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Election Battleground State Changes

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Re: Election Battleground State Changes

#51

Post by OldHand2018 »

qqqwerty wrote: post #32
tathougies wrote: post #15

Why do the estimated vote counts keep going up? Why has this process dragged on for days . Where do they keep losing ballots? Why isn't there a deadline? Why are only these states still counting? Great resource BTW!

Outstanding ballot counts are almost always estimates. Many states allow mail-in ballots as long as they have been postmarked by election day, which means there can be a week or more lag before the precinct receives the ballot. Additionally, provisional ballots are usually counted last, and the number of those isn't known until they start counting them. The process is dragged on for days because Republicans prevented…

> The deadline is December 8th.

Indeed. The process is outlined here:

https://www.archives.gov/electoral-college/roles#meeting

EDIT - it should be made clear that this is when the electors vote. Each individual state must finish their counting before that so they know which electors are voting on December 8. Each state is free to decide when they stop counting - and they each have their own laws regarding that. The Federal government has no say - the US constitution prohibits the Federal government from getting involved.

Re: Election Battleground State Changes

#52

Post by pwinnski »

tathougies wrote: post #20
some-guy wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Votes can arrive by mail later without being opened. Also counties may misreport how many ballots they originally had.

Why do the misreport them? Why don't we know? And I also don't really understand how mail can arrive later. In my state of Oregon which has mail-in only voting, ballots must arrive by 8PM on election day. That's it. Why do other states allow it to go past that? This is crazy. It's election day, not week.

"It's election day" doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. Absentee and other mail ballots have always been allowed to arrive late in the majority of states. There just aren't normally enough of them to make the difference in a close race like this one.

When I lived in California, it was common for military ballots to arrive up to two weeks after Election Day. That never mattered for the presidential race, but other races weren't officially records until everything was counted.

Re: Election Battleground State Changes

#53

Post by Rebelgecko »

googthrowaway42 wrote: post #14
nicklevin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also see 3 blocks in PA of 25k+ votes with 90%+ Biden (one is 97%) - can someone better at statistics tell me how likely that is due to chance given the other values (assuming the data is reporting accurately)?

According to noted election expert Ioseb Jughashvili, such scenarios are extremely likely under certain sets of circumstances. He's said it's nothing to worry about.

Is there a pundit who is still alive and uses that as a pseudonym?

Re: Election Battleground State Changes

#54

Post by stickfigure »

tathougies wrote: post #28
dragonwriter wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do the estimated vote counts keep going up? The same reason they are estimated counts in the first place, there's not hard counts of ballots before the, um, count of ballots. > Why has this process dragged on for days. Because its a manual process that normally takes days. > Where do they keep losing ballots? They don't, that's why the estimated numbers go up, not down. > Why isn't there a deadline? There is, b…

In my home state of Oregon, ballot results are released pretty much immediately, because the ballot deadline for receipt is 8 pm on election day. The same was true of California when I lived there. Why are the rules suddenly changed? Did no one foresee that this would cause one of the worst elections in American history?

Election laws are set by states, and they're all different.

Re: Election Battleground State Changes

#55

Post by mthoms »

ngcc_hk wrote: post #34

Can someone explain why 400k+ vote still being counted but Arizona result is called. No I am not want to dispute or argue. Just number. Thanks.

Networks will attempt to project ("call") winners based on how the data is trending. It has nothing to do with the official results. For instance, I understand that Fox "called" Arizona for Biden already, but I know that CNN and ABC have not.

Re: Election Battleground State Changes

#56

Post by Rebelgecko »

tathougies wrote: post #15

Why do the estimated vote counts keep going up? Why has this process dragged on for days . Where do they keep losing ballots? Why isn't there a deadline? Why are only these states still counting? Great resource BTW!

It's hard to count ballots before you've counted them. I'd imagine the way the estimates work is "here's a 80 pound sack of ballots, each ballot weighs x ounces so we have about 80*16/x ballots. Plus more ballots are still coming in

Re: Election Battleground State Changes

#57

Post by brational »

mthoms wrote: post #41
brational wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me it reads “We aim for 30k but take what we can get.” You can see that the update sizes from the nytimes source vary greatly.

That's over-simplifying by leaving out the "or more" part (which presumably exists because they only want to count full blocks). I do understand the gist of what they are saying but there's got to be a better way to word it. I also wonder if theres a good statistical reason for only counting full blocks. Why not just stop at 30k?

probably dont have access to individual vote data?

Re: Election Battleground State Changes

#58

Post by dragonwriter »

Rebelgecko wrote: post #50
ngcc_hk wrote: post #34

Can someone explain why 400k+ vote still being counted but Arizona result is called. No I am not want to dispute or argue. Just number. Thanks.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21535103/when-will-w... tl;dr is that many of the remaining votes are in parts of the state that are more liberal than the parts of the state that have already been counted. If Biden wins a county that is 50/50 D/R, then they're assuming that he will also win a county that is 60/40 D/R (oversimplifying a bit because turnout can very from county to county and mail-in ballots mig…

> However it was a bit controversial that Fox called AZ as early as they did, I don't think any of the other TV channels have followed suit

I think this is technically correct in that the other TV channels didn't; AP, however, also called AZ.

Re: Election Battleground State Changes

#59

Post by dragonwriter »

credit_guy wrote: post #37
tathougies wrote: post #15

Why do the estimated vote counts keep going up? Why has this process dragged on for days . Where do they keep losing ballots? Why isn't there a deadline? Why are only these states still counting? Great resource BTW!

> Why isn't there a deadline? How could there be? Voting is a state business. Each state is responsible for how it chooses the electors, via what procedures, on what timetable, etc. Here's what the Constitution has to say on this matter (Article 2, Section 1): "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representative…

> How could there be?

Well, Article II of the Constituion might have included language something like "The Congress may determine the time of choosing the electors, and the day on which they shall give their votes; which day shall be the same throughout the United States."

The first clause absolutely gives Congress the power to set a deadline by which electors must be chosen. And it has; the choice of electors, to be within the Electoral Count Act safe harbor, must be finalized six days before the Electoral College votes (so, Dec. 8, as the EC votes on Dec. 14.)

Re: Election Battleground State Changes

#60

Post by noahtallen »

tathougies wrote: post #25
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why has this process dragged on for days >Where do they keep losing ballots? Because a process that had never been trialed in many places was used at the national scale. >Why isn't there a deadline? There is for the ballots being mailed (varies by states). There isn't any practical deadline on counting as long as a good faith effort is being made. Realistically we're probably looking at recounts in several of the ke…

> Because a process that had never been trialed in many places was used at the national scale. Sure, I get that, but didn't anyone foresee that this will call into question the legitimacy of the election. To recap, both candidates have claimed victory at this point, despite no major media outlet calling enough electoral votes. This could have been prevented by simply not changing things at the last minute. Instead, w…

> this could have been prevented by simply not changing things at the last minute

I don’t think this is true, though. The main change is that more people voted via mail. That isn’t a last minute thing. More people want to vote by mail this year, and many states allowed them to already. The problem is that states just aren’t used to processing this many mail ballots. One could argue that there weren’t enough last minute changes! For example, if PA had made a last minute change to begin processing mail ballots earlier than Tuesday, then they’d have finished much more quickly.

> didn’t anyone foresee that this will call into question the legitimacy of the election

In my opinion, the only reason we’re seeing so many people question it is because Trump has been baselessly claiming for months that the election would be stolen from him and that mail in voting is fraudulent. So yes, everyone was aware that Trump would call its legitimacy into question, but I haven’t seen a shred of evidence for it. In fact, two of his lawsuits were thrown out because there was no evidence onto back up his claims.

And to be completely fair, Biden hasn’t called the election, he just said that the path to victory seems clear. And that much is very obvious, since Biden does have more options for winning than trump does at this point, just because Trump’s only path to victory is by winning every state left, and Biden only needs one or two.

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