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Cont: 2020 Presidential Election part 3

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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.
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I'll ask again:

Compared to what baseline?



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.
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No, that's just you stringing words together and calling it "proof."

How many ballots per day are the "correct" amount to get through? With what size staff?

Can you provide a demonstration of this number being achieved or is it just a completely arbitrary quota made up on the spot?


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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Maybe there's more votes to count in some states? Maybe the proportion of mail-in votes that require more steps is different.

"Georgia is done, therefore New York is slow" relies on a lot of questionable assumptions.

It's comically simplistic reasoning for a complicated procedure like this.
 
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Delvo said:
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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Generally, I attribute that to the way different forms of voting work. Electronic voting machines simply reporting a count is pretty much immediate. Opening absentee ballots and then running them through equipment or hand counting is dramatically slower, especially when there's an unusual surge to deal with. Waiting until deadlines after election day for absentee ballots to actually arrive can add a significant period of uncertainty, as well.
 
Delvo said:
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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Thats because most of the temp workers are gone. They run the ballots through in batches.
 
Delvo said:
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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I'm guessing, and this is only a guess, that there are paid staff involved, and they hire a bunch of temporary workers for election week, and then they get down to a much smaller staff. Or perhaps they divert people from other state/local jobs to do vote counting, but they assume all the votes will be counted by Friday, so after Friday, they are down to a much smaller number of counters.

Also, I'm sure that there are "problem" precincts or ballots that take longer to deal with.

However, if there's 250,000 votes left in a state three weeks after the election, it seems that no one thought that maybe they ought to keep that temporary staff on just a little bit longer and get things tidied up.
 
Delphic Oracle said:
I'll ask again:

Compared to what baseline?
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Compared to a sensible expectation that people have of how long it ought to take to count votes. If it takes three weeks, you're doing something wrong.




No, that's just you stringing words together and calling it "proof."

How many ballots per day are the "correct" amount to get through? With what size staff?

Can you provide a demonstration of this number being achieved or is it just a completely arbitrary quota made up on the spot?




Maybe there's more votes to count in some states? Maybe the proportion of mail-in votes that require more steps is different.

"Georgia is done, therefore New York is slow" relies on a lot of questionable assumptions.

It's comically simplistic reasoning for a complicated procedure like this.
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Sealioning.
 
Meadmaker said:
I'm guessing, and this is only a guess, that there are paid staff involved, and they hire a bunch of temporary workers for election week, and then they get down to a much smaller staff. Or perhaps they divert people from other state/local jobs to do vote counting, but they assume all the votes will be counted by Friday, so after Friday, they are down to a much smaller number of counters.

Also, I'm sure that there are "problem" precincts or ballots that take longer to deal with.

However, if there's 250,000 votes left in a state three weeks after the election, it seems that no one thought that maybe they ought to keep that temporary staff on just a little bit longer and get things tidied up.
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I think this is an accurate description of the process. Also after the major races are mathematically decided the pressure of finishing the job is lessened.

What's the old maxim? The time any task takes to be completed is equal to the time alloted for it.
 
Meadmaker said:
Compared to a sensible expectation that people have of how long it ought to take to count votes. If it takes three weeks, you're doing something wrong.
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How about comparing it to how long it takes in other democracies?

I'm only really familiar with UK elections, and I can't say for certain about those, but I have certainly never noticed it taking more than a day or two to count the votes in an election.
 
Captain_Swoop said:
Trump Retweeted

Elizabeth Harrington
@LizRNC
We're all fighting this fight right now.
We're talking about the core of our American Constitutional Republic, the right to vote, the thing people have died for since 1776.
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The irony! The irony!
 
Delvo said:
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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Indeed. It seems to almost converge asymptotically, getting from 99.99999999% to 100% after infinite time. :D
 
Lurch said:
So? 4X the peeps, 4X the counters. Same time to do the job.
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Sure. But it never works that way.

California does its best not to disenfranchise voters whereas many of the southern states actually do their best to discourage voter participation. They might limit counting only ballots that arrive on Election day whereas California might accept ballots for weeks as long as they are a postmarked. They might allow curing of ballots for weeks and another state might not allow it at all. There are probably lots of reasons that California is slower.
 
gnome said:
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.
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Sedition is encouraging others to rebel, which he is certainly also doing. It’s a type of treason of course so let’s not split hairs too much. You could easily call someone performing seditious acts a traitor and be correct.

But he’s not limited to that either. He is leveraging the power of the government to retain power also. He has openly called for members of the government to prosecute his political enemies on his behalf. He’s conspiring, at least attempting to, with other members of the government as well.

Anyway you can stick to a more narrow constitutional definition if you want, it’s ok with me. In a casual conversation when somebody betrays their sworn duty to the US constitution to attempt to overturn a democratic result I think the words treason and traitor are appropriate.
 
Michigan House Speaker Lee Chatfield was on Fox & Friends saying that a “constitutional crisis” could still overturn Biden’s victory in Michigan
He is setting up a scenario where the Michigan legislature sends their own electors if the courts fail to break a deadlock

His meeting with Trump was exactly what we all thought it was.
 
acbytesla said:
Sure. But it never works that way.

California does its best not to disenfranchise voters whereas many of the southern states actually do their best to discourage voter participation. They might limit counting only ballots that arrive on Election day whereas California might accept ballots for weeks as long as they are a postmarked. They might allow curing of ballots for weeks and another state might not allow it at all. There are probably lots of reasons that California is slower.
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Here's an article describing Califonia's issues, but it's from November 10.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/416080-why-california-counts-its-ballots-so-slowly

It describes a whole lot of things California does to allow more voters to vote, so that's a good thing, and I agree with the general statement in the article that it's better to be correct than to be fast. However, it seems to me that it ought to be possible to be both, at least when "fast" would mean "a week or less".

Reading the article, it looks like the biggest bottleneck may be their signature verification process. Apparently, in California, it requires a "high level administrator" to throw out a ballot for a signature mismatch. It doesn't give more detail except to say, "in California, several more layers of increasingly senior officials inspect a ballot, in an effort to count as many as possible."

There's no other details, including who these "increasingly senior officials" actually are. However, I'm picturing people who have jobs to do still having a huge stack of votes that have to be viewed personally.

If the quarter million remaining votes are all of that sort, the situation isn't absolutely horrible. If they are concentrated in certain areas, i.e. if there are precincts that simply haven't been run through the counters yet, it would mean local races where the people running still don't have a clue who won three weeks later.

So, California needs to look at the process and see if there are ways to speed it up. It isn't good to have this kind of delay. Also, it can't just be California. If there are 2 million outstanding votes, and California has a quarter million, someplace else is also in trouble.

Anyway, I want to make sure no one thinks that I'm implying something nefarious is going on. I just think it's kind of crazy that there's still something between 1 and 2 percent of the total votes that have yet to be counted. Hopefully it's a one time glitch when people didn't really understand how different this year was going to be, and how procedures that were written for processing a few thousand absentee ballots suddenly had to be used to process a few million ballots.

ETA: The article would also explain why the 4x the votes and 4x the counters wouldn't work under California laws. You can't suddenly add 4x the "high level administrators". If the law requires specific people in California to be involved in the process, you can't create more of them to meet higher levels of demand.
 
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Meadmaker said:
Compared to a sensible expectation that people have of how long it ought to take to count votes. If it takes three weeks, you're doing something wrong.













Sealioning.
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Why is three weeks sensible?

Has it ever been performed in 3 weeks or less?
 
Matthew Best said:
How about comparing it to how long it takes in other democracies?



I'm only really familiar with UK elections, and I can't say for certain about those, but I have certainly never noticed it taking more than a day or two to count the votes in an election.
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I suspect this lies at the heart of it.

We're conditioned to expect a winner declared within days. When that happens, we stop paying attention. When it doesn't, suddenly everyone's new awareness of it is declared an abberation.

I recall a lot of discussion about this very phenomenon in the days before the election. Now suddenly it is all so unexpected.
 
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This is the first election that has almost as many paper ballots as digital ones. Perhaps as we realize that paper is the safest, and secure way to have an election the more efficient we'll get counting those ballots.
 
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