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Election Battleground State Changes

alex.github.io

81–90 of 93 posts

Re: Election Battleground State Changes

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To recap, both candidates have claimed victory at this point, No, they haven't. Only one has. The other has expressed confidence that they will win. but candidates do that all the time before votes are counted, or even cast, its not the same thing as claiming victory. > This could have been prevented by simply not changing things at the last minute. There's almost no evidence that that is the case. > Instead, we've…

Biden has a transition website: buildbackbetter.com That isn't a declaration of victory?

The very first paragraph of that page says "The American people will determine who will serve as the next President of the United States".

Doesn't sound like declaration of victory to me.

Re: Election Battleground State Changes

#82

There’s a row in PA listing Biden with 104.3% of the vote in a block with 1285 votes (the differential increased by more than the total number of votes). Data error?

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)?

Expected. Last time round, Clinton got 82% in Philadelphia. And mail-in voting was majority Democratic in most places this year.

You'll see similar, on the face of it absurd numbers in the other direction in very red areas for the in-person vote, where the few Democrats available mostly voted by mail, so virtually everyone voting in person voted for Trump.

Re: Election Battleground State Changes

#83

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?

There is, in effect. However, it's in December.

Note that last time round, it dragged out for days as well; it's just that most of the slow count wasn't in states that were consequential for the electoral college.

Re: Election Battleground State Changes

#84

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?

> Did no one foresee that this would cause one of the worst elections in American history?

Did you sleep through 2000?

This really isn't anything all _that_ unusual; the previous one was over quickly because the electoral college happened to fall that way (though the count went on for ages afterwards, and IIRC it took a day or so for the popular vote to flip), and the two before that weren't close enough for it to be an issue. It's still by any reasonable measure a lot less of a fiasco than 2000; it's pretty unlikely to rest on a couple of hundred votes or anything like that.

Re: Election Battleground State Changes

#85

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.

No. For all the coverage that late arriving pre Election Day postmarked ballots are getting, they're a pretty minor factor; probably in the hundreds, not thousands, in PA so far, say. PA already had a rule that they couldn't start counting mail in ballots until polls closed; that's not new, and that's essentially what's causing the delay here, along with similar rules elsewhere. States which didn't have rules like this finished quicker, but these rules aren't new.

Re: Election Battleground State Changes

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quick calculation puts the final score at 295/243 for Biden. To put that into perspective, less convincing than Trump's win in 2016, slightly more convincing than George W. Bush's re-election.

Using the word "convincing" in association with the Electoral College is a bit of a stretch (some would say ridiculous). In 2016 Clinton was +2.9M votes, but 77K were in the "wrong" places (MI 10K; PA 44K; WI 23K) and so the minority candidate took the prize. Gore was +500K, but Bush got Florida by 537 votes, and that was the ball game. Biden is +3.5M and things are still up in the air? What a cockamamie system.

You shouldn't be looking at the popular vote if nobody is try to win the popular vote. It's like judging a basketball game by whichever team makes more passes.

Re: Election Battleground State Changes

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yeah, but what that definitely doesnt say is "Congress shall make no law requiring that the electors be chosen on a specific timetable"

Actually the Constitution says exactly that in the 10th Amendment "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

A deadline obviously exists: the day the electors cast their votes, which the Constitution stipulates to be "the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December", and which this year is December 14th. Other than that, as long as a state properly sends its designated number of electors to vote, how it chooses those electors is nobody's business but the state's alone. If the state is not able to decide, or sends the wrong number of electors, then it creates a problem for the Federal Government, so the Congress can pass a law to clarify what to do in such a case, and since this was the case in 1873, it passed the Electoral Count Act, which essentially sets a deadline for such troublesome states 6 days ahead of the 14th December date [1].

[1] https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11641

Re: Election Battleground State Changes

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using the word "convincing" in association with the Electoral College is a bit of a stretch (some would say ridiculous). In 2016 Clinton was +2.9M votes, but 77K were in the "wrong" places (MI 10K; PA 44K; WI 23K) and so the minority candidate took the prize. Gore was +500K, but Bush got Florida by 537 votes, and that was the ball game. Biden is +3.5M and things are still up in the air? What a cockamamie system.

You shouldn't be looking at the popular vote if nobody is try to win the popular vote. It's like judging a basketball game by whichever team makes more passes.

It’s more like judging a basketball game by points but ignoring the three point line.

Re: Election Battleground State Changes

#89

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 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…

So I understand all this but I'm wondering if you can explain to me how I as a lay person am expected to differentiate your supposed chain of events from what the news tells me are tell tale signs of voter fraud.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-37243190

Re: Election Battleground State Changes

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? This constant finding of ballots, along with the allegations of not being allowed to observe the counting by international election watching groups, and the withholding of counts (see AZ and NV), makes the process seem extremely opaque. This is what I expect of a 3rd world country, not America. It was not difficult to get your ballot in on time. They've been out for weeks.

Only thing I can find on international observers is about North Carolina excluding them [0], and this: CBS News: Trump's attempt to stop vote counting "a gross abuse of office," international observers say. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trumps-international-observers-... [0] Raleigh News & Observer: North Carolina says no to international observers at election polling sites. https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-…

I would have posted sooner, but Hacker News bars me from posting too often. Here is the report, with an e-mail image:

https://www.rebelnews.com/international_elecion_observers_ba...

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