I get that most states haven't certified and the vote counts could change a little bit as they double check the numbers and find a clerical error that put precinct 4s votes in both precinct 3 and precinct 4. Maybe they have a stack of 1,000 ballots that the machine couldn't read. Those sorts of things I expect and are normal.



The story I was replying to said that when it's all said and done, Biden will have 81.5 million votes, but his current total is slightly less than 80. In order for that story to make any sense, there has to be about 2 million votes out there that haven't been tallied yet. That's kind of ridiculous.
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Ridiculous based on what?

When did the counting finish in prior years?
 
Captain_Swoop said:
Trump Tweets

It’s all about the signatures on the envelopes. Why are the Democrats fighting so hard to hide them. We will find massive numbers of fraudulent ballots. The signatures won’t match. Fight hard Republicans. Don’t let them destroy the evidence!
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One bizarre thing about this particular argument was hearing one GOP legislator say, when you go to vote they check your picture ID....

Voting was just as secure before their disenfranchisement orgy claims about illegal voting. Now they talk as if voter picture ID was always the standard.
 
Ryokan said:
Encouraging others to betray their country?

But there are plenty of words in the English language that means practically the same, or that changes meaning depending on context.
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Perhaps so.

Personally I favor a narrower definition of treason, similar to our Constitutional one--effectively waging war on the state or materially helping its enemies. That makes it less likely for political disagreements to be announced as treason. It shouldn't be that kind of a football.

Another good term to use is "subversive"--that is what I would call someone who betrayed their nation by their actions or words, but hadn't literally acted with intention to harm the state or help its enemies.
 
Meadmaker said:
But the certification process is different. I get that most states haven't certified and the vote counts could change a little bit as they double check the numbers and find a clerical error that put precinct 4s votes in both precinct 3 and precinct 4. Maybe they have a stack of 1,000 ballots that the machine couldn't read. Those sorts of things I expect and are normal.

The story I was replying to said that when it's all said and done, Biden will have 81.5 million votes, but his current total is slightly less than 80. In order for that story to make any sense, there has to be about 2 million votes out there that haven't been tallied yet. That's kind of ridiculous.
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I don't think that I've saw California poked at, yet. California has a history of taking a somewhat remarkably long time to finish counting. A month, for example, in the 2016 primary, IIRC.
 
Beelzebuddy said:
They have been and are on the same side. Trump hasn't done much that any other Republican wouldn't have done, he's just been more crass in going about it.
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I'm pretty sure any other GOP POTUS would have done a little better about the COVID response.
 
Beelzebuddy said:
THIS time. Don't doubt for a second that McConnell is taking notes of which circuits to pack.
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I think the focus on McConnell is slightly misplaced, personally. I'd be a bit more focused on the Republican strategists like Roger Stone and Karl Rove, as well as the super-rich people working to undermine the government, like the Koch brothers did. Our country is being stress-tested, either way, and there are definitely forces, both domestic and foreign, taking notes on things to target in the future, with hostile foreigners having a somewhat unprecedented ability to... sneak dirty strategies that would quickly break our country into the public consciousness.
 
This conversation that the final results are taking extraordinary long is a bit amusing considering how quickly they are actually counted and how long they use to take being counted.

Keep in mind that before FDR the new President wasn't sworn in until March 1st.
 
Aridas said:
I don't think that I've saw California poked at, yet. California has a history of taking a somewhat remarkably long time to finish counting. A month, for example, in the 2016 primary, IIRC.
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That's insane. As I said, I can understand taking that long to get everything right, and crosschecked, and clear out a few ballots here and there, but if you can't come within a million votes after three weeks, something is wrong.

And "It's always been like this" is not a defense of the system. It's proof that there's a flaw in the system.

Georgia has managed to count all their votes twice already. What's the slowdown in California? (And I haven't checked in on Alaska yet. I know they were awfully slow to report, as if there was any doubt about who would get those 3 electoral votes, but for all I know they're still out there tracking some votes.)
 
gnome said:
I don't think he's trying to win the recount. I think he's trying to run out the clock without a resolution. That's the prize right now, to make enough states withhold their EVs until Biden no longer has a majority and they can throw it to the House.
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The election results in Georgia are already certified. There is no clock to run out.
 
Meadmaker said:
That's insane. As I said, I can understand taking that long to get everything right, and crosschecked, and clear out a few ballots here and there, but if you can't come within a million votes after three weeks, something is wrong.

And "It's always been like this" is not a defense of the system. It's proof that there's a flaw in the system.

Georgia has managed to count all their votes twice already. What's the slowdown in California? (And I haven't checked in on Alaska yet. I know they were awfully slow to report, as if there was any doubt about who would get those 3 electoral votes, but for all I know they're still out there tracking some votes.)
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Georgia has 1/4 the population of California.
 
Meadmaker said:
What's going on that there are still 2 million votes left to count?

I understood it would take longer this year, but it has been almost three weeks since the election. If the votes haven't been counted yet, that's kind of embarrassing.
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The law in New York is that they have many weeks to accept absentee ballots and cannot count until that deadline passes.

For the primary, it was multiple weeks after the election that they even started counting them.

I don't think it's embarrassing that they are following the laws of their state.
 
pgwenthold said:
The election results in Georgia are already certified. There is no clock to run out.
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By sane standards, yes. The "hail mary" play is to try to throw enough disputes, however meritless once examined, into the play to provide justification for someone down the chain not to do their job. In this case, I think to give the US Senate enough pretext to avoid counting the EVs, which is the process that finalizes the results or sends it to the House if neither candidate has a majority.

I don't think there's enough ammo for Mitch to be willing to do that. But I do think that's what the Trump team is trying for.
 
acbytesla said:
Georgia has 1/4 the population of California.
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That's true, but shouldn't the number involved in the count scale up also?

There's undoubtedly larger overhead in counting more votes and it won't be totally fixed by just increasing the number of counters, but I agree that it's surprising there are so many votes still being counted in some places.

ETA: Some of it may be due to lax deadlines. No need to speed things up a whole heck of a lot if the state law doesn't require it. Just hire enough people to get the job done on time.
 
Meadmaker said:
That's insane. As I said, I can understand taking that long to get everything right, and crosschecked, and clear out a few ballots here and there, but if you can't come within a million votes after three weeks, something is wrong.

And "It's always been like this" is not a defense of the system. It's proof that there's a flaw in the system.

Georgia has managed to count all their votes twice already. What's the slowdown in California? (And I haven't checked in on Alaska yet. I know they were awfully slow to report, as if there was any doubt about who would get those 3 electoral votes, but for all I know they're still out there tracking some votes.)
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Without commenting positively or negatively about it pre-emptively, the LA Times has a bit of a roundup on the topic. There's more when it comes to the details, of course, but it's a good place to start on the topic.

What you should know about how and when California counts ballots
 
acbytesla said:
Georgia has 1/4 the population of California.
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But that means that they have, or ought to have, 1/4 of the counters. The time required to count votes shouldn't be proportional to the number of votes to be counted, unless something is severely messed up.

What started this was the assertion posted earlier that the final tally was predicted to be 2,000,000 votes different than the current tallies. (Some rounding applied) That's a lot of votes, three weeks after the election.
 
The weird thing about the counting speed is not just how slow it is but how radically it slows down. By the end of election day we're hearing things like "95% reported" and "98.4% reported", and after that it's suddenly ½ of a percentage point per week.
 
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