Of course this should normally be a domestic affair for the people of the United States of America. But this year seems so extraordinary in many ways. I’m following events with interest, hope and alarm (not necessarily in that order). In 2016, I posted my thoughts on the imminent election, never for one moment thinking that the US would elect Donald Trump as president. Boy, was I wrong. Can I be wrong again? What do others think? Not that we have long to wait.
Vote early and vote often!
dazz,
From a liberal media outlet: “What’s really going on with the mail-in ballots the US Postal Service can’t trace”
I’m inclined to take the word of the union leader on a matter like this.
I was mainly referring to electoral vote, yes (but I guess it could have easily translated to a couple of points in the popular vote, if I’m not missing something, which could very well be the case, of course)
I mean, there are reports of up to 40% of the mail in ballots being delayed in some states. I’ll need to google my sources and also do some math, but considering how much mail in vote is turning the tables late in the recount, it doesn’t seem far fetched to me that Biden would have won Michigan by 4-5%, to name one state.
ETA: As far as I know, in conservative states mail-in vote is much less prevalent (I’ve read that they make it hard for people to vote that way)
ETA2: sorry, I made a complete mess out of this post while trying to edit it.
Of course, you couldn’t see my next post when you wrote this.
Funny how our local Trump wannabees named their political party “VOX”. LOL
Yup, that settles it then, thanks for the link
Neil Rickert,
Better tell Obama. He still thinks he won easily.
Meanwhile, Biden keeps closing the gap @ PA:
83% REPORTED Party Votes Pct.
Donald J. Trump* Republican 3,099,347 52.30%
Joseph R. Biden Jr. Democrat 2,745,468 46.40% -353,879 -5.90%
84% REPORTED Party Votes Pct.
Donald J. Trump* Republican 3,125,226 51.90%
Joseph R. Biden Jr. Democrat 2,817,059 46.80% -308,167 -5.10%
86% REPORTED Party Votes Pct.
Donald J. Trump* Republican 3,151,010 51.50%
Joseph R. Biden Jr. Democrat 2,885,334 47.20% -265,676 -4.30%
(I see also that you misplaced the blockquote tags.) Here in Oklahoma, about 1.5 million votes were cast. According to NBC News, 465,483 mail-in ballots were requested, and 369,695 were returned.
I was delayed in preparing my ballot, due to the ice storm. When I got around to it, I discovered that my copier was not working. (I needed to include a photocopy of my driver license. Normally, signatures of two witnesses in the presence of a notary public are required.) It was not until Friday or Saturday of last week that I mailed in my ballot. I felt awful about it, considering especially that I live in a majority-Black neighborhood. But my ballot was delivered by Tuesday: I’ve gotten confirmation, on line, that it was counted.
Tom English,
Glad to know your vote went in! So do you think it’s not as bad as they say then?
It would be very difficult for the U.S. Postal Service to mishandle mail-in ballots systematically, and keep word of it from getting out. As for counting of votes, shenanigans are not impossible, but they are uncommon, because representatives of multiple political parties monitor the process.
The most credible voices, in this matter, are the losers in elections of representatives to the U.S. House. They usually have a very good idea of what’s going on locally. Sad to say, my representative — a one-term Democrat named Kendra Horn — lost yesterday. She conceded defeat. To my knowledge, she hasn’t indicated that anything was wrong with the election process. Has any candidate for federal office, apart than Donald Trump, questioned the integrity of the process?
Whether or not Joe Biden becomes president, our children and grandchildren are in a world of shit. The long-term costs of continued inaction on global warming are enormous. But continued inaction is all that we will get from a Republican-controlled Senate. I don’t foresee an effective international response without the participation of the United States. (I do hope that those of you who live in other countries will work to prove me wrong.)
Yeah, I guess it goes both ways. I mean, earlier today I was arguing with someone from “the other side”, that if Biden had somehow been able to pass enough fraudulent ballots to clinch Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and possibly Georgia and Pennsylvania, why would they fail to take full control of the senate too?
I suppose if republicans had control of mail-in vote ballots, in an election like this, they would also have had no problem winning everything.
Certainly not. But that’s another reason why we needed Trump to GTFO. The guy is a catalyst for populist-nationalist movements throughout the world and they all share the same anti-science motto.
Creating a demographically accurate sample, especially when filtered through the Electoral College and county-level voting, seems nigh impossible.
Polls called for a defeat for Brexit in 2016, too … ☹
Tom English,
I rule the thermostat in our house with an iron fist. It’s a significant contribution.
phoodoo,
I blame Rupert Murdoch. His influence worldwide is scary.
I fear Trump might shade it at the post. ☹ Nevada seems way too close and too far to go. In the rest, the margin seems too great for the remaining votes to reverse.
With Clark County (where Las Vegas is) underreported it seems to me the trend should still favor Biden in Nevada. And at this pace, Biden is definitely winning Pennsylvania too. Georgia and North Carolina are going to be awfully close
dazz,
I’m counting on you to be right!!!
You can always trust a foreign self appointed pundit, this is the internet after all. 😅
In other news, Georgia just went from 92% to 96% reported and the gap is closing fast. Went from 2% to just 0.4% and less than 20K votes. What a nail biter!
I guess we will be waiting for a while before this is done …
Looks like they just started reporting at Pennsylvania again. Biden keeps getting closer.
It’s like the hair and the tortoise!
50K votes left to count in Georgia, Trump’s lead is down to some 13K votes. It’s going to be incredibly close, a few hundred votes possibly.
NYT flash: “Trump’s lead in Georgia shrank to 13,540 votes on Thursday afternoon. The secretary of state said that about 50,000 votes now remain uncounted.”
Assuming that there are exactly 50 thousand votes to be counted, Biden ekes out a win if he gets 64 percent of them.
I’m close to thermodynamic equilibrium here …
No more updates on Nevada until tomorrow, for fuck’s sake!
Entropy dictates?
Seems the vote has to be delivered on horseback from Harrisburg to Salem by a man in a three-cornered hat, and the roads being powerful muddy at this time of year, and what with winter approachin’ I reckon we’ll see which way the wind blows come early December …
As far as I can tell, the Republican votes exceeded the polling estimates in every poll at every level almost without exception. In multiple states, Trump’s votes exceeded the stated polling margin of error! Now, if this were just a matter of sloppy and inaccurate polling, you’d expect the error to fall both ways at random, but instead ALL the errors fell in the same direction. This implies that polling techniques suffer from a systemic problem, common across all polling organizations even including internal Trump campaign polls.
The most plausible explanation I’ve seen is that Republican voters tend to be much more distrustful of polls than Democrats, and don’t get sampled in proportion to their numbers.
Also, I find it mind boggling that Trump could attract such a large number of voters despite 4 years in which he told his voters over 22,000 lies, completely mismanaged the virus, corrupted every cabinet department without exception, publicly lined his own pockets at taxpayer expense, took kids from their mothers and put them in cages, and passed only one major piece of legislation, a $1.5 trillion tax break to billionaires and big corporations. Makes one wonder if there is anything whatever he could do to lose the bigot vote.
Nor do I expect him to lose much power even if he loses the election, because his voters have morphed from Republicans to cultists, who worship the man and could hardly care less about their nation. Which is probably predictable under an administration that has no use for public education.
Trump is going to win by a landslide.
Or in reality-based terms, what’s causing the delay is a combination of (1) an extraordinary number of mail-in ballots; (2) many state laws prohibiting counting them until election day; and (3) counting processes being understaffed, underequipped, and undertrained.
Flint,
We call it ‘shy Tory syndrome’ over here. Our polls routinely underestimate right-wing sentiment.
I have to agree with Tom English, that the election is a side issue. Its climate change, stupid.
And Biden will be so busy fighting an antagonistic senate, it will be impossible to get anything meaningful done. He has already backed off cutting oil at the very sniff of criticism.
If (nearly) half the population of the US can vote for a dangerous idiot like Trump, what chance is there that they will start installing solar panels ?
Jesus, we are screwed. And I dont even live there.
Same here. Some of them are, understandably, ashamed of themselves. Either that or they lie to honor their dear liar leader
In fact, I’d already come up with that quip, and was holding it in reserve. [Here’s help for those of you whose knowledge of U.S. politics does not go back very far.]
Back in 2011, I started a blog for my thoughts on sociopolitical affairs, but abandoned it after a few posts. I will call attention to the title, Accidentally American, and to the tagline:
Of course, I had no idea, back then, that a senior advisor to the president, Stephen Miller, would be using “cosmopolitan” as an epithet in 2017. I gladly accept the adjective.
Biden took 66.3% of the last 16,697 ballots. It’s going to be awfully close
He can get a recount if he pays for it.
Mixed blessing. The ballot harvesters forgot to vote for down ticket races. Nationally, there are hundreds of thousands of ballots with no vote for Representatives. A costly blunder.
Could that be the main reason why dems won’t win the senate too? Or is it mainly some people voting dems for the presidential election but republican for the senate?
Whoever manufactured the ballots after the first round of counting was only interested in the presidential race. Or didn’t have time to make a plausible ballot.
USA has no effective way to challenge fraud, so I assume this is fait accompli.
But statisticians will look at the last minute ballots. I suspect if the election were a refereed paper, it would be rejected.
But that’s speculative. In practical terms, it means the republicans keep the senate, make major gains in the House, and, of course, keep the Supreme Court. Biden will be the lamest of ducks from the get go.
He will not pass any legislation that isn’t approved by the Senate. Including court packing. Same for judicial appointments. Any controversial executive orders will face the supreme court.
WTF? Why would the dems rig the presidential election but “forget” to take the senate too?
Oh, wait, you are saying that ballot harvesting is how dems rigged the election, right? (yes, I’m slow, I know)
First of all, I am speculating from early reporting. I am not a tribalist, and this line of argument might evaporate. Time will tell.
Second, in many states, ballot harvesting is legal. The legal way is to look for unreturned mail ballots, knock on doors and pick up the ballots directly from the voter.
The illegal way is to manufacture ballots and forge signatures.
If you set up a shop to manufacture ballots, you might not have time to make them statistically plausible.
The word “rigged” means criminal.
It has been a common practice in one party states and cities. I see no reason to exclude the possibility.
But challenging elections has historically failed, and I see no prospect of this year being different. Sometimes a few cosmetic laws result from blatant cheating.
The interesting thing would be if legal or illegal ballot harvesting resulted in a lame duck president, due to incompetence.
Again, I’m speculating.
The lame duck part is very close to becoming fact.
Aside from speculation about fraud, this election has exposed a lot of raw incompetence.
Ballots mailed to obsolete addresses and to dead people. Ballots incorrectly printed. Ballots lost in the mail.
Yes, I think I see what you’re doing. You’re justifying a speculative narrative (ballot harvesters illegally filling out the ballots of their legit owners) with another speculative one (all those harvesters just happened to be too stupid to fill out the ballot). Very common attitude among conspiracy theorists, sorry to say. It’s not a matter of being a tribalist or a partisan, you’re just making shit up as far as I can tell.
I’m well acquainted with white, evangelical Christians — the category that includes half of the membership of the Republican party, and most of my family. They’ve indeed morphed into something hideous, steadily conflating Christianity with Republicanity since the mid-to-late Seventies, but not what you’re describing. It’s important to understand that their beliefs had turned into an atrocious mishmash of politics and religion well before Trump came on the scene. They most definitely do not worship Donald Trump. Instead, they are thrilled by the story that God is working through a bad man today, just as in Old Testament times.
There is one terrible change that has come, over the past four years. In 2017, the Christpublicans were analogizing Trump to King Nebuchadnezzar. I suspect that word eventually got around that they were revealing their fabulous ignorance of scripture. More recently, I’ve heard analogies to King David, emphasizing that David did some horrible stuff, but was still an instrument of God. Their rationalization is disgusting and fabulously pathological. But I don’t get the least sense that they’re worshipping Trump.
Now, as for caring about their nation, I agree that they are running roughshod over democracy. They applaud when Trump says that he’s going to take actions that are patently unconstitutional. The common response that they’ve turned into fascists is wrong. Political scientists have been writing a lot about the rise of authoritarianism in America (and actually have data to support their conclusions). Christpublicans want a strongman, sent by God, to straighten everything out. They continue to speak of the Constitution as inspired by God, but in reality wipe their asses with checks and balances.
Yes, you were slow. I suspect that the American Petrushka has died, and that a Russian has coopted his account. That’s my conspiracy theory, anyway, and I’m sticking with it. The text source named “Petrushka” has its conspiracy theories, and the text source named “Tom English” has its own.
Very perceptive. Petrushka is a puppet. Technically a marionette. That had a benign connotation at UD.
https://twitter.com/RyanGirdusky/status/1324381408861839360
I have not alleged the vote was “stolen”.
I think it is a fact that a lot of Biden voters were incompetent, and left the democrats worse off in many ways. It’s worth asking why.