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US Politics: Weimar, Washington, Whining, Bush II


A Horse Named Stranger

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4 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

Sorry, Weimar? I don’t think so.

I admit, the title was more for DMC's amusement, since he bats the Republic on the verge of Fascism so solidly away. Historical fun fact (which most of you probably know) Weimar was kinda modeled after the US system with the rather strong President.

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@Fez

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I believe it's only PA, MI, and WI that don't count ballots until election night

I've been wondering about this. Do any of these states prep so that they can do it as quick as possible, or do they literally do nothing with the mail in ballots until the polls close?

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8 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

@Fez

I've been wondering about this. Do any of these states prep so that they can do it as quick as possible, or do they literally do nothing with the mail in ballots until the polls close?

I don't know. If they just wait, it's incredibly stupid and is going to lead to massive chaos.

I know that WA starts processing ballots essentially as soon as they can get them. They release the first tally of results on Election night, but they are getting those tallies, asking people for more information if needed, writing down how many ballots have been received every single day. It's a major set of work, but it's also so much better. 

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10 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

@Fez

I've been wondering about this. Do any of these states prep so that they can do it as quick as possible, or do they literally do nothing with the mail in ballots until the polls close?

I linked this article the other day.  You can also see the rules by state here.  Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are indeed the only three swing states that don't start at least processing until election day - and processing early indeed does help speed up the count considerably.

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22 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

I've been wondering about this. Do any of these states prep so that they can do it as quick as possible, or do they literally do nothing with the mail in ballots until the polls close?

This politico article has the answers to most of your questions.  But basically MI, WI, and PA are all not going to start counting or even verifying their absentee ballots until election day, and thus there's really no hope they'll be called quickly.  AZ allows mail ballots to be dropped off in person and for whatever reason this is super popular there, so all those votes (likely hundreds of thousands of votes) will need to be processed before being counted.  In 2018 this process took about a week to finish.  IA starts verifying 1 day early, but will definitely still have a backlog for at least a week. 

@Fez I do not share your optimism that we will definitely know the results of the next round of states like MN, OH, NC, GA, NV on election night.  MN, OH, NV and NC allow ballots postmarked by election day but received in the next few days to be counted.  GA is in court on whether this will apply as well.  In all of these states, that could easily mean tens (hundreds?) of thousands of ballots still outstanding on election night.  And there is every reason to assume that in every one of those states, those ballots will lean Democratic.  So if Biden is ahead in any of those states, then he almost assuredly will win.  But if Trump is ahead, then who knows?  It will depend on how many ballots are left, and I don't think we're going to be able to get hard numbers on that.  If it's 50k in Georgia then a 1% Trump lead is probably going to be safe.  If it's 50k in Nevada...probably advantage Biden. 

But on the whole I think that responsible news organizations are going to be VERY conservative about calling states with outstanding ballots.  Because the makeup and breakdown of this election is going to be totally different.  Exit polls will be completely useless (and many orgs aren't even doing them). 

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22 minutes ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

I admit, the title was more for DMC's amusement, since he bats the Republic on the verge of Fascism so solidly away. Historical fun fact (which most of you probably know) Weimar was kinda modeled after the US system with the rather strong President.

The list of nations who use a similiar form of government to us that haven't gone through periods of authoritarianism seems pretty short.  The strong executive setup we have seems to fall prey to it pretty easily.  I worry that our military's code of honor has always been our only real backstop.  But then I'm really pessimistic lately.  Its hard to stay optimistic.

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Going further, I think that on election night we'll have a very good idea of who won.  If Biden wins Florida or NC or TX then he will win  If Trump won all three then he's already overachieving his polls, the question is how much.  If it's Trump +6 in TX, +3 in NC, +2 in FL, then he'll probably win.  The only scenario where it's really uncertain is if the picture is right on the line (Florida +0.5, NC +1.5, TX +2.5) or if the results are really weird (like Biden +8 in MN, but doing very badly in FL/NC or something). 

But we won't know, we'll just have a good idea.  Saying with 95% confidence that Biden will win is not the same as saying he's won, which is what the networks will want before they make a call.  And Trump is definitely going to exploit that gap if he manages to win FL and TX. 

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It really is. It's incredibly depressing to me to see exactly how easy it is for just regular people to fall into these kinds of things, and how pervasive it is in our world now. 

A source of "truth" turned out to be a reporter from Infowars (when I dug into it).  Even I know enough about Infowars to run a mile.

She is living in Ireland, so its not like she is fed this stuff on a daily basis.

Anyhow, i'm done.

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4 minutes ago, Padraig said:

A source of "truth" turned out to be a reporter from Infowars (when I dug into it).  Even I know enough about Infowars to run a mile.

She is living in Ireland, so its not like she is fed this stuff on a daily basis.

Anyhow, i'm done.

:grouphug: I'm sorry that it didn't turn out more positively Pod. 

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Three big Pennsylvania court cases today:

 - Green party off the ballot for failing to meet requirements.  This paves the way for absentee ballots to go out on time.  Good for Dems.

 - Ballots postmarked by election day must be counted so long as they are recieved by Nov 6.  This will slow down getting a final count of votes, but probably means thousands/tens of thousands of additional absentee votes counted.  Good for Dems.

 - The Pennsylvania Supreme Court also denied pleas to allow for third parties to deliver absentee ballots in the state.  This was already illegal, and Dems were appealing it.  Bad for Dems, but not a big deal. 

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The LA Times has an interesting article digging into the USC Dornsife poll's data.  Hard to choose what to quote, I recommend just reading the whole article, but here's some tidbits.  Among Trump leaners there's a 75% likelihood they vote compared to 92% for Biden leaners.  70% of undecideds have an unfavorable view of Trump, and 75% of those that voted 3rd party in 2016 have an unfavorable view of Trump.  When asked the most important issue in the election, the top 4 were the economy, "uniting the country and healing racial divisions," response to covid, and law enforcement - in that order.  That's good news for Biden.  Moreover, Biden actually has a light lead in who voters think will handle law enforcement better - 52 to 48.  Trump is up 52/48 on the economy and Biden is up 57/43 on covid response.  Biden's up 61/39 on ability to unify the country and undecideds give him a 78/22 lead.  

Also, since it hasn't been mentioned yet, the Cook report put Arizona in the lead Dem column this morning.

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NC has already started counting (and rejecting!) mail-in ballots. The rejected ballots have recourse to be corrected according to NC laws. but as per 538, African American votes are being rejected 4:1 compared to white voters (some of it is due to more of them being first time mail-in voters). I wasnt aware there was publicly available data on race of voters though, but it based on some sort of self-identification.

Also, rejections dropped to 4 and 1% respectively, so the original >20% rejection rates were just poor statistics.

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26 minutes ago, DMC said:

I linked this article the other day.  You can also see the rules by state here.  Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are indeed the only three swing states that don't start at least processing until election day - and processing early indeed does help speed up the count considerably.

Thanks, that’s what I needed. All three have slight variations that will come into play. PA starts right away, so that’s good, and WI does too, but unlike PA it’s not mandated to work that way. MI, OTOH, has no chance of counting all their votes on the 3rd.

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11 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Thanks, that’s what I needed. All three have slight variations that will come into play. PA starts right away, so that’s good, and WI does too, but unlike PA it’s not mandated to work that way. MI, OTOH, has no chance of counting all their votes on the 3rd.

Yeah all three are gonna take awhile.  I agree with @Maithanet that while we'll probably have a good idea who will win by the morning after at the latest, enough races likely won't be called for either candidate to reach 270 for about a week or so.

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