This is the inherent problem with too much access to information. These things have happened/existed for years, but nobody knew about it until every bit of information became public because it didn't have any meaningful effect on anything. Transparency is great, but the flipside is it can be used to alter perception/reality in a divided country.

It is starting to seem like information without context and knowledge (or worse, deliberate manipulation) is worse than no access.

Added a couple of key phrases for clarification. I know it sounds elitist, but it's the truth. The internet was an outstanding thing until too many people had access to it.

Well, yeah. But that's what the internet is.

And the dude who tweeted about the 1900 thing may even believe he found something legit, I don't know.

But it's like crowdsleuthing suspects. Well-intentioned people doxxing innocent people because they found them in a picture close to a crime and all of a sudden their lives are in danger.

I don't know what the answer is, but it's only going to get worse.

Stuff like that is why we're about to step into unchartered waters when Biden hits 270. A large swath of the population will absolutely and unequivocally believe in their heart of hearts that he stole the election and therefore anything they do to correct this terrible wrong is justified.

I think this goes back to "it's a feature not a bug". For instance, in Pennsylvania, the GOP sued to prevent early counting of early votes:

Bloomberg - Are you a robot?

This is 100% by design. I don't think it's fair to be mad at "the system" when the Dems were like "yeah, let's get to counting" and the GOP was like "nope, the chaos is what we want as it gives us the best chance to win". You can say "build a better system" but it's almost impossible to build a perfect mousetrap when someone else is trying so hard to break it (never mind the difficulties of COVID).

SI

I want to respond to this and similar statements that have been made as gently but directly as I am able, because I think there's something very important here. I've said for a long time that I don't think we've faced head-on the reasons why Trump won in '16. This election has validated that.

Consider that Trump had just shy of 63 million votes in 2016, and as of right now has over 68 million in 2020. That will grow significantly before all of the counting is done. Several million people who did not vote for Trump four years ago, and based on the fact that they didn't vote for Clinton either are probably relatively apolitical, watched what happened in his first term and decided he was the better choice. Even more did so for Biden of course, I'm not saying these people should be catered to or whatever - they lost, and I'm thankful they did.

I think though that we would do well to consider, when we think about where we stand and what to think of these people, that a lot of them are independents. I believe we should not think of this in terms of people being different than ourselves in intelligence, morality, decency, humanity, etc. They are simply people who came to a different conclusion. They are not inferior to us. They disagree, and only that. There is either something in Trump they were so attracted to, or something in Biden & the Democratic Party they were so repulsed by and/or feared, that they found Trump more palatable. I believe we *must* face the fact that not just a few - and of course, some percentage at least of Trump's '16 electorate also fits in here, how much is a debate I don't wish to repeat here - simply think so differently that they believed Trump better for America's future.

We are not better than them in any way. We just came to a different conclusion.

135k in PA now, 89% counted still.

Right but it's not as if only GOP-controlled states have shortages of poll volunteers. It's a virtually nationwide problem every election cycle. It goes deeper than GOP voter suppression.

Multiple sports books just pulled betting on the election off the board. Maybe it's over soon?

I think I posted about this yesterday here but maybe it was somewhere else. Is this going to be dozens(?) of lone gunman terrorist Pizzagates (my guess). Assassinations are not off the table - though I think there's the laughable Kamala Harris socialist Trojan Horse theory that might protect Joe Biden a bit. Or some sort of more organized "problem"? And, if so, I don't know what that looks like.

Do most people grudgingly accept it and grumble about it for the next 40 years? Does it go Tea Party-ish (lots of political bluster that gets co-opted by the right)? Or does this form into an organized violent movement on a larger scale. And on what scale? A revival of the Klan sort of thing where there are major pockets of terrorists running around killing people lawlessly (even moreso than now)? Or are we talking Civil War-ish level? The last seems unlikely as, I think, they want to talk a big game but, in their heart of hearts, most of these people aren't willing to lay down their lives for this.

SI

The amazing thing to me is not that this is going to happen, but that Trump telegraphed exactly what he planned to do and people still believe he's in the right despite the obviousness of how counting works. These votes existed on election day regardless of what order they were counted. How do people not see this?

I saw a tweet that said we need to come up with different terminology for how we report the count. A candidate is not really "leading" or "gaining" because at the deadline (whenever that is), the result is done. Neither candidate is coming from behind to win in these states or holding off the other - they had already won or lost, we just didn't know the outcome yet.

OK. One sports books just put it back up, Biden still favored. Not sure what that was about.

GA to be finished by noon per SOS.

Maybe I'm missing the point - I'm still tired and was rambling over in the other thread. Are we talking about vote counting or voting at polls?

If we're talking about counting: Vote counting of record turnout during a pandemic has been done in most states within a couple of percentages of votes within one day. That seems really efficient to me. The pandemic was always going to make this more difficult and anytime the Dems tried to ask for election money (or USPS money), the GOP and, let's be honest: Mitch, didn't want to or wanted strong concessions for something that everyone should be able to agree on and shouldn't be bipartisan. And that was solely because they knew the more people voted, the more it hurt them in the election.

As for polling, I've been on record here as saying I strongly believe we should have a new Voting Rights act with everything from a Saturday or Saturday/Sunday Election Day, guaranteed Early Voting with reasonable hours nationwide, guaranteed paper trails (we don't have that in Texas - I have no proof that my vote counted for Joe Biden or Mickey Mouse), stringent requirements about purging polls, and special rules for larger counties (say, >100K people) with mandatory minimums about how many people are zoned to one polling place and how far polling places can be from every residence zoned to them. And, yes, the federal government should pay for it and not states.

But I don't think there's much support for any of this. President Trump has no interest in this and a President Biden with a GOP Senate has no hope of passing something like this.

SI

Perdue under 50%.

Just noticed that per NYT, Clayton County is only 84% done. Not nearly as large as Dekalb/Fulton/Gwinnett/Cobb, but it's probably the blackest county in metro Atlanta. 84.9-14.2 Biden so far. If the rest come in at that rate, that's a 14K net gain for Biden.

Yes to both basically. I was just saying that the reason it was taking as long as it is, is because we don't want to invest the resources required to make it better. Sounds like you're pretty much in agreement there.

Heh. Blackest county in Georgia.


https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/uni...rcentage#chart

With the obvious proviso that IF this is legit... this is the kind of stuff that is going to put the election in limbo:

Lol! He's right.

I used info via Social Security Death Index on "Your Voter Information" on the Michigan SoS website.

William was born in 1902, died in Detroit at age 82 in 1984.

He applied for an absentee ballot on 9/11, submitted it on 9/19.

They've been at it for months. https://t.co/jfpaVIFLhh pic.twitter.com/l4kCijui0g

— Peoples_Pundit (@Peoples_Pundit) November 5, 2020

This isn't a DOB issue, it appears to be validated by SSN information.

GA SOS now saying 61K votes left to count. I guess that's good, but why are these numbers going up? Certainly doesn't help with perception.

I'm guessing that even SCOTUS wouldn't support that, given the multitude of state laws and processes on that.

Dang. Twitter put a label on that one in under 5 minutes.

Yeah, either does the term "found" as in "they found more votes in Fulton." I've heard those kinda of things a lot and makes it easy for conspiracy types to latch on.

The Republican SOS is trying to help Biden win? ;)

John King has had to catch himself 3-4 times (at least) talking about "missing" ballots/votes and then has to spend 2 minutes clarifying that he didn't mean missing, just not counted yet.

Aren't they from multiple polling places ? If so, the obvious explanation is them getting the "still left to count" numbers at different times.

I mean, there is likely a whole team tasked with monitoring Trump in shifts. He's not exactly flying under anyones radar ;)

There was another scenario I saw that at first glance was a head scratcher. There are dozens of examples of counties where it appeared that Trump won nearly all of the new voters/registrants. ie. Biden got near the same amount of votes as Clinton, but Trump got 5-20X what he got in 2016.

Aren't NY and CA still counting?

I think everyone is still counting some votes. Biden may end up with 5-7mil vote lead in the popular vote.

https://twitter.com/Redistrict/statu...586755074?s=20

Biden has been outperforming Clinton all over PA.

Anticipating this from my evangelist friend. Going to say "Jesus must have wanted it this way".

I guess votes from overseas services members don't count.

Has anyone seen a legit explanation of the 138K Biden vote dump in WI at 3:30am? Not a single Trump vote, just 138K Biden votes. This is what's going to get litigated. Just curious if there's anything out there explaining it that has flown by my twitter feed and I missed it.

Wisconsin didn't find ballots or stop count; voter fraud claims untrue

https://twitter.com/MotoKitten91/sta...883878401?s=20


Also just finding one example isn't enough, voting fraud happens every election year.

The one in Michigan was a typo. Guy typed 153k instead of 15k in a county with 70k citizens

This is one of those things where I think the average election office isn't used to doing PR or anything like that - they're just reporting or counting numbers in a way that most makes sense and is quickest. But with this glut of information where we receive so much news but only in pieces and without much context, it's going to be open to wild speculation.

SI

We should have just stopped the election when the southern states reported their democratic mail-in votes first.

That’s basically the GOP argument flipped over. And yes, you can see how stupid that sounds.

Right, that one was explained. This one not. And the MI numbers got revised to reflect the error.

According to AJC, Jo Jorgensen has 60,414 votes, enough to be the "king maker".

I'm all for people voting for who they want. But this one will hurt.

TEXAS GOES BLUE!

SI

Michigan :)

Trump retweets false claim that Biden got 138K mysterious Michigan votes - Vox

I think the main thing with this stuff is people just dying to find an irregularity soooooo bad they take any hint of it as significant (OMG it happened at 3:30 AM to sneak it by ! But I caught it !) and just share it to create a stir, rather than consider how stupid one would have to be to do it that way if they wanted to even with that 'hint'. Like, what's more realistic ? Someone hoping no one in the age of the Internet would notice even at 3 am ? Or there being another explanation out of a vast variety, considering this whole thing still is done by humans. With a system in place to catch these errors, which happened here.

This is another example for this phenomenon:

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1324132814091132929

Seeing about 61k votes left to be counted in Georgia with, per 538, a predicted weighted average of +19 for Biden, I don't think it's going to be enough.

Thanks!

The counties are +19 blue, but absentee ballots tend to be bluer than that.

As Nate Silver said:

Anything to distract me from work :D

Even being +19 means he makes it up by my math. This has been exhausting, I got dressed to go for a run almost 2 hours ago and I am still sitting here obsessing on this shit LOL