thanks
I mean hopefully in 8-10 days we can all have a good laugh at my hand wringing over this. I would love that.
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Possibly glimmer of hope:
I agree, but it depends. Do in-person votes take precedence over ballots that were mailed in, either mail-in ballots or absentee? Why should they? If they don’t then it’s essentially a crapshoot and, based on where they are and when the counting stops, the GOP could very well be playing themselves by stopping the count too soon.
Take Florida for instance. They’re supposed to be counting as the ballots come in. If so, that’s a huge net advantage for D’s at the moment. That advantage will diminish on Election Day as GOP olds vote in person. But if they stop counting too soon, it will be the votes from those very same GOP olds that don’t get counted.
The same goes for absentee ballots. When I was overseas, we were told flat out that our votes probably wouldn’t even be counted because the election would probably be called before our absentee ballots even arrived. Now maybe (probably?) things have changed in ~30 years since, but stopping late-arriving absentee ballots could still mean leaving a bunch of military ballots completely uncounted. In prior elections, this may not have affected the outcome. In 2016/2020 though? It could be the difference.
Just some hopeful thoughts waaf anyway whatever
I must be reading something differently than everybody else. But I see those rulings as saying ballots received after the cutoff shouldn’t be counted. But I don’t see anything about ballots properly received by the cutoff shouldn’t be counted unless they can be counted by midnight on election day. Most states have a week or two built in to finish and certify the count?
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My understanding is that votes cast day of using machines are tabulated much quicker than mail in ballots that have to be extracted from one or two envelopes and than scanned through a reader. And certain states don’t allow that process to begin until 11/3.
Does PA have a law that says results must be publicized as they come in? With a D governor and D SoS, what to stop them from saying on election night, the day after etc., “We are continuing to count the votes and will report the results of the count when this is completed” or something like that. Nip this “ahead on election night” garbage in the bud.
Or is this handled at a district level, so MAGA counties would report huge Trump wins, urban areas wouldn’t report because they are still counting hundreds of thousands of mail in ballots, and the dynamic of “Trump ahead on election day” would be even worse?
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Right but what I’m saying is that, unless there’s funny business afoot in every county, those ballots sitting there for the past month don’t just keep sitting there all day until the in person ballots are done being counted. As far as I know that doesn’t happen anywhere, even in MN and WI where they don’t start counting til the polls close. It’s not like “oh these are in-person votes they take priority.”
Right. The Wisconsin ruling doesn’t say anything about cutting off counting at Midnight if the ballots were received by the (earlier) deadline. It might still mean that a bunch of Wisconsin ballots get invalidated (b/c they arrive too late), but, hopefully there is enough time before election day to prevent that and the ballots that arrive on time should be counted…
The larger concern itt and elsewhere is based on extrapolating what Kavanaugh’s language could signal about the way he would rule in other scenarios. For example, if a state already has a pretty firm count of all votes that were cast in person, but mail ballot counts are taking longer (because of USPS delays, because voter signatures are getting challenged on a high % of ballots, because of court challenges to “naked” ballots, whatever), will SCOTUS step in to say that the interest in having a “timely” result and a “certain” outcome is more important than taking the time to count every vote? Kavanaugh seems to be laying the groundwork for that kind of argument, and that is what is really making everyone nervous.
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According to what I just read, Wisconsin doesn’t even start counting until the polls close, so no…they’re not going to stop counting at midnight. I doubt they ever have since they became a state.
40% of the country loves Trump, red states suppress Democratic voters, our system favors rural voters and you don’t seem to have the first clue what you’re talking about.
Yeah, Biden will win in votes cast in the popular vote. Cool. That means very little in America right now.
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My buddy keeps telling me the corporations won’t let Trump take us into fascism and I keep asking him why they’d stop him, let alone how. That’s where his argument falls apart, yet we keep having it.
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El Bloombito strikes again
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Yep. Like I think we could very well see 10% of mail-ins tossed in PA. I had someone super enthusiastic about having already voted and when I started asking questions he said he had filled it out but not yet mailed it and he planned on mailing it later this week. I asked him to please use a drop box and he said ok but I’m not super confident.
I see people’s eyes glaze over when I tell them to please make sure to use both envelopes or their vote won’t count.
A lot a lot a lot can go wrong with mail-in votes in PA. We are the perfect example of Republican minority rule. The system is rigged and they gerrymandered the fuck out of the state and are clinging to the state legislature as a result.
Democrats won the popular vote here 55-44 in 2018, and the GOP holds a 54% to 46% edge in seats.
The gerrymander swung the result from D+11 to R+8.
Biden needs a landslide.
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And by a lot of work you mean picking up the remote and turning it to Fox News?
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Yeah this is really really bad and a favorite go to of the PA “Yeah Trump’s a moron but…” people.
Like if Latinos give him a second term just fuck this country so hard.
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Correct, and we’re right to be worried about it. Who do you think the swing vote on this is? We know where Kavanaugh and Gorsuch stand.
Tarrant county is super red because Fort Worth is the biggest chunk of it, and is actually blue. I have lived in multiple spots in the rest of the county and it is very deplorable.
In fact I have a hard time of thinking of any part of the county outside Fort Worth that is not hardcore red.
Going to pray for a surburban woman revolt.
There isn’t one. Violent riots.