Mail in voting and the election day train wreck

[Arwon]

Trainwreck is certainly the correct description for what we are headed for on election day. The judges would also have accepted:

"Total Disaster"
"Fiasco"
"Cluster fudge"

Maybe even constitutional crisis

 

[Arwon]

Link? I find it hard to believe that when, nationwide, just a handful of voter fraud cases turn up, Los Angeles has over 1 million cases.

Remember when Trump was elected, and Congress appointed a Republican-led committee to look into voter fraud? They gave up when they couldn't find any.

It's a rubbish claim started by an organisation called Judicial Watch who like to try to purge electoral rolls, and is being peddled in the far right fever swamp via the likes of infowars.

Basically, California keeps on hand a record of inactive voters - people whose mailouts have come back as undeliverable, due to having moved or whatever. That's so they don't disenfranchise valid voters, but very few (like, the example given is 12 out of 44000 in Santa Cruz one time) actually vote from that list.

The people who made this claim added together the inactive list and the regular registered voter list and got a spurious big number.

 

[Zkribbler]

Although incoming international mail has been being received for weeks now, our P.O. is not accepting outgoing international mail.

Yesterday I checked again, and we can once again, I may mail stuff to the US. My tax returns, due last July 15, can now be mailed.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Are you suggesting that TMIT would try to spread BS from far right misinformation sources?

Say it isn't so!

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Are there any signs that people have gotten the message that the post office is in a bad way and that they should mail in their ballots well ahead of time or drop them off at drop boxes? Has there been any research into that? I also have seen that while the Democrats are pushing hard on mail in ballots, they don't seem to pushing nearly as hard on getting the message out that you need to vote as soon as you get the ballot and preferably through a drop box rather than wait until the day of.

 

[Socrates99]

I saw this article today that paints a kind of scary scenario. Makes me nervous.
https://www.axios.com/bloomberg-gro...ios-a554e8f5-9702-437e-ae75-d2be478d42bb.html

 

[El_Machinae]

It's paralyzing. It means that there's a patriotic reason to actually vote in-person. But then that puts you at risk of having voting day itself be a gong-show. And you cannot send your letter after finding out that in-person didn't work.

What's necessary now is unceasing messaging that the results won't be known on Election Day. If the US had a proper President, he'd start with that messaging instead of this stupid thing becoming a new partisan divide.

Every (R) who announces (on their social feed) that they're doing their ballot by mail-in will help keep their country calmer.

 

[El_Machinae]

Biden 'refusing to concede until the last vote is counted' is the outcome of game-theory. The 'refusing to concede' was a pin pulled out of the grenade already by Trump*, first. And then people are pissed that Biden has been forced to mirror the strategy. There's a game-theory here, the Prisoner's Dilemma, where one person degrades the trust for a temporary advantage and everyone else basically has no choice but to do the same thing.

What's the world people want to live in? The one where Trump will refuse to concede, but Biden 'must' take the high-road? It doesn't work that way. The degradation has already happened. There could be a detente, where the candidates give general agreement under which they'd gracefully concede. But the initiator of the degrading of polite behaviour was Trump.

But please note my point about the election not actually being settled on Election Day. People have to know this, implicitly. The only way for people to be at peace with that idea is if they know that 'their side' has votes yet-to-be-counted.

*Jesus, he kept lying about the last election after he won. He didn't even concede his own squeaker of a victory.

 

[Sommerswerd]

I saw this article today that paints a kind of scary scenario. Makes me nervous.
https://www.axios.com/bloomberg-gro...ios-a554e8f5-9702-437e-ae75-d2be478d42bb.html

They're calling it the "Red Mirage"... catchy... Just remember where you heard it first

This exactly. What Trump is hoping for, is that the reliably red states get called for him early (which FOX News will be happy to oblige) so that he can say he is "winning"... then, declare that all the states that are being reported as "Too early to call" due to mail-in ballots are, in-fact dutifully rigging the vote totals so that Biden wins.

He just wants to throw the whole process into question so that he can justify refusing to concede. If we get to a point in the night where most or all of the states expected to go for Trump have been called, but then he happens to lose a key state, Pennsylvania for example, or Wisconsin, that's when the news outlets are going to start projecting that he will inevitably lose as "the math isn't there for him anymore". At that point Trump will go berserk, crying conspiracy and foul, because "the dishonest media is saying that I will lose the election even though I'm clearly winning, sleepy Joe only has 2 states and I've won 10! Conspiracy?? TREASON???"

Called it ​

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I think covid has provided good practice.

I haven't left the house much in months. With a descent supply of bottled water we can go a while even if the water shuts off. I'm laying in food so I can go at least a couple weeks without having to get out to the store. We don't have to worry about really excessive cold. I'm having my gf put in for the first couple weeks of November as vacation time, so that even if her work is "deemed essential" we will be able to unquestioningly comply with an order, or just common sense advice, to stay home, stay safe, stay off the streets.

 

[Naskra]

What's necessary now is unceasing messaging that the results won't be known on Election Day.

Fake news of the future is never necessary.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Fox News will call the election for Joe Biden by 1:00 a.m. November 4th (MSNBC and CNN having called it for him by midnight).

 

[Zkribbler]

The US Postal Service is busy sending out vote-by-mail instructions which are wrong.

 

[Kaitzilla]

Looking back on my own congressional districts election in 2018, and looking at projections regarding November, I am seeing an inevitable disaster. Like many California districts, in 2018 the election day vote tallies here favored the Republican but shifted as the mail in vote was counted over the following days. Plenty of people here knew exactly what was going to happen, since people voting by mail skew Democrat here by a very wide margin. However that "plenty of people" did not include the intentionally ignorant and the media that plays to them, so Republicans widely believe that the election was "stolen."

So with mail in voting anticipated to account for as much as thirty percent of the vote, and mail in voting skewing heavily to Democrats, it is predictable that election day vote tallies across the board are going to indicate a complete wipe out in favor of the GOP. This is something the Trump faithful expect and something that their favored media will undoubtedly report as genuinely happening. Trump will almost certainly make a false claim of a sweeping victory sometime in the evening of election day.

At that time there are unlikely to be any facts available to counter that claim. In 2018 the percentages of mail in ballots and how they would skew could be forecast with some reasonable expectation of accuracy, so legitimate predictions could be made. In my district the election day counts were very nearly a tie, for example, so everyone except the most obtusely insistent on ignoring the facts knew the Democrat would take the seat (ultimately by over five points). But the credible news services in November are going to be forced to report "yeah, this is unprecedented so estimates and predictions of final tallies at this point would just be irresponsible." This will not be an effective counter to the predictable irresponsibility of Trump and the right wing news sources that will be telling their followers exactly what they want and expect to hear.

How do we counter what will undoubtedly be several days of Trumpist celebrations? What backlash can we expect from them as votes are counted and reality slowly overtakes their happy place of ignorance?

I think I read something like 66% of Americans think the result will be known in a day or two.

Reality says "nope"

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Fox News will call the election for Joe Biden by 1:00 a.m. November 4th (MSNBC and CNN having called it for him by midnight).

Without even knowing what times zone you are referring to I think this is wildly optimistic. and in the case of Fox News I think it implies a sense of responsibility on their part that is totally lacking. Checking their website earlier today I could not locate a single thing that would prepare their viewers for the possibility of Trump losing.

 

[AdamCrock]

We've tried , we've failed, conclusion :
Don't do a mail voting - it is a waste of time and money.

 

[El_Machinae]

Fake news of the future is never necessary.

You're usually laconic to the point of non-communicative, it seems. So, sure, whatever floats your boat.

 

[Zardnaar]

Fox News will call the election for Joe Biden by 1:00 a.m. November 4th (MSNBC and CNN having called it for him by midnight).

I like optimists.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Without even knowing what times zone you are referring to I think this is wildly optimistic. and in the case of Fox News I think it implies a sense of responsibility on their part that is totally lacking. Checking their website earlier today I could not locate a single thing that would prepare their viewers for the possibility of Trump losing.

Eastern.

It's not the responsibility of a website associated with a news-and-commentary TV channel to prepare its viewers for one election result or another.

Election night coverage has one goal (in two parts): call states as quickly as you can and call the race as quickly as you can. That's what people are tuning in for that night. So, over the decades, the networks have developed formulae that let them call states before the full vote tally is in. As soon as they have grounds for calling a state one way or another, they can award one candidate all of that state's electoral votes. Once someone gets to 270, they can call the race for that person. They hold off until the polls close on the West Coast, so as not to discourage down-ticket voting. But once NC and Penn are known, the results of the presidential race will effectively be known, let alone if Florida were to go to Biden. And the election night news team will announce that. The next day, the likes of Carlson and Hannity will grouse and groan that it isn't really known, and I heard about this polling irregularity over here, etc. And Trump, of course, will not accept the results or concede. But the race will have been called, and even by Fox.

Some states tally their mail-in ballots as they come in and they're part of the first set of results delivered to the networks from that state, as soon as the polls close there.

 

[Lexicus]

You're completely certain that Biden will win PA and NC?
I'm not.