Election Day, Jour Quatre et la Grosse Dame: UPDATED Recap, Open Thread, and Latest News
12:30pm EST Biden to address nation at 8pm, expected to declare victory
.@edokeefe reports Joe Biden is making plans to speak later on Friday to declare victory if the presidential race is called in the afternoon https://t.co/muaB5VhVsz pic.twitter.com/QMC6ANK2cP
— CBS News (@CBSNews) November 6, 2020
10:45am EST There will be a recount in presidential race, along with Senate run-offs in Georgia
"With a margin that small, there will be a recount," Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger says, as race between Biden and Trump is down to thousands of votes
"The final tally in Georgia at this point has huge implications for the entire country" https://t.co/fxHKy8hSEp pic.twitter.com/um03Yn3unW
— CBS News (@CBSNews) November 6, 2020
8:50am EST Biden takes Pennsylvania
Decision Desk HQ projects that @JoeBiden has won Pennsylvania and its 20 electoral college votes for a total of 273.
Joe Biden has been elected the 46th President of the United States of America.
Race called at 11-06 08:50 AM EST
All Results: https://t.co/BgcQsEyt3j
— Decision Desk HQ (@DecisionDeskHQ) November 6, 2020
Original Post Follows:
ICYMI Last Night:
President Trump’s comments at 6:40pm EST Thursday
LIVE: President @realDonaldTrump delivers remarks https://t.co/Oa13t7CxaC
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) November 5, 2020
Meanwhile:
Georgia
Former Vice President Joe Biden opened up a narrow lead over President Donald Trump in Georgia early Friday morning as absentee ballots continued to be counted.
Biden led by 917 votes after Clayton County counted more absentee ballots. Biden won 87% of ballots tabulated between late Thursday night and Friday morning in Clayton, located south of Atlanta.
Biden chipped away at Trump’s lead since Election Day as more absentee ballots were counted. Biden trailed by 118,000 votes on Wednesday morning but steadily gained ground as over 237,000 absentee ballots, many of them from Democratic-leaning counties, were counted since then.
The race to win Georgia — and the presidency — isn’t over.
Thousands more absentee ballots will continue to be counted Friday, including 4,800 in Gwinnett County. In all, about 10,000 absentee ballots remained to be tallied, in addition to a few thousand military, overseas and provisional ballots.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has emphasized that every legal ballot must be counted. County election offices have until a Nov. 13 deadline to certify their results.
Pennsylvania
Two Stories from 6ABC in Philadelphia
After former Vice President Joe Biden appeared to trail President Trump by hundreds of thousands of votes in Pennsylvania on Election night, the days-long count of mail-in ballots reduced the president’s lead to fewer than 20,000 by Thursday evening.
As of Friday 1 a.m. in Pennsylvania:
*6,639,262 ballots have been counted.
*95% of the total expected vote has been counted
*63 percent of the counted ballots are election-day ballots, and 37 percent are mail ballots.Trump: 3,286,171 (49%)
Biden: 3,267,942 (49%)
——–
Gap: 18,229* Statewide, 93 percent of all 2,622,681 mail ballots returned so far have been counted. At least 175,880 more mail ballots need to be counted.
* 76 percent of mail ballots counted so far are for Joe Biden.
* In Philadelphia, 358,644 absentee and mail-in ballots have been returned so far. 84 percent of those have been counted, and 58,642 more need to be counted.
* Votes counted in the suburban counties: Delaware (92%), Bucks (93%), Chester (98%), Montgomery (99%).
Philadelphia police are investigating an alleged plot to attack the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia on Thursday night.
Action News has learned that police got a tip about a group driving up from Virginia in a Hummer to unleash an attack at the Convention Center where votes are being counted in Philadelphia.
Police tell Action News they found a weapon and two people were transferred to Central Detectives.
However, it’s unclear how or if the people are connected to the investigation.
Early Friday morning, the Hummer was still on 13th Street near Vine. The vehicle had a window sticker and a hat with the logo for the internet group QAnon known for spreading conspiracy theories.
The FBI has labeled them a domestic terror threat.At least 24 congressional candidates in this current election have endorsed or given credit to conspiracy theories promoted by the group.
No injuries were reported.
While all that is going on, the courts are busy:
Updated at 10:17 p.m. ET
President Trump’s campaign has unleashed a multipronged legal offensive directed at states where vote counting continued Thursday based on unsupported allegations about fraud and irregularities in the election.
Attorneys for the Trump campaign sought intervention from the U.S. Supreme Court and also filed suit in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Nevada seeking remedies they hoped would help their prospects in those places. In some instances, that included requests for counting to cease altogether or at least pause for a time.
In Wisconsin, the campaign said Wednesday it would request a recount after unofficial tallies showed Democrat Joe Biden leading Trump by about 20,000 votes. The Trump campaign alleged, with little evidence, irregularities in the vote. A recount can’t begin until the state officially certifies the results, which are due by Dec. 1.
In particular, Republicans have complained their observers are not being granted access close enough to observe vote counting and filed a flurry of lawsuits around the issue. In Nevada, a lawsuit also objected to the state’s decision this year to send absentee ballots to all active voters.
Trump made his objective clear with posts on Twitter, including one that sought to “STOP THE COUNT.”
…
A Georgia judge summarily dismissed a Trump campaign lawsuit on Thursday afternoon that alleged ballots received after a 7 p.m. Election Day deadline were mixed in with legitimate ballots, according to The Current, a nonprofit newsroom in Georgia that partners with NPR member station Georgia Public Broadcasting.
“The court finds that there is no evidence that the ballots referenced in the petition were received after 7:00 p.m. on [Election Day], thereby making those ballots invalid,” Judge James F. Bass wrote.
Later Thursday, a Michigan Court of Claims judge ruled against a challenge filed by Trump’s campaign as to how absentee ballot counting was handled, reported Rick Pluta of NPR member Michigan Public Radio Network and Abigail Censky of member station WKAR in East Lansing, Mich.
Trump’s campaign alleged it was not getting enough access for its poll challengers in counting sites. Judge Cynthia Stephens said the Trump campaign failed to make its case, and that it’s too late to grant the remedy requested.
“On this factual record, I have no basis to find that there’s a substantial likelihood of success on the merits as relates to this defendant, nor am I convinced that there is a clear legal duty on behalf of anyone who is properly before this court to manage this issue,” Stephens said.
The legal merits of Trump’s various other challenges appeared thin to many legal analysts.
Back on the political ranch, the president’s evening statement did not go over well with chunks of his own party, while being cheered by President Trump’s more ardent supporters:
As Trump’s closest allies backed his unfounded claims, some other Republicans defended the election process and the poll workers who are still counting hundreds of thousands of legally cast ballots.
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R), who did not vote for Trump, said there was “no defense” for the president’s misleading speech.
“America is counting the votes, and we must respect the results as we always have before,” the Republican governor said in a tweet. “No election or person is more important than our Democracy.”
Romney said in a statement that “counting every vote is at the heart of democracy.”
“That process is often long and, for those running, frustrating,” he added. “The votes will be counted. If there are irregularities alleged, they will be investigated and ultimately resolved in the courts. Have faith in democracy, in our Constitution, and in the American people.”
Reps. Denver Riggleman (R-Va.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) called for the president to present evidence of his claims and “respect the democratic process that makes America great.”
“STOP spreading debunked misinformation,” Kinzinger tweeted. “This is getting insane.”
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) similarly reassured the public that continuing to count legally cast ballots is “NOT fraud,” though he also suggested that Trump was within his right to challenge any votes “cast after the legal voting deadline.” (No evidence of late voting has been publicly disclosed.)
Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.) offered a more tempered stance, but still raised the specter of election irregularities.
“All votes that comply with Pennsylvania law must be counted, regardless of how long the process takes,” Toomey said in a statement Thursday, adding that a recount “should be immediately granted” if the vote count meets the threshold for one.
“Once a final count is reached and certified, all parties involved must accept the outcome of the election regardless of whether they won or lost,” he added.
Many other Republicans, including some former governors and governors-elect in states still counting votes, also urged the public to remain patient and ignore unfounded allegations.
Somewhat lost in the noise, the Democratic Party House Members had a bonkers — and contentious — conference call that went more than three hours over the GOP gaining seats in congress. It isn’t election news without a “Dems in Disarray!!!” piece of course. This isn’t quite that, but Speaker Pelosi hasn’t had a great election:
An angry dispute erupted among House Democrats on Thursday, with centrist members blasting their liberal colleagues during a private conference call for pushing far-left views that cost the party seats in Tuesday’s election that they had worked hard to win two years ago.
The bitter exchange, which lasted more than three hours as members sniped back and forth over tactics and ideology, reflected the extent to which the 2020 campaign exposed simmering tensions in the party even as its presidential nominee, Joe Biden, stands on the brink of achieving their biggest goal of the year — ousting President Trump.
Party leaders had expressed certainty that Trump’s divisiveness and mishandling of the pandemic would help them expand their majority with wins in GOP-held districts — and yet they lost at least a half-dozen seats and failed to retake the Senate. The explanation laid out by centrists, according to multiple people who were on the call and spoke on the condition of anonymity, is that Republicans were easily able to paint them all as socialists and radical leftists who endorse far-left positions such as defunding the police.
“We need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again. . . . We lost good members because of that,” Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.), who narrowly leads in her reelection bid, said heatedly. “If we are classifying Tuesday as a success . . . we will get f—ing torn apart in 2022.”
Other centrists, including Rep. Marc Veasey of Texas, made similar points. Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a Florida Democrat who suffered an unexpected loss to a Republican challenger, argued through tears that the party’s infighting on Twitter needs to stop.
Liberals, meanwhile, fired back. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, argued that Democrats shouldn’t single out people and ideas that energize the party base. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), a self-described democratic socialist, grew angry, accusing her colleagues of only being interested in appealing to White people in suburbia.
“To be real, it sounds like you are saying stop pushing for what Black folks want,” she said.
Democrats are poised to hold the smallest majority in 18 years, undercutting the leverage of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). The rancor on Thursday’s call is certain to be more pronounced next year as the party faces the tougher task of uniting to pass legislation.
During the call, Pelosi sought to reassure her members that the election wasn’t as bad as it seemed. Democrats, she argued, have held on to about 70 percent of the 30 Trump-carried districts they won in 2018 — and she predicted they would capture the White House.
“We held the House. Joe Biden is on a clear path to be the next president of the United States,” she said. “We did not win every battle, but we did win the war.”
Pelosi even held out hope of taking control of the Senate, pointing to two likely runoffs in Georgia where Democrats will be severe underdogs. Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), however, cautioned that if Democrats run on socialized medicine and defunding the police, “we’re not going to win” those races.
Congressional Democrats’ high hopes dashed as GOP clings to Senate majority, scores unexpected gains in the House
In the aftermath of their unexpected losses, Democrats argued that the party needs to come to terms with a bigger problem: Republicans have successfully cast the most vulnerable Democrats as “socialists” and tied them to liberal ideas, including Medicare-for-all, the Green New Deal and cutting police budgets.
It didn’t matter that Biden, House Democratic leadership and most members have rejected calls to “defund the police,” a position that got lost in attack ads.
The attacks, moderates warned, have proved salient and powerful — and Democrats need to figure out a way to address them now.
“Democrats’ messaging is terrible; it doesn’t resonate,” Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.), a member of the Blue Dog Coalition, said in an interview. “When [voters] see the far left that gets all the news media attention, they get scared. They’re very afraid that this will become a supernanny state, and their ability to do things on their own is going to be taken away.”
The blame game extended beyond the liberal members. Several moderate Democrats said in interviews that Pelosi should have made a deal with the Trump administration on a coronavirus relief package. Many moderates had been pushing her to compromise, fearful that constituents would blame them as Democratic leadership was unwilling to give Trump a legislative victory before the election.
Pelosi has said she was holding out for a better deal and that politics had nothing to do with it. Trump, she argued, wasn’t backing policies that address voters’ needs — but to centrists, that was just an excuse to say no.
“It made us look like obstructionists instead of those up for the challenge the country needs,” said one lawmaker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk frankly. “That was a huge mistake. Trump was like, ‘I’m ready for a deal, make it bigger!’ and Pelosi was obstructing.”
Rep. Cheri Bustos (D-Ill.), the chairwoman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee who nearly lost her seat, is also facing members’ wrath. On the call, Bustos defended her operation, arguing that Republicans were forced to “spend tens of millions of dollars playing defense, deep into their territory in Arkansas, Montana, Alaska, Missouri, Indiana, western North Carolina, and more.” But she also offered sympathy.
“I also want to say the thing we’re all feeling: I’m furious,” she said. “Something went wrong here across the entire political world. Our polls, Senate polls, gov polls, presidential polls, Republican polls, public polls, turnout modeling and prognosticators all pointed to one political environment — that environment never materialized.”
She added: “I want answers, and my team is already planning how we go and get those answers. I look forward to talking them through with you.”
Updates will follow as warranted.
Of note – progressive House members held their seats. Moderates lost. This reinforces my tired trope that people want clear opposing positions in an election and the appearance (If not the fact) that their politicians are fighting for them Say what you will about AOC but no one would ever accuse her of being a shrinking wall flower.
And you missed one key story – the FAA has imposed flight restrictions over Wilmington Delaware. They seem to think a President-Elect lives there.Report
Sapphire blue left wing progressive house members camped in safe Democratic districts kept their seats. Likewise moderate centrist Democratic house members camped in safe Democratic districts kept their seats. I don’t think the determining factor is how left wing they are. Can you give some examples of progressive house members who held marginal non-safe districts?Report
The problem is that a lot of things can be simultaneously true:
1. Spanberger can be correct that “Defund the police” chants in the rest of the country and the unrest in Richmond over the summer nearly cost her reelection;
2. Ilan Omar could also be correct that the MPD is beyond control or hope of reform and completely against her constituents based on racism especially because Kroll is a loud and proud Trumpist and almost certainly a racist. She has a right to defend her community and point out the brutality of the MPD.
3. We live in an atmosphere where a lot of things are easy to nationalize now. Some of it is because this is a national issue. The police acting with impunity and being agents of white supremacy is universal and present even in the deepest of blue cities. Unfortunately it does seem to be asymmetric sticking.Report
Politics is local.
Messaging is national, whether you want it to be or not.
This is part of the problem when everyone wants the feds to step in and stop a state from doing X, or to force a state to do Y. If the feds are going to force Omar’s political preferences into a state that does not share such, then what Omar says about her local issues is of national interest.Report
I think it’s part of the problem of a lack of localism.
NANCY PELOSI WANTS TO X, Y and Z!
Here’s my local rep. Dakota Smythe. Dakota Smythe is the *PERFECT* rep for my district. 6 months out of the year, he can be found downtown in his office, always willing to gladhand, overtip at the local diner, and have a 30 second meeting/selfie with a constituent.
Dakota does not agree with Nancy Pelosi about everything. Dakota agrees with Nancy about 78-80% of the time. That other 20ish percent of the time? Dakota agrees with *ME*.
That’s what makes Dakota a good representative.
The election is coming up. Nancy Pelosi is running on something crazy. “Free False Teeth For Undocumented Migrants!”
I don’t want this. This is bullshit. Dakota Smythe is running against an upstart challenger. “DAKOTA SMYTHE IS PELOSI’S LEFTENANT! DAKOTA SMYTHE WANTS TO GIVE PELOSI MORE POWER! DAKOTA SMYTHE WANTS NANCY PELOSI TO BE SPEAKER!”
I have a choice. Trust Dakota. Hedge my bets.
Making the representatives necessarily toe the line on every goddamn thing was a mistake.Report
Did she make the Democratic reps toe the line on every vote?Report
Every vote? I’m sure she had some “vote your conscience” stuff for naming post offices.
But even if she never made anybody toe the line on anything…
Does it matter?
Because I seriously get the feeling that there is not a whole lotta room for an 80% ally.
“I want allies that respect minorities. I want allies that respect people who are LGBTQ+! I want allies that want people declaring bankruptcy for medical reasons to have a lawyer! WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU THAT YOU ARE AGAINST THAT?!?!?”
And so on.Report
You just wrote a comment about how Pelosi is forcing her moderate members in moderate districts to toe the line on liberal votes even when she doesn’t need to. I asked “is she actually forcing them to vote the way you are saying they are?” and you shrug, say you imagine she is and then heap scorn on her for doing the thing you say you’re imagining she’s doing.Report
Oh, pardon me. It’s not Pelosi who is arguing “I want allies that respect minorities. I want allies that respect people who are LGBTQ+! I want allies that want people declaring bankruptcy for medical reasons to have a lawyer! WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU THAT YOU ARE AGAINST THAT?!?!?”
The person yelling that sort of thing above against someone arguing for a Howard Deanesque 50-State Solution kinda candidate tailored for every state in the union is arguing that.
They are the ones pushing for making the representatives necessarily toe the line on every goddamn thing that I see as making a mistake.
And arguments that an 80% ally is not a 20% enemy gets questions about whether the 80% ally cares that children are dying.Report
Ah ok if your point is that passionate lefties care more about being pure loyal lefties than winning then it’s pretty incontrovertible, yes. That is a universal characteristic of the passionate actors on both wings.Report
I’ll repoint to this thread about the Dem House Caucus phonecall:
I’m more or less agreeing with Spanberger.
Oh! I know the analogy I want to make!
Remember Todd Akin and his, erm, questionable biological theories?
Democrats in a lot of places were able to run against Todd Akin. Like, in the Northeast! How in the heck could someone in New Hampshire plausibly run against some knuckleheaded representative from Missouri?
Well, they did.
LOOK AT TODD AKIN!, they said. VOTE FOR ME AND VOTE AGAINST HIM!!!
That’s all I’m saying about “Making the representatives necessarily toe the line on every goddamn thing was a mistake.”
It’s not the Leader nor the Whip making them toe the line on everything.
It’s the knowledge that Todd Akin is making John Boehner’s power stronger. So vote for me. Vote against Todd Akin. Vote against John Boehner.Report
I like how the agenda of the desired “Moderates” is revealed as:
Allies that [DON’T] respect minorities.
Allies that [DON’T] respect people who are LGBTQ+!.
Allies that [DON’T] want people declaring bankruptcy for medical reasons to have a lawyer.
Apparently these goals are hotly contested, and outside the boundaries of consensus.Report
Erm, no, Chip.
That’s the argument that is always given against people who argued for Howard Dean’s 50-State Strategy.
“You want someone tailored to be able to win in North Dakota? YOU BIGOT!”
To the point where when someone points out that when they argued for Howard Dean’s 50-State Strategy that they got called a bigot, the go-to gotcha is “I like how you’re acknowledging that the only people who could get elected in North Dakota are bigots.”
I will, instead, point to what Spanberger said again.
And I agree with Spanberger.
And the gotcha against Spanberger is not that she’s a bigot.Report
Here’s Joe Kennedy:
“People who refuse to support Joe Kennedy in Massachusetts are bigots against LGBTQ+!”
“Um… I think that there are other reasons to not want to vote for Kennedy…”
“Yes, of course. Thank you. They also hate Blacks.”Report
You should argue with those people you quoted.
Are they around here?Report
So, like, was Pelosi arguing that Spanberger was supposed to chant “Socialism! Defund the Police!”?
What exactly is the point of disagreement between the two?Report
Chip, I’m not arguing that Pelosi is the one who was saying that all Democratic Representatives need to be electable in Berkeley.
I’m saying that the people who argued against running North Dakota-electable democrats in North Dakota because those democrats would have to be bigots are the ones who argued that.
It’s not about Pelosi except insofar as demanding ideological lockstep results in people knowing, just knowing, that a vote for the Republican in New Hampshire is a vote condoning what Todd Akin said.Report
Who are these people who “who argued against running North Dakota-electable democrats in North Dakota “?
Because that’s not really what Spanberger was talking about.
Spanberger was saying that constituents in HER district heard Rashida Tlaib describe herself as a “socialist” and thus voted Republican.
Her logic was that it didn’t matter that Spanberger herself was electable in Virginia so long as someone somewhere was saying “socialism!”
But what this overlooks is that “Socialism” isn’t an economic descriptor, or even a political descriptor.
Socialism nowadays is a cultural term (thus, ‘Cultural Marxism”).
So Rashida Tlaib will always be a socialist, even if she became a hedge fund manager.Report
Who are these people who “who argued against running North Dakota-electable democrats in North Dakota “?
The ones who abandoned Howard Dean’s 50-State Strategy.
You are aware that the strategy existed, once… right?
Is it your position that the party is still utilizing it?Report
Do they have names, and can their preferred strategy be described, so that we might compare the two?
I get this feeling that we are shouting at ghosts of Imaginary Democrats here.Report
So if I can’t *NAME* who abandoned Howard Dean’s 50-State Strategy, we must still be using it?
Q.E.D., I guess.Report
We’re talking about behavior that the party can’t control. I remain somewhat flummoxed by it. If Democrats are going to be tarred as loony leftists for as long as right-wing media can find a loon shrieking leftist stuff in a safe district or on twitter then the Democrats are kind of stuck. This is one of the iron laws of institutions: people care more about their personal influence in an organization than they do about the success of the organization itself. If leftists could press a button and take full control of the Democratic Party but also consign it to never getting over 25% of the national vote they would hit that button faster than you could say intersectionality.Report
Here’s Nancy Pelosi:
I think it’s weird that she’s telling “her” representatives to be bigots.
North: Much like Northeastern Republicans and Todd Akin, it may not necessarily be their fault but it sure as hell is their problem.
Whether this makes it their responsibility is up in the air, I guess.Report
Well, as you can see, the party knows it and is trying to deal with it for what that’s worth. It’s a tough dance- politics ain’t beanbag.Report
as you can see, the party knows it
Yeah. One weird thing is that I read the headline:
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her top lieutenants had a stark warning for Democrats today
And I thought “wait, is she saying that to her caucus or is she saying that to, like, Democrats-In-General?”
(My take is that the answer is that she was saying it to her caucus (I don’t know if she was looking at AOC) but either intending or not minding that her message would be heard by those who are on social media anyway. HEY DEMOCRATS! PUT A SOCK IN IT UNTIL GEORGIA IS DONE!)Report
Nancy Pelosi is an idiot. GA is no longer determined by convicing conservatives to vote for things.
It’s determined by the massive amount of PoC that live here and were never given the opportunity to vote…until they suddenly got it…plus a small core of liberal whites.
Now, there are ways to hypothetically turn off those liberal whites, mostly because they are, still, somewhat racist, (For example, the Dems could demanding busing start or something, or anything that affects property values.) but there’s basically no way the Democrats in Congress are going to do those things.
Going to the left _currently_ would mean things like ‘instituting M4A and other things that are widely popular with the Georgia left’.Report
Here’s the moronic facts of the situation: There are indeed ‘moderates’ who will not vote for the Democatic party because they think it is too left.
But they don’t think that because it actually is. They think that because Republicans constantly portray it like that, Democratic leaders nonsensically agree with that (Nonsenically because it’s both wrong _and_ damaging_.), and the media don’t say anything about this.
The Republicans have _decades_ of lying at this point. It’s basically How They Operate to get elected: Paint the opponent as an insane far-left person.
I mean, Spanberger is up there complaining about THINGS THE DEMOCRATS DID NOT DO. The Democrats are not trying to defund the police, and the Democrats not socialists. He, and everyone else, somehow thinks this means…the Democrats should stop doing things. What?
I don’t know how to make the situation any more clear than that. The problem is not that the Democrats are too far to the left. It’s that the far left…literally exists in any form at all, and everyone lets the Republicans get away with lying about the situation.
There are two choices here: Constantly call out the Republicansfor their lying, or…since that won’t work…just, start doing the same to Republicans. If I have one piece of advice for Democrats: Start fucking lying your asses off:
Pick the most insane random gibberish from the farthest right Congressman, and put it up on screen, and attribute it to ‘Republicans in Congress’, with a picture of your opponent right there. Like they do. Pick things from far-right think tanks, call them the ‘Conservative Agenda’, run against that instead of your actual opponent.
Do the stuff that has been done to you for _decades_.
And stop pretend that the Republicans will stop attack Democrats for…other, random people too far to the left.Report
In that vein:
Report
I will refrain from criticizing Pelosi because she has earned a tremendous amount of goodwill with me.
But I think these sorts of analyses that see the American political spectrum as a series of points from the Left pole to Right pole is mistaken.
The Trumpists themselves have told us this.
When you read Kristin’s posts, or any of the conservatives here, or the Tabarrok post Jaybird cited, or the Rich Lowry piece in National Review, the overwhelming message they are telling us is that Trumpism is a culture war battle to the virtual exclusion of every other issue.
They feel slighted, ignored, belittled, marginalized.
Regardless of whether it is true or not, their feelings are not amenable to compromise or triangulation.
There is no tax program or economic theory that can make them feel warm and friendly towards Ilhan Omar.
There isn’t any police reform or local land use policy that would make them vote for a Democratic city councilman.
Culture war is by its very definition a binary.Report
Regardless of whether it is true or not, their feelings are not amenable to compromise or triangulation.
I never know how much emphasis on “people feel things strongly” I need to put.
I mean, a lot of social constructions rely on how people feel.
The social contract itself is based on how people feel.
And if people feel that “the other side” has already broken the social contract, they’ll point to the clause that says “if the other side breaks the contract, the contract is null/void” rather than to the clause that says “the other side is allowed to break the contract from time to time because, hey, people are imperfect”.Report
Its hard to stop breaching the contract, when one’s very existence is an a breach of contract.Report
I’m sure you feel that strongly.Report
…which, in the US, for the right, is based hugely on propaganda and not actual facts.
And when, rarely, when these feeling are based on real events, instead of just dumb cultural war bullshit of ”How dare an open racist be let go from his job?!”, these real events are normally events _that elected Democrats have nothing to do with_.
And thus the behavior of elected Democrats cannot alter them.
—
Now, maybe their argument is ‘The entire left has breached the social contract, and thus the entire social contract is null and void’.
Which…is not something that can be arguable about, but…it…also can’t be arguable about. Obviously. Like, tauntologically.
So why do we think anything is alterable there, why are we pandering to people who have generalized ‘the social contract does not apply’ to literally half the population? Doing political things they like isn’t going to fix that.
It’s…I mean, we, on the left, have a group we don’t think the social contract applies to: Nazis. (In fact a good percentage of us think you can just punch them in the face, which…*shrug*, I dunno. My only concern there is accidental identification, I have no problem with punching poeple who _are_ Nazis.)
Nazis saying they will pass laws we like isn’t actually going to make us like them! We won’t accept them back into society. Like, this is really obvious.
—
To flip the common question of ‘Why is the right pandering to Nazis?’ around…why is the left pandering to people who think we _are_ Nazis? How can this vaguely work? How can we get a message to them when they have, collectively, decided (Thanks to propoganda) that what ‘we are’ is so disturbing, so far from normal behavior, than we are not legitimately part of society?
We…can’t. WHY ARE WE TRYING?
There is a way to fix this problem: Do something about the propoganda and mistrepresentation, and for God’s sake, _elected Democrats need to stop pretending there is anything to the propoganda criticism_. Stop pretending there is this…bastion of far-left fanatics that have to be rebuked, because there aren’t (Or, at least, the people being pointed at aren’t those people.), and you are literally playing into the propoganda’s hands.
And…like I said, fight fire with fire. Not just because it’s a stragety to win, but because it reduces the fuel available…if _everyone_ is framing moderates on the rother side as insane fanatics, then that stops working!Report
Hey, I’ve long thought that this shit ends in divorce or war.
I used to argue for stuff like “we need measurable stuff instead of feelings!” but then I watched the Monkey Cucumber Grape Ted Talk again and realized that… no… feelings were very, very important and my dismissing them was something that I could do because of a handful of limitations I have mixed with a handful of privileges I have.
I mean, good luck with the whole eradication of racism thing. If you’re not careful, though, you might end up with a smaller share of the Minority vote.Report
Hey, I’d be up for any other solution, mostly because divorce is not something that can happen.
But…the elected Dem leadership constantly going ‘We need to be moderate’ is not a way to solve the problem…it literally makes it worse, because it encourages the Republicans to keep doing what they are doing.
The more Repubs paint the left as ‘out of control liberals’, the more Dems flinch and says ‘Yeah, we need to stop being that! Be moderate, everyone!’, the more Repubs paint, etc, and the worse the situation gets.
The Dems fighting back in exactly the same way might actually fix things, in that…if _everyone_ is calling everyone else ‘out of control fanatics’, and…no one seems to respond to that…people start thinking ‘Oh, that’s not a real thing, maybe? Like…maybe no one is like that? Their actual positions seem…kinda moderate, actually.’.
Which…is a problem for the future, because it actually is really a thing, there really are crazy fanatics and they sometimes get elected to office and it would be nice if they could be called out still, but…*shrug*…it’s better than the Republicans being incentivized to continue tearing the country apart because it keeps winning them elections to pretend the guy who wants to expand some health insurance programs is going to show up with BLM and burn their house down.Report
Or to put it another way: The Democrats, right now, are trying to fight fire by throwing wood at the fire to try to calm the fire down.
I don’t particularly think this is a good plan.Report
For what it’s worth, I don’t think that “moderation” is the best play. (I don’t know that moderation has *EVER* been the best play.)
It’s just that it is almost always the 3rd best play and and it is pretty much never the worst play (which is normally a fully enthusiastic diving head first into doing the wrong thing).
Personally, I think that an emphasis on Class rather than Race is the best way forward. If there’s an emphasis on race, it needs to be on whatever will fix the Lunch Table Problem rather than CRT (which, lemme tell ya, will *NOT* fix the Lunch Table Problem).
Shit, maybe Biden will be able to pull it off. I’ll give him a chance.Report
But why did the moderates lose? Is it because they weren’t progressive enough, or was it because they serve a district that is very centrist and does not like the progressive wing of the party taking up all the oxygen? Especially in a race that had this much participation.
When I see a moderate lose to what the GOP is today, it’s not because the moderate wasn’t progressive enough.Report
The moderates lost because they were in red districts and the red voters came out in force. A presidential election is different from a midterm.Report
Right, but having moderates in red/purple districts be more progressive is not going to win them more votes.Report
Yeah, we’re in violent agreement here.Report
First, you incorrectly used “progressive” as a synonym for left-wing. Leftism is a regressive, ignorant ideology that’s antithetical to actual progress. Neoliberals are the real progressives.
That aside, the reason nutty leftists win reelection is that they only get elected in heavily Democratic districts. Rashida Tlaib would never have been elected in a competitive district, and thus would not have a reelection bid to win. If her constituents ever grow up and vote her out, they will do it in the primary, not the general.Report
What North said. There was a lot of ticket splitting in this election. People voted for Biden for President and Republican down ballot. Biden out performed the average House Democratic candidate in the polls even in safe Democratic districts.Report
Well it looks like Biden may well take Georgia. Holy buckets. Take your victory lap David.Report
CNN (I forget who) made an interesting point:
Election Day was a big success for Republicans… EXCEPT Trump. They won House seats. They look likely to hold the Senate. The vast majority of Republicans did great on Tuesday. Except Trump.
So if the Democrats rigged the election… holy hell did they do a bad job of rigging it or they have an even shittier plan than we thought.Report
This!
Sure, it’s possible that our hypothetical conspirators are so stupid as to only vote for Biden and do NOTHING else to help the Democrats down ticket. If so, I expect we’ll find them easily and prosecutions will abound.
I’m not giving up breathing or sex waiting for said prosecutions to materialize though, even in the red states.Report
The Senate now depends on two Georgia special elections and I am not sure how much of an advantage the GOP will have here. The ironic thing about Trump is that even though he is almost certainly going to lose the releection, he got a lot of people out to vote. These are people who probably stayed home in 2017, 2018, and 2019 because Trump was not on the ballot. Maybe Georgia reverts a bit more red and Democrats don’t get out with motivation either.Report
I expect the GOP wins both of the run-offs.
Last time Georgia had a Dem Senator was in 2005. Trump won’t be on the ballot for the run-off.
Loeffler(R) didn’t beat Warnock(D) because another Republican was also in the race, splitting the GOP. That split combined easily crushes Warnock.
Perdue(R) did beat his opponent, just not by enough to get to 50%.Report
With better numbers:
Perdue(R) got 49.8%
Ossoff(D) got 47.9%
Hasel (L) got 2.3%
So give Perdue 10% of the Libertarian vote and he’s got it. Having said that, a 5% reduction in GOP turnout (or increase in Dem) and Ossoff would get it.
The other race was a mess. More than a dozen people ran, with multiple members from each party. All the GOP vote combined is about 49%. All Ind+Lib vote was about 2.3%. The Dem vote combined is the rest.
So basically the two races are the same. The Dems are two points down but that’s within scoring distance so I expect lots of money to be burned on this from both sides.Report
Paraphrasing other comments seen around the intertubes:
So, I don’t want schadenfreude.
I don’t want to wallow in the tears of Republicans, or see them crushed and driven before me. I don’t want them to feel the way we did, that their country is becoming an awful dystopia.
I don’t want them to be afraid, or feel persecuted, or that they can’t get a fair shake.
I just want to live in an America where everyone is respected and empowered and given equal access. Where everyone’s future is equally open and full of promise.Report
You do recognize that a lot of your fellow progressives, especially the very noisy ones, state very loudly that they do want to wallow in the tears of conservatives, etc. They don’t want equality, they want to flip the paradigm.
They may be a minority, but damn if they aren’t noisy…Report
They have the entire right wing media dedicated to megaphoning them; lotta the normal media too. Liberals are boring, leftists are interesting. Also they’re a minority but they’ve got a LOT of cachet in some very visible places.Report
Yep, just like the left wing and normal media loves to megaphone the right wing racists.
Which is my point. It’s not enough to say “I don’t believe that”, you need to disown that crap, loudly.Report
Or *looks at the GOP* let it take over your whole party instead?Report
I still don’t believe the racists took over the whole party.
The guys who just want to “own the libs” however…
When the bulk of your politics is counting coup…Report
I’d say they want to bill and coup, but Trumps never pay their bills.Report
In normal circumstances people can be unified, at times radically, in opposition to change on divisive issues. Conservatives have used this insight to win some battles over the last few decades.
I don’t think the same is true for change, especially radical change. This is where Democrats make their mistake with the left flank. Radical change is not unifying, but divisive. Too often lefty Democrats look at what radical conservatives have done to the GOP and say ‘why not us too?’ without understanding this dynamic. Combined with the class biases in our media environment that make left-wing radicalism infinitely more visible to Joe (and apparently Juan) Normie you have a recipe for perpetual underperformance.Report
I hadn’t thought of it in quite that way before. That makes a lot sense.Report
End-zone dancing is a time honored tradition in America.
Reference the Claire Briggs cartoon from a few days ago.
If the worst thing Trumpists have to endure is a few smirks from the barista at Starbucks, they are indeed blessed.Report
Let me put it this way: you know all that BS with Obama telling Universities to crack down on campus sexual assault, and campus administrators doing anything and everything EXCEPT implementing something that looks like due process. Remember how such processes had/have ardent defenders who lambast every criticism as “just wanting to be able to get away with sexual assault!”
That is the kind of crap that makes people run from the progressive side of the aisle. Not because they want people to get away with sexual assault on campus, but because they have sons, and nephews, and they don’t want baseless accusations to destroy those young men anymore than they want their daughters and nieces to be destroyed by campus sexual assault.Report
It doesn’t sound weirdly petty for people to base their political allegiance on things like this?
Isn’t it more likely that these things are symbols and totems of larger culture war grievances?
Because for every example of a guy being falsely accused on campus, couldn’t we find about a hundred cases of a black man being brutalized by police?
So by your logic, we should see people running TOWARDS the progressive side, but that’s not happening.Report
Police brutality is bi-partisan.
ETA: You know how I feel about police brutality. I absolutely DO NOT see progressive politicians offering up anything serious with regards to dealing with it. The best I’ve seen is having mental health pros start handling mental health calls, etc. But very little with regards to changing the legal landscape that enables the brutality.Report
If you cared so much about Police Brutality, why haven’t you ever put forward a plan to reform the cops?Report
The D’s in the house passed cop reform bill that hit QI a few months ago. My guess is that bill or something stronger will be passed in the house pretty soon in the new congress. We’ll see how many senate votes it getss.Report
If it is good, and it passes, I would never be happier to be wrong.Report
This is one of those things that you’ll be able to throw in my face in a year or so.
“SEE? THE DEMOCRATS *DID* WANT TO REFORM POLICE!”
So let’s put a pin in this one.Report
Heck we can even circle back to it while putting a pin in it to create a legislative synergy but i’m just blue skying here.
My hope would be that the cop reform bill is one of the first 50 or 100 days bills that gets a lot of push along with a new voting rights bill.Report
From Virginia, Spanberger’s state:
“Northam signed the MARCUS bill, a partial acronym for “mental health awareness response and community understanding services,” which would create teams of mental health service providers and peer recovery specialists to accompany police officers responding to individual crises.
The bill is also named for Marcus-David Peters, a Black man who was shot and killed during an encounter with the Richmond police in 2018. Peters, a 24-year-old high school biology teacher and Virginia Commonwealth University alumnus, was naked and unarmed when he ran into traffic.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/northam-marcus-bill-budget/2020/11/05/db470a48-1f83-11eb-ba21-f2f001f0554b_story.html
What is noteworthy is that the same people who hear a guy on Twitter saying “defund the police” and therefore vote Republican, will somehow, mysteriously NOT hear this sensible centrist reasonable reform bill.
In other words, the “defund” stuff was a pretextual grievance to allow them to do what they wanted to do anyway.Report
And I don’t want to diminish moves like this (you said LA was doing something like this, I think Seattle is, I think Br. Michael said CO had something like this – this is GOOD). But this is the low hanging fruit of reform. It’s something that can be done rather quickly and with little effort, and like CRBs, it’s something that should the police decide it’s too much of a pain for them, they will toss it in the bin while complaining about budgets.
We need reform like this, but with teeth.
Broke: Defund the Police
Woke: Defund Police Violence.Report
My hunch is that opponents of police reform will always find a way to insist that the cure is worse than the disease. And many folks who claim to be in support of police reform or at least abhorred by the behavior that is leading to calls for police reform will be all to willing to agree with that line of thinking.
To wit…
I think “Defund the Police” was terrible branding. Anytime you have to explain that one of the three words in your slogan doesn’t actually mean what everyone thinks it means, you done messed up.
HOWEVER… there were also scores of people who had it explained to them what DTP was all about and responded with a “Yea but still…”Report
“Defund the Police doesn’t mean Defund the Police.”
“Can we abolish QI instead?”
“WHY DO YOU THINK ABOLISHING QI IS A SILVER BULLET”Report
IF YOU ABOLISH QI THEN GOOD COPS CAN’T DO THEIR JOBS!Report
Again with the quoted conversations with invisible people.
Why don’t you argue with people who are actually here, instead of some randos you saw last week on Twitter?Report
Here’s the quote in the comments to the essay that Oscar Gordon wrote about reforming the police:
I am not sure that abolishing QI is the magic bullet people imagine it to be.
Would you like me to find you some quotations from people arguing against reforming Police Unions? Because I’ve got some of those too.Report
Sure, argue away with Saul if you like. Maybe he can join this thread and defend his position.
it would be a lot more productive that way.Report
Hey so long as we’ve evolved from “why don’t you argue with people who are actually here?” to “well, maybe they are here”, I’m good.
Sometimes moving the ball from “that’s a strawman!” to “only a few people are arguing that!” is a win.Report
Somebody ought to answer Chip’s actual questions:
1. Yes it does.
2. Yes it is.
3. Yes, we can.
I’ve often found that it’s far less important what stance one takes on an issue that what one thinks is an issue.Report
It doesn’t sound weirdly petty for people to base their political allegiance on things like this?
Petty, yes. Weirdly, no.Report
Those are less of a problem than the “opportunity = outcomes” types.
If there is equality opportunity it’s expected that there will be unequal outcomes. That, as a concept, makes heads explode on the Left.Report
Current theories I’ve seen:
Harris was deliberately picked to be appealing, she didn’t move the needle. She will be kept outside like JFK kept LBJ outside.
The Hunter Laptop stuff ain’t over. Joe will be given the opportunity to resign for his health or put up with an official investigation, thus putting Harris in the Presidency.Report
Anyone who figured they were voting for Biden for pres was a fool. They were voting for Harris, Biden acted like he didn’t know where he was most of the time.Report
1. No.
2. No.Report
Every VP nom is made with the hope of gaining votes. It’s nearly impossible to tell how well any of them have worked. The role of the VP, beyond presiding over the Senate and inquiring after the health of the president, is entirely the president’s choice.Report
If Trump does fire Wray, I expect his successor will be ordered to fast-track a Hunter Biden investigation, and it’ll have the same result as the Obamagate one.Report
Just putting this here because I needed a laugh, and I think the rest of you do as well.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SandersForPresident/comments/ao0e5m/bernie_is_coming/Report
I accidentally reported this post trying to click the link. I am sorry no reporting intended!Report
Oscar has already been reprimanded.
Please be more careful in the future.Report
WAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA! Why do you hate me?! I was only trying to be funny! Jaybird is soOoOoOo mean!Report
Will, I’m still innocent but Oscar in guilty as hell.Report
Too true, I am.
Of what, I’m not certain, but the DA says he’ll figure something out and let the media know what I am guilty of ASAP.Report
I don’t see the report button; IIRC, I told it to go away (is that possible?) because my eyes would see “r e p” and my finger would go “the reply button!”.
I don’t miss it.Report
Id love to turn it off if you figure that out.Report
If you have a login, you don’t see it. (Or so my initial tests with Edge vs. Chrome tell me.)
So get a wordpress account (it’s free!) and log in and it’ll go away? Maybe?Report
In case anyone cares about my Georgia excitement: Biden is now 1,584 ahead in Georgia, and probably going to win. There’s 99.0% of the vote in…so that level continued exactly where it was going.
Unfortunatly, my hope that Georgia flipping would call the race has run into a snag:
Military and overseas ballots could arrive until yesterday. And there are apparently ‘thousands of them’…which seems kinda vague. If you search, you’ll see people talk about ‘In 2016, there were 5203 of them’, but…in addition the obvious problem of greater voter enthusiasm, it’s ignoring the fact that almost all the ballots would have arrived earlier, and already been counted. We only care about the ones that hadn’t, and it’s increadibly unclear how many there are.
Those ballots won’t maintain the pro-Biden slant. But it’s unclear that they will even tilt _towards_ Trump…some of the military does, a little, but…it’s unclear who exactly is voting. Or how many there are besides ‘thousands’.
But even if, by ‘thousands’, they mean literally 9000, they would have to tilt 60% Trump to cover the gap, and that’s about the farthest threshold _for_ his level of military support…so if they mean 5000 or so, he’s not getting there. And, again, these are military and _other overseas_ ballots….people just living in other countries.
However, one thing is sure: We’re not getting a 20,000 vote margin here like I was hoping. We’re getting a photo finish. Annoying.
And that’s on top of the fact that…we’re at the point an automatic recount is happening. Which means…Biden is going to gain votes, because…Trump voters used machines, which will remain identical, and Biden voters fill out absentee paper ballots, some of which would not have been counted correctly.
So, I am still convinced Biden is going to win, and again, he’s ahead right now, but this race isn’t getting finished soon enough to be important to the Big Map, and…even if it was, it’s not going to be definitive until later.
So…Biden is ahead, but…that doesn’t really mean anything…except it makes Trump demanding that counting stop even funnier.
I wonder if the duped protestors wandering around shouting ‘Stop the count’ have gotten the update they need to flip around to demanding ‘Count every vote’. Or have they all just transitioned to ‘Stop the steal’ so they don’t _have to_ specify what actions they want?Report
There are 5K votes in Gwinnett County yet to be counted that should raise Biden a bit more. This might be true as well in other Democratic leaning counties.Report
Incidentally, I’ve been thinking ‘I wish the Democrats would pass a law stating that any ballots that arrive by mail have to be accepted up to 10 days after the polls close as long as they are postmarked on time’, but I’ve been assuming that such a thing would have to make its way through court, and conservative judges would somehow decide that such a thing is an unconstitional interference in state elections.
However, I hadn’t noticed that military and overseas voters _already_ have such law. Their ballots have three days to arrive after the election. Which must mean it’s constitutional…no one seems to have ever challenged that. And…while there might arguably be some weird legal justification for the military (Although I’m not sure what?), the fact that voters who are merely _overseas_ get that grace period makes it much harder to invent a constitutional nonsense that the Federal government can make a grace period for them, and not voters in the US.
Especially since some of those are be out-of-state ones. Like, conservative judge iis going to have work really hard to figure out if there are two people, one who in the Bahamas and one in Puerto Rico, both who mail their ballot election day: Why can the Federal government say the Bahamas has to be counted in Georgia as long as it gets there within three days, but is _constitutionally barred_ from making that law for the Puerto Rico guy?
I mean, not that I expect consistency for the conservative play-judges that keep getting appointed, but that’s hard needle to thread! Alternately, they could try to throw out the existing overseas thing, but then they have to justify somehow keeping the military rules…which they might be able to, but at that point, it’s a giant shakey structure and it’s obvious what they’re trying to do.
So, right there, add that to the voting reform stuff.Report
I think the issue is less “can there be a law about accepting ballots late if they’re post marked on time” (clearly there can be), and more “did the State Supreme Court in Pennsylvania do an ass pull and change the rules in spite of the law to help their guy”.Report
WRT what the PA courts can do…they decided that rule before the election, which means trying to change it _now_ would be exactly the same sort of thing that the Supeme Court has claimed to dislike, changing the rules during an election.
There were people who, under the laws at the time, mailed their ballot on election day, secure in the knowledge it had 10 days to get in, and altering that retroactively disenfranchises the people who operated based on what the rules were.
Now, the decision the court may might have been political, but…that doesn’t really mean it can be changed or voided, because you can’t randomly hurt innocent voters for misbehavior of a court. Whatever reason the court decided that, it was a fact as of election day, and it needs to remain as a fact.
And as long as the court didn’t explicitly say it was doing it for that reason…I’m not sure there’s any possible repercussions there.
—
But anyway , I wasn’t talking about that.I had been thinking about the Democrats creating a Federal law that says ‘absentee ballots have to be accepted for the next ten days’. (At least, in Federal elections.)
And I was vaguely assuming the current Supreme Court might invent a rule about that to stop it…until I realized that Federal law already does that, but only for oversea and military ballots. (Well, it’s 7 days, but the amount can’t be important.)
If the constitution allows Federal law to set a longer deadline for overseas mailed ballots, it allows Federal law to set a longer deadline for all mailed ballots.
Now…I’m sure Republicans would be perfectly happen if _that_ went away, too, but laws that have been unchallenged for decades at least have some presumption of constitutionality. And you look bad when you start randomly striking them down.
—
Actually, I kinda think this should be the Democrat’s policy from now on: Whenever they pass a law, make it in such a way that to strike it down, the courts would have to strike down something the government has been happily doing for decades, with no one complaining. Don’t make new things, expand old things.
I don’t know if the new Supreme Courtis going to be activist in this manner, but it would be good idea to always start using a framework that they would be hestitant to poke at. Yes, sometimes that’s not ideal, but that’s better than the New and Great thing being struck down.
And…on top of that, they might find it easier to sell to the population if it’s framed that way.Report
The election was already underway when PA changed the rules. I voted before PA’s court did their thing.
Yes, this is why courts really shouldn’t be changing important rules during an election on a politically motivated whim. Another great reason is it opens the door for this “wait until we see the results and whether that rule helps us and then try to undo it” gaming. It also lowers the level of respectability of the election in general.
We’re now in the situation where both sides can point to the results can claim victory under the “established” rules. If the US Supreme Court throws out the rule change retroactively, they’ll be viewed as being politically motivated. One of the big lessons of Bush v Gore should be that judges are human and can convince themselves rules favoring their side are more “just”.
Now Biden has won more convincingly than Bush so there’s that.
And there you go. One team can change the rules for political reasons during the election, the other team can’t change it back. You know, because of fairness.
Given the speed of the post office (i.e. MUCH faster than 10 days on average) I think you’re opening the door to problems. Afaict we don’t even pretend to try to control Post Office stamping, nor am I sure the Post Office never retroactively stamp things. You’re trying to appeal to a “neutral and trusted” body which is only those things because we mostly don’t try to depend on it.
However, that’s mostly a quibble. I’d be fine doing it and then waiting for problems.
You mean like children-in-cages?Report
You didn’t in PA. Here:
https://billypenn.com/2020/09/17/mail-ballots-pennsylvania-printing-green-party-supreme-court-biden-democrats-deadline-election-november-philadelphia/
Notice these two paragraphs:
They literally hadn’t printed any ballots, much less mailed them out. So no one had voted.
Why would there be ‘problems’ if the mail was much faster? If all the ballots come within say, three days, but they have to wait another week while no ballots, or almost no ballots, come in, before certifying the results…the harm is what?
But…this is an absurdly disingenious argument anyway. We just _had_ an election where one party tried to make the span longer and one shorter, and one of them is repeating conspiracy theories about pre-dating ballots, and you are too, which means this OBVIOUSLY matters.
So, please _justify_ why not counting ballots that arrive later makes sense as _policy_…not arguing ‘the laws say other things’ or a ‘court shouldn’t have decided’…I’m explicitly talking about changing Federal law. So explain why the law shouldn’t say that, especially if your claim is ‘It doesn’t matter?’
This is an absurd conspiracy. We do control stamping postmarks, in fact, a _very large_ number of things depend on the exact date of the postmark, including taxes, for example. There are entire legal situations where postmarks are _incredibly_ important. The idea we suddenly can’t trust them is insane.
However, there is an actual problem there: The mail can have unreadable postmarks, or slip through the postal system without a postmark at all. This is a real thing that happens, as opposed to the conspiracy theory.
But there is an incredibly obvious solution, and Virgina already did it. They implimented a regulation requiring all counties use intelligence mail tracking on their ballots. This means when each ballot enters the post office it can be tracked the entire way, via a computerized system that really cannot be tampered with, and certainly can’t be at any local level.
And considering that for some unknown reason absentee ballots are allowed to _require voters to purchase postage_, (1), I would actually like Congress to pass a law saying that the Post Office should create a specific system for accepting and tracking absentee ballots for free (Which is really just normal mail tracking but partitioned off.) and all states have to use this for absentee ballots as part of this law.
And when an absentee ballot is received after election day (Obviously ones received before were mailed before.) the barcode gets scanned and the date it entered the system is known.
Actually…if it was a Post Office system, nationwide, the Post Office itself could mostly enforce it. The system knows what it’s handling and when it entered the system, and things that enter too late can be marked as such and be sorted elsewhere.
1) Requiring people to use a stamp seems like an obvious poll tax to me…and, no, the constitution doesn’t allow a poll tax even if it’s just 55 cents! I know that seems trivial, but this is philsophical point. That is a blanket ban. There is no wiggle room. Unlike most of our rights, there’s never been any tradeoff allowed there, because it doesn’t _conflict_ with any other right. Why is this allowed?
I suspect it’s because the justification is ‘Because you don’t, technically, have to use an absentee ballot, you can vote in person.’, but actually, some people are in situations where they _do_ have to vote absentee. People detained and awaiting trial, for example, or convicted of a misdemeanor. They have a right to vote. For _free_, because all voting is free! Not for 55 cents!Report
The thing about passing laws at the federal level is that elections are state business, so it’s gotta be crafted carefully or the SCOTUS will toss it.
So demanding that the states provide free postage might not pass muster, but telling the post office to track how many ballots it processes and submit a bill to the feds after the election would.Report
Yes, that’s why I found it interesting the Federal government already sets deadlines for specific voters. If they can do it for some, they can do it for all.
I…think you misunderstood me? I wasn’t saying the _states_ should provide postage for free. I was saying the US government should….or, rather, not charge postage.
The Post Office can already define different categories of mail, and can require people to use the correct one. (Although there are some weird first amendment issues with some of those…but physical ballots, interestingly, are not any form of ‘speech’ whatsoever.)
It seems very strange they could not define a category for ballots, with tracking number and all. And require people to use it _for_ ballots. And they could, obviously, not charge postage for that category.Report
You must have missed my comment up thread. All kudos to you David; you called it well ahead of time.Report
Oh no, don’t give me credit for that, I misunderstood the situation. Until yesterday, I hadn’t realized the _last_ 1% or so of ballots counted would be overseas and military, which were _not_ as tilted towards Biden as the rest of them.
I thought it would be a margin of 20,000-30,000, I said that somewhere, I think. That’s what it would have been if the numbers continued.
They did not. At this point, now that counting has stopped, it stands at 7,248. Which is uncomfortably close. I wouldn’t have been anywhere near as optimistic if I’d realized how that would end.
On the plus side, that’s an automatic recount, so we don’t have fools whinging over the fact it’s hard to get a recount under Georgia law and Trump trying to come up with bogus justifications to get one, and the GA Sec of State having to choose between discrediting himself by pandering to a ranting old idiot, or following the law, which requires actual observable things to point at to get a recount…you can’t just pay for them here.
Addition: The sad thing is, I told myself I wouldn’t get ahead of myself this election, being very careful about the actual fact, because my assuming Clinton had it last election. I made myself be pessimistic, in fact.
Buuuut….at least I limited myself only to getting overexcited over the fact _my_ state might flip, and I already knew the obvious actual election results by that time. This was more a personal thing. If I had been wrong, it would not have mattered.Report
Looks like Biden will take PA, AZ, NV, MI, WI, and maaaaaybe Georgia. He didn’t get NC or FL.
Are the polls still broken? I really don’t know.Report
N.C. is not out of the park yet. There are 270K ballots to count, largely from Democratic leaning counties and ballot can come in by the 12th.Report
Statistically, a bare win in indistinguishable from a bare loss. Either candidate could have pulled in 330 EV and the polls still be right.Report
If you take 538’s averages, then move it towards the GOP by the margin of error the results are, roughly, in line with this. But all the polls and the aggregation being wrong in the same direction is a concern even if the polls weren’t full on wrong.
My own personal lesson from this experience if when reading 538 in the future I’m moving all their estimates towards the GOP by their margin of error. That way all my surprises should be pleasant.Report
This is two presidential elections is a row where 538 was correct within the margin of error, with the error being in the same direction and large enough that the result was very different.Report
Yes, I agree. This suggests three things to my mind:
1: 538’s overall methodology is fundamentally correct.
2: The polls that’re going into 538’s system are missing… something. Something that isn’t exactly making them flat out wrong but that is making them less right.
3: The analytical narrative that is being built around the polling numbers that come in has a leftward bias that is magnifying this moderate problem into a big expectations shock.Report
The shy Trump voter is a real thing. I have empirical evidence
In my Houston neighborhood (Oak Forest), there were lots of Biden/Harris yard signs, but no Trump/Pence ones.
But there were also several yard signs for Wendell Champion (*) as House Representative (TX 18th District). Under some obscure TX law -I think- those yard signs cannot identify the candidate’s party. But Champion was the snowball-chance-in-hell Republican candidate in a district that Sheila Jackson Lee first won in 1994, re-elected this week with 73% of the votes.
Those Champion yard signs, they were all hidden shy Trump voters. Too uncomfortable to put a Trump/Pence sign in their front yard, but adding to the TX red wall.
(*) Champion is also one of the three individual plaintiffs suing over and over again for tossing out the 127k early votes in the ten drive through locations in Houston.Report
The shy Trump voter is a real thing.
Snowflakes?Report
Is there even any evidence that someone would be punished, socially, for being a Trump supporter?Report
I think depending on where you are, yes, you would be punished socially for being a [Biden]/[Trump] (delete one) supporter.
In Houston, a little bit. Not rotten eggs in your front door bad, but *morons* whispered as an aside bad, probably yesReport
Maybe embarrassed Trump voter is more apropos.Report
Depending on where you live, you can be “punished, socially” for supporting anybody. And this has always been true. You can grow a pair and put up with it or be a snowflake.Report
If I don’t like it, can I move to Somalia?Report
I saw an article yesterday that said the big hole in the polling, and likely a big part of the shy Trump voter, was young college-educated white males. Vast numbers of them say they don’t share their political support for Trump because they’re afraid of severe repercussions in the workplace.
These are likely to be the most junior people in a variety of industries, and they went through college during the “woke-era” where they were taught first-hand why they should live in fear of the thought police. They learned to keep their heads down and lie to anyone inquiring about their political leanings, lest they get condemned, ostracized, cashiered, and expelled.Report
Snowflakes won’t last long in Somalia’s climate.Report
Well, so long as we’re moving back to “suck it up, buttercup”, I think we’ll be okay.
I just don’t want there to be significant asymmetry where when one side gets to commit microaggressions against the other and say “suck it up, buttercup” and when the other side snaps back screams “HATE SPEECH!”Report
Give it ten years, every leftist population center will be Somolia.Report
Here have all the facepalm emojis.Report
Snowflake is a 2010s derogatory slang term for a person, implying that they have an inflated sense of uniqueness, an unwarranted sense of entitlement, or are overly-emotional, easily offended, and unable to deal with opposing opinions.
Or they can just not put up yard signs. That way they don’t have to deal with accusations of racism and other quasi-fascist attacks and they can still vote the way they want to.Report
In Maine, the three October polls for the Senate race predicted Gideon would beat Susan Collins by 5.7 points. An earlier poll had her winning by 12 points, and the polling average throughout the campaign was +4.8 points Gideon. Collins was said to be “in the fight of her life” and nobody gave her any chance of pulling out a victory. Collins beat Gideon by 8.8 points. The October polls were off by 14.5 points, and the worst one was off by 20 points.
Polling is dead. You’d get more accurate forecasts just by asking Charles Barkley or Kim Kardashian what their gut feel was.Report
People really don’t answer polls like they used to during the golden age of the landline. I am pretty sure I turned away pollsters in 2012 because I thought they were scammers.Report
There’s a 50% chance that the results of two elections would land on the same side of the margin of error. There may be considerations for why that happened, but two heads or tails isn’t enough to call a coin unfair.
This country has been near dead-even since 1994. House, Senate, presidency. Some shifting in governorships, but even that’s been pretty balanced. I even remember hearing something once about 62,000 votes in 2016.Report
2020 is a reapportionment year.
None of this is official yet but the projections I’m looking at show Texas picking up 2-3 seats, California, Colorado, North Carolina, and Florida picking up one seat, and *MAYBE* Oregon or Arizona or Virginia picking up a seat (or maybe change one of those ors to an and).
Minnesota, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Rhode Island, and Alabama mostly look like they’re going to lose a seat (maybe one or two will keep it) and there’s a chance that New York loses a seat.
Which means those states get redrawn for sure (and, in the past, redrawing techniques have resulted in getting rid of undesirable congresspeople by putting two undesirables against each other in one district… you won’t get rid of both of them but you’ll get rid of one of them and send a message to the other).
And remember: They have computers now. Bad actors can influence elections for the next 3 or 4 elections by drawing maps with the power of computers!
Edit: Ew… looking at another map, maybe California loses one and New York loses two?
I have no idea.
I just know that the census will change things and those changes, in the past, have changed more things (without sarcasm) for at least one or two elections.Report
At this point it is basically all but certain that Biden wins at least Nevada, Arizona, and Pennsylvania.
1. 130K votes in PA are largely from Democratic friendly areas but even the red county votes have been good for Biden. This does not include ballots received after November 3rd which can increase Biden’s total.
2. Nevada is basically a done deal even if not officially called. The remainder of the votes are overwhelmingly in Clark County.
3. Arizona has tightened but not by enough points for Trump to claim victory absent a Hail Mary.
4. Georgia can go either way but Biden’s lead is likely to increase by a few thousand more votes and recounts rarely do more than switch a few hundred votes.
5. North Carolina is not over. They are not making an announcement until next week. There are at least 270K ballots left to count, mainly from blue counties and areas. Ballots can arrive by November 12th and be counted as long as the post-mark is November 3rd.Report
A buddy from work just texted me: “You’re getting two terms of Trump. This election was just over whether you wanted them next to each other or not.”Report
I don’t think Trump is going to be in physical or mental shape to run in 2024. Look at him. Listen to him. His dementia and possibly Alzheimer’s is going to be really kicking in then.Report
Assuming he’s not the NY State Pen by then . . .Report
I don’t see any way Trump gets the nom again. The party won’t allow it.Report
We didn’t say Donald J Trump. We have lots of Trumps we can nominate.Report
By all means do George. You have plenty of Trumps and we’re plumb out of Clintons; that’s a fight we should relish.
If Biden were going to run the kind of admin where the President influences who gets investigated or prosecuted (he’s not going to) then going easy on Trump would probably be the most cruel thing they could do to the right.Report
Oh yeah, Chelsea would get hundreds of votes. ^_^Report
Thankfully she seems utterly uninterested in seeking political office.Report
If the party had the juice to stop Trump, we’d have seen evidence of it right by now.Report
The party is irrelevant, as Trump showed in the 2016 primaries. What are they going to do, run Jeb!?Report
A blast from the past:
This was back in October 2016 when I thought that Trump was going to lose.
Now I know that 2024 can run on “Trumpism Has Never Been Tried”.
And if it’s run by someone who isn’t both stupid and lazy?Report
Is there a guy who can pull off Trumpism that isn’t Trump?
There’s been many imitations lately but none of the can pull off the recipe.Report
I assume that there is.
(I don’t assume that it’s necessarily a guy.)Report
They broke the mold when they made Trump (the rest of us brought hammers).Report
In Da House:
Report
[Checks the half-life of Pelosium]Report
She might lose. Her caucus is having a civil war between the moderates who got crushed and the far-left in the super-safe seats. AOC can’t seem to understand why things like socialism and the Green New Deal aren’t the way forward when supporters of it kept their seats while moderates lost.
In part that’s a coastal elite bubble problem, and if her wing wins the Democratic Party will become a small, almost fringe party that only wins in high-end urban enclaves that currently vote 80-20 Democrat. New York, Philly, San Francisco, Portland, etc.
The same thing happened in the 90’s when Democrats lost the South by adopting California values that Southerners didn’t hold.Report
This appeares to be trending as a repeat of 2012 in results, which was a big win, but not a landslide. So update your priors to that, rather than the false impression it was a nailbitter created by the order the votes got counted.Report
I was thinking “This feel a lot like how 2018 went.” but it has a lot of parallels with 2012 as well.Report
I find it interesting how much media simply dismisses Trump’s garbage about vote fraud as garbage, not even bothering to show it. He’s lost his presumption of relevance.
Here’s a GOP senator being slightly too polite to say “He’s full of shit”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCdm2FJfjeIReport
The trouble for Democrats is that it’s very obviously vote fraud, so blatant that it’s mind boggling that they think for a minute that they might get away with it. And we know it is real and massive just from the statistical anomalies that are big red flags for voter fraud.
Biden got less votes than Obama or Hillary in all states except WI, MI, PA, and GA. In those key states, the big Biden vote didn’t show up on election night, it showed up with the wee AM, and then days later. And the big fraud occurred in the places where massive fraud is a historical given. Milwaukee, Detroit, Philly, and Atlanta. Why did black turnout somehow only surge in cities where Democrats control all the vote counting?
In Michigan and Wisconsin, the number of ballots is going to be dramatically less than the number of reported votes, because there they just changed the vote count. In Michigan they even had a secret router hooking their counting machines to the Internet, which was uncovered by a Republican observer. In Wisconsin, and election official discovered that their voting machines were changing thousands of thousands of Trump votes into Biden votes, and the whole state was using such machines. That 4% lead Trump had there on election night? That was real, and that’s what the audits and recounts are going to find. The same in Michigan.
Heck, I’ve got a list of 14,550 Michigan voters who are dead, yet they still voted. All were born from 1900 to 1920, and I’ve verified quite a few of them against the Michigan voter database that says that they did indeed vote.
Anyway, the list of such things is becoming endless, all clear evidence of fraud that courts do consider in US election fraud cases, which are not unusual. The GOP can’t make Trump not challenge such fraud, either. He’s gong to contest it, and he’s going to start winning. Even if he doesn’t, Republicans aren’t going to stop investigating the fraud, the FEC and DHS aren’t going to stop investigating the fraud, and people like James O’Keefe aren’t going to stop investigating it.
But suppose Biden manages to get into office. Just as everyone knows that JFK beat Nixon due to fraud, which Nixon didn’t protest, everybody will know that Joe Biden got crushed in 2020, and his party used blatant election rigging to get him in. A whole lot of Democrats, especially outside the blue urban bubbles, are not a bit okay with election fraud. They want fair and honest election, and fair and honest officials. They’d defect, and 2022 would become a massive Republican sweep, as would 2024. It would be the end of the Democrat party as a viable political force at the national level.Report
This is just adoreable!Report
Let Andrew McCarthy talk you off the ledge:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/11/when-vote-fraud-is-claimed-question-always-is-did-it-make-a-difference/Report
We know it’s Andy McCarthy because he calls votes cast in good faith but disallowed on technicalities “fraud”.Report
Andrew McCarthy is an anti-Trump moron from day one. The right completely ignores him.
You see, it’s not just Trump who can demand recounts and throw up legal cases, because his wasn’t the only name on the ballot.
The Democrats did the crime, using cheesy election rigging methods that have been around forever, and now comes the reckoning. Normally they avoid the reckoning because their fraud is smaller scale and down-ballot, often just rigging a contest for fire inspector or ag commissioner where so few people care that it doesn’t take much to change the outcome, or not needing any rigging at all because they’d win anyway.
But not this time. They didn’t do a more careful job because in places like Michigan and Wisconsin, they believed the polls that said they’d crush Trump. So the fraud had to be immediate and ad-hoc, which meant just changing the counts. Those counts won’t remotely match the number of ballots they have on hand, and a trivial and automatic recount will expose the vast discrepancy between truth and fiction.
All Democrats are doing now is showing how unashamedly corrupt they are, and not only are they going to destroy their party on a national level, they’re going to guarantee that the Republicans win every debate on voter ID, vote in person, and other election issues. Their talking point that “there is no voter fraud” just got blown out of the water, forever and all time.Report
So…you’re saying this will automatically be revealed easily, by the states that are doing automatic recounts?
Cool. That seems simple enough. I guess we’ll all know you’re right, because most of these states are having automatic recounts. Georgia is, for example.
Now, in some sort of world where the recounts _don’t_ reveal this incredibly obvious fraud: You’re wrong, right? Is that how it works? When facts don’t match claims, that means wrongness, right?
Or should the recount have been more detailed? Or…longer? Or…something else? Do things just keep changing and shifting?
Are you ever wrong? Or do other things just keep having have happened, like when you predicted…all sorts of things throughout the past couple of days that turned out not to be truth. Is this some sort of science fiction universe, does the past change _under_ us?
For example, what happened to those votes that were coming 2:1 for Trump in Arizona that you talked about the governor saying Tuesday? 300,000 extra votes for Trump in Arizona? They…didn’t seem to show up, in fact, the vote has actually sorta remained the same? I think they were slightly pro-Trump, like 53% or something, they did tilt things _slightly_, but…not anywhere near that level. Of course, you sorta ignored the fact the governor isn’t the one who said that anyway.
And speaking of Arizona, wasn’t there going to be a massive lawsuit about Sharpies there? Turns out…that was completely bogus, and in fact, it had been confirmed as such at the time you said it, although admittedly you might not have known that at the time. But you know it now, right? This isn’t going to be something you bring up months from now when none of us even remember it, right?
I mean, you do this all the time, promising things that clearly aren’t true, and then blatently don’t happen or are disproven, and you don’t correct or even pause…but it’s _really_ noticable over the _four days_ of the election. Like, we may not remember you said months ago, but we remember what you said _Tuesday_.Report
They’ve already turned up huge discrepancies. In Antrim County Michigan, an election official got suspicious and did a hand recount. It shifted their reported total by 6,000 votes. The county’s population is only 23,580. The clerk said it was a “tabulating software” glitch. Forty-seven other counties there use the same “glitchy” software.
All these states will be meticulously recounted, and it’s going to be very very embarrassing for election officials.
I’ve listed numerous big red flags that are taken as evidence of possible fraud in any US election. All of these red flags are present in the key states.
Remember when Gore was demanding meticulous recounts? I do. He demanded them because the Democrats hadn’t been engaging in rampant ballot fraud, so there would be nothing to discover except a few more Gore votes.
If Democrats are dead set against meticulous recounts and audits now, it’s because they know they have something to hide.Report
LOL. Maybe Republicans shouldn’t constantly push dumbass voting software, programmed in Serbia, that constantly has glitches…if they don’t want glitches.
And, no one did a hand recount. Did you actually read what happened there?
The software on the tabulator at the voting precinct spit out a record of the votes on paper, and cards that seem to hold the _correct_ totals. Those cards, sealed, were transported to the township, opened, and loaded into the computer.
The totals loaded in from the card were incorrect.
Now, there’s all sorts of questions here that I, as a computer scientist, could be asking if I didn’t know what was going on.
I’d be asking, for example, how the data was encrypted, and what sort encoded and labeled filed. Why are the totals not in a human readable format where a text file can be glanced at to verify the labels match what is on the screen, or alternately why isn’t the entire thing in some format that records _all_ the data, and essentically brings the entire eleciton along with it, so the results can’t be wrong?
That’s what I’d be asking if I ran into this out in the wild.
Unfortunately, I know exactly what is going on:
This is voting software, the complete and utter shitshow category of software, and the cards _probably_ had some sort of dumbass unlabeled tab delimited files and someone set up one the program that loaded in the totals in a different order from the voting tabulator.
Because you can, for some reason, do that sort of utterly stupid crap. And the voting software provider will call it ‘user error’.
Because that is how voting software works, it’s written by poorly paid lowest-bidder outsourced programmed, cobbled together, probably built on MS Access, with default passwords and backdoors and no security and patched at the last second. And everything is always the fault of the ‘untrained users’, even stuff that software very obviously shouldn’t allow.
So this was probably an easy and obvious mistake.
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More importantly, this was easily catchable…mostly because they do print the totals out, and carry them along with the cards, and they would be compared.
And would be caught, when the result got certified.
Like, this is literally exactly the wrong way to do it. The correct way is to alter the totals on _voting cards_ as they are loaded in. Not have the tabulator add everything up correctly and print that out as a permanent records and then try to alter loading those numbers in later. Everyone at that precient, including the Republican observers, know what the printed out numbers were, and could easily have caught this…and if not it would have been caught during vote certification. That’s what that is…it’s confirming each set of number _actually_ matches what the precient has, by directly asking them.
Granted, maybe your cospiracy is this fraud happened _at_ the precient, and they would have confirmed the fake numbers (Although…they didn’t?)…but I should point out, if the precient was that compromised, where they can do whatever they want with no concern for being spotted, they could have just opened the machines up and altered the totals, or just voted repeatedly and that wouldn’t have been caught.
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But I guess you did find a VERY obvious mistake, so…bravo? Except…this would be an incredibly stupid and nonsensical way to tamper with anything.
And I believe you promised ‘ Those counts won’t remotely match the number of ballots they have on hand, and a trivial and automatic recount will expose the vast discrepancy between truth and fiction.’
Which implies this happened more than once. (It would be strange for the Democrats to only have operatives in a very Republican and very small county.)
So let’s see what happens next.Report
Oh, and:
So, if they _aren’t_ against that, they don’t?
Because they aren’t.
In fact, what you even talking about? No one is objecting to any recounts, whatsoever.
Although, hilariously, you know what states actually don’t like recounts? Conservative ones.
Georgia has really strict recount rules. From what I read, it’s going to be hard to get one here. Again, not because of Democrats, but because the Republicans run the place and wanted it that way. A recount here requires alledging _specific_ examples of discrepancy or errors, and there hadn’t been any in Georgia. (No, the thing in Chatham county wasn’t.) You can’t just pay for them like in other states.
To be clear: I’m not _opposed_ to him getting a recount here, I’m just not sure state law allows it here. There is a Republican Sec of State, and it’s entirely possible _someone_ will come up with a pretense that allows him to do it, or maybe he’ll pretend the Chatham County thing does despite the fact there was nothing wrong there, but…I don’t know.
And, honestly, while I don’t oppose a recount of here, I would oppose the Sec of State _allowing the Republicans to break the rules_ to get one. No. We want to change the law, we change the law…and it is what it is right now, you can’t change the law mid-eleciton. We don’t operate the government by making exceptions for our own party.
But then again, there might really be a way legitimately under the law. I don’t know the law well, it’s confusing. (Or we might hit the impossible narrow ‘automatic recount’ window and none of this matter.)
But the other states, the ones that _haven’t_ been in the grip of conservative governments for a hundred year, have much easier recount rules.
Granted, the Trump campaign has to respond within a certian timeframe after certification, and I can see them totally screwing that up and then trying to sue about _that_, because that’s the sort of people they are…incompetent and yell-y.Report
It turns out that Georgia _is_ close enough to get a n automatic recount. The margin isn’t quite as tight as I thought it was, it’s 0.5%, which Georgia is within. It’s still incredibly strict, but…this race falls within it.
You know, it’s weird how Republicans spend so much time trying to ensure ‘election intergrity’ by keeping ‘invalid’ votes out, but then…make recounts hard. It’s weird.
Shouldn’t just…set them up where they always happen? Like, they could make them happen always, or put the margin for automatic recount high.
And do spot checks. Plenty of states do that, but not the conservative ones.
Granted, lots of them didn’t even have the _possiblity_ of recount or spot checks…before this election, we couldn’t have recounted anything, because WE DIDN’T GENERATE PAPER BALLOTS.
It’s almost like…in states overseen by Republicans, they never foresaw a need for recounts, or disputing the totals, or anything.
There’s all sorts of very interesting implications hovering right there.
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And one really really wonders what the Republicans would be saying if Georgia hadn’t been forced, at gunpoint by a court, to change voting machines so they could generate a paper ballot?
Like, what if, thanks to the Republican making a shitty choice two decadces ago, and digging in their heels even after everyone knew how broken it was, we couldn’t do a recount?Report
I know the golden mean fallacy is a fallacy, but these two comments make me feel good.Report
James O’Keefe [isn’t] going to stop investigating
Trump already has the boats, so all he needs are the dildos.Report
James O’Keefe has already posted astounding videos of Democrats explaining their vote fraud operations, in both Minnesota and Texas. The woman in Texas, who said she made about $75K rigging votes in a major election cycle, was taken into custody by law enforcement.
James O’Keefe’s video of a postal working explaining that he was instructed to back date ballots to November 3rd is talking to USPS investigators. They take mail fraud very, very seriously, and love to send people to jail for 20 years.
Democrats are not going to get away with such blatant fraud because Republicans are not going to let them. Plenty of Republicans politicians, especially ones like Mitt Romney, are all-too-willing to concede, but what really matters are the Republicans who are never going to stop proving fraud, simply because there are too many big red flags.
I’ll expand on things Larry Correia noted.
“The massive D turn out, but only in the keys states”, and only in key cities in those key states. Biden only beat Barack Obama’s black turnout in MI, WI, PA, and GA. What are the odds of that? Everywhere else he performed worse than Obama did.
Now think about that for a second. It means there are huge numbers of black people who refused to vote for Barack Obama, but showed up to vote for Joe Biden. That’s just stupid, but you apparently believe it.
“The late night spikes that were enough to close all the Trump leads, are a red flag.” A second red flag is that none of the non-key states had anything remotely like that. That only happens because of fraud.
“The statistically impossible breakdown of the ratios of these vote dumps is a red flag.” It is impossible to show up with 20,000 unopened ballots that happen to be 20,000 for Biden and 0 for Trump. Flat out impossible. That wouldn’t even happen in the Soviet Union, where at least a few people would vote against Stalin, no matter the consequences.
“The ratios of these dumps being far better than the percentages in the bluest of blue cities, even though the historical data does not match, red flag.”
“Poll observers being removed. Red flag.” If Democrats weren’t committing massive fraud counting the votes, why wouldn’t they let Republicans watch?
There are dozens more big red flags like that, and nobody connected to the Internet is going to be able to ignore them for very long, much less for four years.
The entire world is going to be 100% aware that Joe Biden stole an election and isn’t the lawful President, and they’re going to be aware that everyone else is aware of it to. Biden will be a political cripple, and an albatros that will doom the rest of the Democrat party.
I’d actually like to see him get in, just because of that. I think it would help Republicans far more than a second term for Trump.Report
George, your throwing down a lot of text on this. I gotta give ya some credit. If there is as much fraud, it will get put to the light of day. There is no reason to put this much effort into it when it will just be dismissed. Even if or when found true will be shoved in the mystery box to be a complete mystery two days later.
You have to understand, every time you hold up the mirror, the only reflection they see is Good Society. You are trying to push a reality into a unreality.
I know you’re fighting the good fight, but there are better things to do with your time and efforts.
The bubble is going to bubble, that’s what makes it a bubble.Report
I’m all for reality checking The Narrative but it seems like if any of these allegations had merit they wouldn’t be getting thrown out of court at the most preliminary levels. Even beyond that I have yet to see a case where the relief being sought would have an impact on the outcome if granted.Report
The next 7 weeks will be interesting.Report
Ah yes, noted man of integrity James O’Keefe. Are you going to cite Jacob Wohl next? Another man of integrity. Okay, a man of multiple criminal indictments, hairbrained schemes but always one who gives reporters a nice laugh.
You are a clown.Report
Great criticism from the hardcore facts guy that cites Vox and Salon.
You’re a parody of a parody.Report
James O’Keefe is from the Andrew Breitbart school. Never, ever let your opponent bully you. Always push back. He called it “walking toward the fire”. James O’Keefe, Ben Shapiro, Steven Crowder, Greg Gutfeld, Gavin McInnes. They can all let their theatricality get in the way of their message, but it’s because they are really playing chess in an extra dimension. The goal is whatever you’re working on, but also to make the media fall into your trap. The problem comes when it might amuse you to game out how the press will respond to your third move, and you’re planning your fourth move, but the story gets lost to the populace.Report
“They can all let their theatricality get in the way of their message, but it’s because they are really playing chess in an extra dimension. ”
Agreed.
These Trumpists exist in a different dimension that the rest of us, a dimension outside of the empirical reality that describes our world.
It is a dimension of grievance and rage where the Rightful Ordering of the world has been turned upside down and they are an insurgent force using whatever means possible to blow up the Death Star.Report
Come on, not you too. I understand it’s tense, but this is the time when lucid, respectful political discussion is most needed.
There’s an interesting discussion to be had about whether Breitbart would have supported Trump. Andrew was a pit bull, but devoted to the truth and inclusivity.Report
Andrew was a pit bull, but devoted to the truth and inclusivity.
Just ask Shirley Sherrod.Report
So, 270towin.com has called PA.
The actual media are still all waiting for each other because they don’t want the wrath of Trump.
This is getting a little silly, guys. SOMEONE has to step forward and say it.Report
Nothing is going to be decided before mid-December.
This is a bigger version of Florida 2000. It will go the Supreme Court several times.Report
Since when has any of “the actual media” besides Fox been afraid of making Trump angry?? And even if they were, why on earth would they still be as they announce his impending departure?Report
Biden increases lead in PA to nearly 22K votes, AZ tightening but probably not enough to swing the state. Biden leads by 29K.Report
Michigan is going to hold an emergency legislative session tomorrow to go over the election fraud. Turnout in Michigan, whose population hasn’t changed since 2016, saw turnout jump 20%. Nearby Ohio, which has figured out how to run elections, only saw turnout go up 8.5%.
Wisconsin and Minnesota will probably do the same. All six state houses are under Republican control, and as the Constitution says, state legislatures have power over elections. Given the overwhelming evidence of massive fraud, all three states could easily end up flipping back to Trump.
MI, WI, MN, PA, GA, and AZ all used voting systems called “Dominion”, as did many other states. That will be put under intense scrutiny. According to Sydney Powell, our government has two offense software programs to hack those and change vote totals. Whether our election was hacked by Democrats or by Russians (perhaps with Snowden’s help), we have to get to the bottom of it. We must leave no stone unturned to find out if even one vote was flipped by Russians.Report
George, I know every part of your Facebook feel is telling that Dominion is connected to the Democrats via- *checks Google* Apparently them and Pelosi share a lobbyist? That’s rather weak. Oh, and they donated to the Clinton Foundation. You also know who Dominion supports, with campaign contributions? Mitch McConnell. That’s because they are government contractors and, duh, try to lobby and bribe the government.
But we’re worried about election rigging here, not ‘paying off government officials so they’ll use our stuff’.
So…who is in control of Dominion? Who owns it? Like, the actual _real_ owners of it are surely more important than politicians that you’ve haphazardly, in the wrong direction, linked to it?
*checks* Hmm. Its owned by private equity, and we don’t know who that is? And private equity _also_ owns the other electronic voting company, ES&S? And…also the third one is also owned by private equity? So we don’t know who is actually the owner of literally any of them? That seem weird. Seems like, at minimum, we should make these companies follow the same transparancy as public companies, and…probably more, really?
The Republicans really should just haul the Dominion CEO, and others, into Congress and question them. Demand to know who runs them. Demand to know who works there. Demand to know all sorts of things. But, as this is a little too late at this point, obviously, and we still have the pandemic happening, so…hearing aren’t a good idea. But I just remembered, I have a time machine, so I’m going to travel back and tell Republicans to start holding hearings on this back in January.
And…I’m back. What happened there? *google* Here we go:
https://www.salon.com/2020/01/13/voting-system-ceos-agree-to-work-with-government-not-independent-analysts_partner/
Well, the Republicans didn’t really get very far there, but they tried, a little. A pathetically small amount of trying, but…some of the House Administration Committee did. *frowns* The House? What? *check notes* Ooops. I actually asked the Democrats to do it instead of the Republicans. My bad.
Don’t worry, they were also extremely deferential, just like Congress should always be to CEOs, especially of companies in charge of really important parts of government functionality.
(And _that_ is what the bribes are for.)
—
But this is hilarious. Everyone with knowledge has been screaming about electronic voting machines for years, any sort of intelligent person in that field, and when this _does_ make it up to the level of a politician (Which it does all too rarely.), it’s always been Democrats. Not enough, mind you. Nothing actually gets done, ever. But Democrats were the only people willing to even act like anything is wrong or even dubious…until the lobbyists wrote them bigger checks and they suddenly wandered off disinterested.
And SUDDENLY, this.
So because Trumpism turned you guys into a bunch of conspiracy theorists, which means the sort of error that has happened hundred of times in electronic voting machines (1), but was pretty mild as an error and would be easily correctable (2)…is a giant conspiracy and you want to burn them to the ground.
And I say this an official representive of The Left: Do you need someone to hold your coat?
In fact, here, have these keys. We have a gasoline-filled tanker truck with ‘Electronic voting’ painted on the side out back of our leftist HQ, we’ve been filling it for decades. All we demand is you burn the others down too, along with Dominon. Burn them to the ground, and salt the earth.
And take down anyone nearby…which doesn’t really include the elected officials they are clearly are just bribing, but whatever. You want to trade Pelosi for McConnell, we will indeed take you up on that. You can even have Hillary Clinton, free of charge.
But, besides the obvious bribes, in all these companies have actual political operatives and very political people involved (Which is part of the reason they’ve started hiding ownership), people who have very clear political motives. People who say things like they’re helping ‘Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President.’. People who should not be anywhere near election systems. And perhaps be investigated quite a lot.
Now, none of this is going to change the election results, but…this is the best possible collatoral damage I have ever seen. It would be _amazing_ if taking down Trump resulted in Trumpists flailing wilding and pulling electronic voting down with him!
1) Which is one of the problems with them
2) Unlike some of the other errors…our last primary in Georgia had a problem where paging back would hide half the candiates. Which ws ‘fixed’ by putting in a uncertified patch while the system was live. Whcih is actually as much of a problem _as_ the problem.Report
When I look at the listed history of number of people who voted (see link), the number this election was abnormally high, like it’s-been-60-years-since-we’ve-seen-this high.
Having said that, it could easily be (and probably is), a combo of statistical noise, Trump doing a good job at spinning both sides up, and Covid giving everyone a lot more time to vote.
https://www.michigan.gov/sos/0,4670,7-127-1633_8722-29616–,00.html
https://www.politico.com/2020-election/results/michigan/Report
I may need Schilling to explain Benford’s Law to me. Twitter is, apparently, talking about it and how it demonstrates that fraud took place.
I’m not good enough at math to know what they’re talking about but I understand that Benford’s Law is how they got Enron a million years ago?Report
The wikipedia page has, of course, been edited about 40 times since Thursday.Report
I’m not good enough at math to know what they’re talking about…
This is foundational probability and distributions. One of my pet peeves is the number of statistics classes that don’t even bring up the question of testing whether data fits a particular distribution. For example, whether fitting a model to data using least squares is a good thing depends on a whole lot of stuff about the underlying distributions. Are the residuals (error terms) normally distributed? Heteroskedastic? I absolutely hate that Microsoft put easy least squares into Excel, and just ignored residual analysis.Report
It’s how we got the cubic fit for COVID growth.Report
It predicts, for instance, that most prices will end in “.99”
(I don’t understand it either.)Report
Unlike some of the other errors…our last primary in Georgia had a problem where paging back would hide half the candiates. Which ws ‘fixed’ by putting in a uncertified patch while the system was live. Whcih is actually as much of a problem _as_ the problem.
Isn’t this a violation of federal law?Report
Oops, misthreaded. This should have been in response to Jaybird’s 6:56 comment.Report
DavidTC’s comment.
Mine was whining about being ignorant about math.Report
I’m having a bad day. I’m so tired of negotiating final details over the sale of our old house. Also tired of taking things out of boxes and trying to find a place for them in the new house. So I don’t seem to even be able to misthread properly.
Techniques similar to Benford’s Law were used to demonstrate just how terrible the much-beloved lever machines were for accuracy.
Anyway, skimming through a few papers on Google Scholar — not necessarily a great place to start, but usually not a bad one — it appears that: (1) it seems to be widely recognized that you can’t use the leading digit, you have to use the second digit, (2) the second digit seems to be very sensitive to the degree of aggregation, and (3) errors are heavily biased to false positives (in the case of elections, indicating fraud where there is none).Report
This is what I have found as well.
Benford is a good first step, when adjusted for the reality of voting data, but it’s merely an indicator, not a sufficient condition of fraud.
But everyone is deciding that the improper use of a first indicator is evidence of fraud.Report
When I was working for the state legislature, and was the guy on the budget staff with IT and more serious math experience, I got the questions about algorithms for looking for fraud in public assistance. “None of these are proof; but they suggest clients and providers to look at more closely.”Report
What I’ve always called a “curious result”.Report
Okay, cool. I found the article (from 2017!) that talks about Benford’s Law being a flawed tool. I mean, it strikes me as being crazy that we’d be able to reliably predict what second digits are/are not.
It’s a tool that gets used (not definitively, but used) to detect fraud in foreign elections. But it’s a flawed tool.
Makes sense.Report
“Not flawed, ‘flawed’!”Report
Yes. Yes it is.
Does that matter? Not in the slightest. Following the laws about voting machines are only for the…actually, those laws aren’t for anything. They’re just sorta ‘show laws’. Things that look nice on paper.
But, anyway, I know I came off as sarcastic above, but, hand to God, if the Trumpian conspiratorial lynch mob goes after _electronic voting_, and actually takes them down, I…will not be able to process reality.
It would be like winning the lottery on top of winning the lottery.
I know they’re complaining about _just_ Dominion now, not the other companies, but…all those companies are opaque messes that openly and repeatedly violate election law, have no transparancy, are owned by mysteriously people., have ties to political entities, and you can’t go after Dominion without taking the entire thing down.
I am seriously considering, and I am not joking about this, creating some sort of false conservative identity and infiltrating some of these conspiritorial groups and feeding them _true information_ about these sleezy companies, just to sorta point them in the right direction.
Or maybe, I’ll start a rumor about…uh, nevermind. Let’s me leave some plausiblity deniablity there.Report
Heh. I’m not even having to invent any rumors. They’re ranting about Clintons and Soros and Pelosi owning the company, and I correct that to ‘Technically, we don’t know who owns the company, because they refuse to tell us, and refused to tell Congress also. We need to take them to court, RIGHT NOW, and find out owns them.’
Man, this is great. Let’s get some of those crackpot conservative lawyers. Let’s get James O’Keefe in here, send him in undercover.Report
Good news!
There might never be another Republican president.
We might never need to fact-check ever again!Report