Michigan remains my biggest concern for election night. That's a state where we could see a surprise due to a combination of low minority turnout and Trump's efforts with the white working class vote.

Though polling shows Clinton should win it. 77.9% chance according to 538. Also Clinton has far more organized GOTV apparatus than Trump.

Clinton's already been surprised once by Michigan, so anything is possible there.

No statewide election had ever been won by 1 vote. Maryland's electoral votes were once won by a 4 vote margin - in 1832 by Henry Clay - and the 1974 NH Senate and 1839 Massachusetts Gubernatorial races were decided by 2 votes. The closest recent one I can recall (Florida in 2000) was still 539 votes.

Yessir! :)

Al Franken was elected to his first term in the Senate by 312 votes.

I haven't looked in the past couple of days but earlier in the week there was rain forecast on Tuesday for only one major (big enough to have a dot on the map I looked at) city: Detroit.

FWIW.

Right at this moment, I think this is the most important facet of the election. The delta in GOTV effort and effectiveness might be the largest in history, in her favor.

This election simply never fails to be interesting.

Hispanic EIP voting in Florida is off the charts...429k have voted in person, up 152% at this time in 2012#TrumpEffect

— daniel a. smith (@electionsmith) November 4, 2016

I got a massive chuckle out of early voting today in NC. First off, there were signs *everywhere* saying "no voter IDs required." I'm talking massive ones on both sides of the road going into my chosen location (a rec center in a public park,) signs lining the sidewalks from the driveway to the rec center door, massive ones over the big double doors, etc. I go in to vote, and it's your typical suburban voting location during work hours: every poll worker was a 70+-year-old white person. I assumed all those "voter IDs not required" signs meant that, you know, an ID wasn't required, but I further assumed that showing something official with my picture, name, and address on it would be the fastest way to get validated and get on with it. So as I walked up to the sign-in table, I smiled and nodded at the old lady sitting there, and started to reach for my wallet...



It was like a moment out of a movie.



Her reaction was *priceless*. It was basically "NO NO NO NO NO PUT YOUR WALLET AWAY NO VOTER ID PLEASE DON'T MAKE IT LOOK LIKE I AM ASKING FOR ONE FROM YOU MR BLACK MAN ZOMFG EVERYONE PLEASE LOOK AND SEE THAT I AM NOT SUPPRESSING THIS NEGRO'S VOTE !!!!!1111111" :D :D :D

Seriously, it was like that movie/sitcom trope where someone goes to say/do something that no one wants you to do and like five people raise both hands outward toward you and with panicked faces say "NOOOOOOOOO!!!" It felt like if I'd made another move toward my wallet, three old white people would have jumped out from under the table to grab my arms and put it back in my pocket. :lol:

Well if someone did that in my vicinity with all those signs up everywhere, at a glance I would probably think that they were being a dick

lol Ben

that story is great

I'm glad you weren't suppressed today!

You should have said something like "This is the first time today that I haven't been asked for my ID before voting. All of the other polling stations asked."

Sure and I am talking about this more as a general mindset, as I think most folks do when they say that "every note matters." The language may be imprecise, but the thinking holds.

Maybe that poll worked had read all the court opinions stating that new NC voting laws were enacted to disproportionately harm black voters didn't want no trouble :)

As a Michigander I can confidently say this: don't worry about us. I'll be shocked if Trump is within three points in Michigan. Wayne County has to stay home in massive numbers, more than I've ever seen, for a Republican to have a chance to carry the state. 30 years ago we were a swing state sometimes, but there's been a steady left-ward drift. The rural areas will go for Trump of course, but it's never nearly enough to overcome the Detroit area.


I totally agree. Voting for a candidate you don't really support because you're more afraid of the others is a misuse of civic responsibility IMO. One lesson that is loud and clear in this election? The major parties can do whatever they want to do and the electorate won't leave them. I'm not sure prime-time televised and online streamed mass murder and torture would do it. The only thing that gives them the confidence to continue taking people's vote for granted is a refusal to seriously consider other options due to fear of the 'other side'. Everyone should do what they believe is best, but as for me I refuse to have my vote be controlled by others, fear of what they will do, etc.

I think this is an area where that whole 'be the change you want to see in the world' idea is very appropriate.

:lol:

The Nader point is well-taken, but the Perot thing is something of a canard.

Ross Perot myth reborn amid rumors of third-party Trump candidacy | MSNBC

Something like 60% of Nader voters would not have voted for Bush had Perot not been in the race. How many of those Perot voters bother to show up if the race were Bush/Clinton is a fair question, but it's not as simple as "Perot cost Bush the election."

As I've said elsewhere, the Senate is far more interesting to me in terms of the 'horse race' thing this year. Latest 538 info has it mostly likely a 50-50 split, and I've seen some discussion of how people who favor Hillary over Trump but don't really trust her are going GOP for their congressmen in order to 'hedge their bets'. The projection for the Senate has most commonly been 51-49 Dems ... I predict, unfortunately, massive chaos there after the election. The Garland nomination will likely be particularly ridiculous.

Win.

Joking aside about the voter ID stuff, it does seem fairly easy to claim to be someone you aren't and vote multiple times, especially with early voting. They just asked for my name and address, and in NC, voter information including address and party affiliation can be looked up on the interwebs. What would stop a Republican from looking up 12 Democrats then going to 12 different locations on day 1 of early voting, claiming to be a different person each time? Vote 12 times *and* keep 12 people from the other side from voting. Or if you know of someone who isn't going to vote or has moved away, there seems to be an extremely low chance of detection there.

ADDED AFTER TYPING THAT LAST SENTENCE: I just checked. I'm still listed as a registered voter in South Carolina. I moved in August 2014. What's stopping someone from claiming to be me there if they use the same low-level validation that I had this morning?

Ya, I know it's said there's no evidence of widespread voter fraud, but, why would there be? That's kind of the point, that it'd be easy to do and wouldn't leave a paper trail. In Idaho you can either show an ID, or just sign an affidavit. It would be very easy to sign it as anyone, and there would be no evidence that you were ever there. You would need to know what address they're registered at - but you can look that up publicly online. I doubt voter fraud swings elections, but I wish we could all meet halfway on this, require IDs, but make sure that everyone that wants one can easily get a free ID (which might help them in a lot of other areas of life too).

Dola: To be clear, that's not a snarky question. I truly have no idea about this stuff. Maybe I am underestimating the process in my assumption that states don't cross-reference votes. In the first scenario I presented, it would become obvious that something had gone wrong when the people showed up to vote, but I'm really curious how any of the studies that indicate that voter fraud is extremely low would even be able to take my SC registration into account.

Heh. Molson broke my dola and kinda said what I am wondering about.

I mean, heck, someone who moved could even be in on the fraud, right? "Like-minded friend, I'm moving. Here's my address. Feel free to keep on voting as me."

I'd assume you'd at least start hearing complaints (in Ben's scenario) of people being turned away from voting because someone already had in their name -- similar to how fraudulent IRS filings are discovered.

At some point I'd wonder if the juice is worth the squeezing. Would you get more out of spending a day voting as others (while still having *some* risk you'd get caught) or going door-to-door, working phones, etc?

edit: waited so long Ben got in two more posts

I'm sure there's good reasoning behind it, but I don't really get how 538's projections are affected by certain polls. for example:

It was 65.1% for Clinton at 456pm. Then an update came in at 518pm:

CO: Clinton +5
UT: Trump +6

This brought the numbers down to 64.3%.

Then at 538pm, we got another update:

VA: Clinton +18

This moved the needle to 63.9%

Seems really odd to me.

Earlier in the week Hillary dropped 3% after two polls had Trump leading in Missouri.

I don't think it's as easy as you say. For one, the poll workers are local, so the chance they or someone else voting knows you or one of the names you try to vote as is pretty high. Many precincts just aren't that big.

Second, anyone doing this is running the risk of a felony conviction. I think finding people willing to take that risk is pretty difficult, especially when it's likely that the voter fraud won't change the results of the election. Even to swing the vote 1000 in one direction it would take pat least fifty people, and almost no statewide elections turn on just 1000 votes.

That being said, I've stated in the past and earlier in the thread that I could design a voter ID bill that I wouldn't oppose, but in real life these bills are almost always larded up with other voter suppression tactics. Trying to design an ID bill that won't impact minority participation won't work, because the whole goal is to impact minority participation.

A couple of factors explain at least some of it, though I don't pretend to understand it all at a detailed level. Some polls are less reliable than others(i.e, most of the polls in the last day have been on-line ones). Some are also adjusted for because certain pollsters tend to have a bias one way or the other compared to the average; for example, I know there's an LA Times poll that has had Trump even or ahead pretty much the whole way when obviously that's not been the case. Third thing is, even if a poll shows one candidate ahead, if it's not by as much as expected then that still could move things.

Also if you go to a polling place and try voting as someone who has already voted, that's going to raise a major red flag. Not that the election judges really have the power to do anything to you.

Getting the voter databases to talk to each other between states would be a big step, but it's incredibly complicated as you have essentially 100+ systems that have to talk to each other between every state's voter registration system, DMV and any other system to catch anyone has moved between states.

There are just so many better ways to impact an election than voter fraud. Maybe for small, low-level elections it's a decent tactic to swing a few votes and it's surely more of an issue when it comes to ballot petitions where it's just signatures, but actual voting in elections? Meh, the juice isn't worth the squeeze especially for a big election.

Here's the thing: that kind of voter fraud doesn't work as well as Republicans think it does. To the extent that it happens, it generally gets caught, and the people engaged in it are usually people who don't entirely understand how polling places and precincts work in the first place.

Polling places don't have a master list of everybody who lives in the precinct and you just show up and state your name. If you're trying to vote, as you, in multiple precincts, what that typically means is you're registered in one, and you're casting provisional ballots in others - but you have to be able to prove residence in the territory covered by that polling place for your vote to count. In some cases, that might be same-day voter registration, as in Wisconsin, where you roll into the precinct and show documentation proving that you live in that precinct, at which point you're permitted to register and vote. In others, that might be an affidavit that you sign swearing that you live in that precinct and are registered even though you aren't showing up on the voter rolls, but you often have to provide documentation within a set period of time afterward to prove it, or - and this is crucial - your provisional ballot doesn't get counted.

Voter impersonation fraud is even more difficult/time consuming, because the poll worker will ask for your name (and possibly address, depending on the state), and you have to provide that before they go flipping through the book looking for you. Which means if you're going to impersonate people, you have to somehow cull a list beforehand with who you're going to impersonate and where and you still run the risk of announcing yourself as Bob Johnson to a poll worker who knows who the fuck Bob Johnson is, and knows you ain't him.

So those are the two great Republican fantasies for how elections get stolen, and the amount of work necessary to make either work on anything more than a local level just...isn't feasible. Could you steal a mayoral election in a small town that way? Well...mathematically yes, practically speaking, no; in a small town, everybody knows everybody. Good luck with that. Los Angeles? No, probably not. The number of people eligible to vote means you'd need a massive program, and the more people are in on it the more likely it is to come to light. State legislature? Harder. Congressional? Harder still. Presidential? Not just no, but hell no.

You cannot coordinate on that scale, not in a 24/7 news environment, and hope to get away with it. Which brings us to the next type of election fraud: who counts the ballots?

The Constitution grants power over the handling of elections to states; to the extent that any states exist which would want to "rig" an election for either of the major candidates, those are going to be states with sympathetic party control ALREADY IN PLACE. Texas officials might want to rig it for Trump, but what would be the point? He's vanishingly unlikely to need their help. California might want to rig it for Clinton, but...what would be the point?

So right off the bat you can probably toss out ~3 dozen states as either not being feasible or being a waste of effort to rig. Clinton ain't going to be rigging Texas, Montana, or Kansas. Trump is not going to be rigging California, Oregon, or Hawaii. And so on.

Which brings you to the battleground states. Wisconsin? Republican control at the state level. North Carolina? Republican control at the state level. Florida? Republican control at the state level. Pennyslvania? Republican control of the Legislature, Democratic control of the Executive. Ohio? Republican control at the state level. So if you want to believe there's a coordinated effort to steal the election that way, you have to believe that the Republican establishment is on board with stealing it for Hillary Clinton. That if there's anti-Trump fraud afoot, it's going to be a knife in Caesar's back.

But, again...you can't keep that kind of conspiracy quiet, not at the level necessary to pull that off for either party - let alone to coordinate across state lines to ensure that all dozen or so battleground states cockblock one candidate or the other. You can pull off that kind of fraud in a small town for a mayoral election, say, but the more prominent the elected office, the harder it is to do.

So what's next? Vote buying. Cool, that's a thing which could happen...but voter ID laws don't do a damn thing to address that (never mind how prohibitively expensive it would be). I can show my ID all the damn day and you still, as a legislator, have no idea if I've been bought and paid for by a campaign. That, incidentally, is how the old political machines worked. Not necessarily with a direct cash payment, but there was a quid pro quo. If you wanted a particular job, you voted for a particular candidate. When people talk about Chicago politicians and the Chicago machine, that's what they're talking about, and that's something voter ID laws conspicuously fail to do anything about.

Okay, so what else? Here's another one voter ID laws don't address: absentee voting. Register a friend or family member online or by mail without their knowledge, intercept the ballot, and return it. Now, again, that's not the easiest thing in the world to pull off, but it carries less risk than in-person impersonation.

Look, the TL;DR on all of this is that election fraud CAN happen, but the masturbatory fantasies in which the Republican Party engages on this issue just...they're not feasible. If you're going to steal an election, you tamper with the ballot count, not with the actual voting process. You suborn somebody who "finds" an extra box of ballots, or who sticks an extra couple boxes in with the legitimate ballots being delivered to the clearinghouse, or what-have-you. And you still have to have an idea of just how much is needed to 'flip' that precinct (or state) in the first place or you run the risk of modifying the total so obviously that it's clear there's been tampering.

Requiring ID to vote, by itself, isn't the worst idea in the world. But for that to be legit, you gotta do it clean. You can't tack on "okay we're going to close polling places and eliminate early voting and stack the deck on what kind of documents constitute proof of ID and reduce hours at the DMV in districts that are majority-minority, and..."

Once you start tacking on all of those other measures, it isn't about fraud prevention. It's about voter suppression - about controlling what the electorate looks like so that the people who show up on election day are more likely to vote for you and yours than for your opponents.

There's a right way and a wrong way to handle voter ID. Voter ID doesn't actually accomplish much of anything except to make white Republicans feel good about themselves, but there's nothing wrong with that, if it's handled properly.

The problem is that the states in which Republicans have rushed to institute strict voter ID laws in the aftermath of SCOTUS striking down the voting controls in the Civil Rights Act have NOT implemented it properly. In fact, they've done so in such a way that targets minority constituencies "with surgical precision." Republicans in some states have been vocally forthright about what voter ID is intended to accomplish - and it's generally been to suppress student and minority voters.

The part of your post that I bolded is the key. Require ID, make it easy and free to get an ID for voting purposes (passports or driver's licenses would still be valid for voting, but needn't be free), and don't tack on all the other suppressive bullshit that's meant to shape the electorate in a way that's friendly to a particular political party.

Do that, and nobody bitches. If your single mom working two jobs doesn't have to take a day off to ride a bus 50 miles and spend all day getting an ID, great. If your 102 year old great-grandmother doesn't get denied because her birth certificate has a typo - or she was born in a county that didn't even REQUIRE birth certificates - great. The problem is when certain groups are deliberately disadvantaged and the response is "don't be poor" or "don't be old" or "don't be a minority, what's your problem?"

To clarify, what I mean by 'prove it' is they don't just flip the book open, point to the name, and go 'is this you?' You state your name and address and if they match, THEN you're asked to sign your name. If they don't match, at that point provisional ballots get involved again - and those don't get counted unless you can prove you are who you say you are, living where you say you live.

Here's the thing: 1500 words, man.

Shake it off or something.

They just extended voting hours at a Mexican supermarket to 10 PM. Close to 1,000 voters in line. If you have a panic button GOP, find it.

— Jon Ralston (@RalstonReports) November 5, 2016

Current voter count in Clark with at least an hour left:

55K

Record keeps getting higher.

— Jon Ralston (@RalstonReports) November 5, 2016

Looking even more unlikely that Trump will be able to win Nevada with turnout on the final day of early voting.

Dems win Clark by 11,000-plus, will be ahead overall there by 72K-plus, more than 2012. May be game over in NV for GOP.

— Jon Ralston (@RalstonReports) November 5, 2016

I think Hispanic voter turnout is going to destroy Trump and is likely underestimated in the polls

I'm not going to say I told you guys so, but I told you guys so. :D

Let's not get too carried away with "learning" from early voting turnout. It's up everywhere, got it. But we don't really know how this breaks down... are these just accelerated voters who are +1 early but -1 Tuesday? Or is this really an indicator of true enthusiasm and overall participation? We honestly don't know.

This is definitely going to be the year that early voting "tipped" into a much more standard thing for the country. But we don't know what we can really learn from it, yet.

Trump took a meaningful drop on PredictIt between Thursday and Saturday. He was up in the 33-36 range across a few parallel markets, but this morning is now selling at 28-29. That's a big move considering there wasn't really an accompanying "event" to speak of.

There were some Friday morning polls that looked good for Ds, but it wasn't anything clear or long-lasting. That might be the most unexpected move I've seen in the markets this entire cycle.

My best guess is it's just a correction - that he sort of outkicked his own coverage a bit with a week or so of relative calm (from the candidate himself), and that things just regressed to the mean a bit.

I had bids in to buy D/HRC/woman/Kaine at 63c, but the market never got to that point, and I obviously missed the big money-making opportunity there. I had the right idea, but wasn't aggressive enough (or was too greedy, if you prefer).

In Nevada you can because it's a small state with only so many votes. The big firewall in Clark County will more than offset any rural gains the Repubs make on Tuesday, especially with Washoe county even. There's not enough votes left.

NC and FL are more populous so harder to predict. Obama had a big early vote lead in 2012 and still lost NC and barely won FL.

This is absolutely true. I've been trying to find some data on whether these are new voters or just accelerated voters. The only thing I found was this from FL:


Low propensity means only voted in one of the last three elections.

Just noticed the Obama vs McCain thread has more than twice the posts of this POTUS 2016. Wonder why but assume the changing demographics of this board.

The board isn't nearly as active as it was 8 year ago.

There's some info available on North Carolina as well.

Log In - New York Times

Less regular voters are steadily representing a larger and larger share of N.C. early voters pic.twitter.com/OtuJhYE1Mj

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) November 5, 2016

So far, 63% of the people with a >98% chance of voting have turned out. Our model doesn't seem like it has a great grasp on 20 v 50% pic.twitter.com/09YwSFunSc

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) November 5, 2016

I sure hope that Nevada guy is not going to have a repeat of this:

Fox News, Karl Rove Argue Over The Outcome In Ohio - YouTube

Part of it is due to a less active board, but we also had more of a debate in 2008 because there were more people on McCain's side.

Donald Trump really thought he could insult Latinos and we'd just stand there and take it. Please, we are not @ChrisChristie.

— Gabe Ortíz (@TUSK81) November 5, 2016