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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30058 thread views

U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.

If you're a U.S. citizen with voting rights, your polling place can reportedly be located here.

If you're still researching issues, Ballotpedia is usually reasonably helpful.

Any other reasonably neutral election resources you'd like me to add to this notification, I'm happy to add.

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I have to get up early AF so I'm going to bed (it's 9:15 pm in Japan, yes I'm on farmer's hours).

I hope when I awake the country hasn't exploded. Good luck, my fellow countrymen and women.

I want to stay up and F5 Twitter/4chan for hot election shitposts but I have to go to work tomorrow. D:

It depends on how contested it is. Often we basically know who won by around midnight on election day, so about 16 hours from now. But famously in the 2000 election, no one knew who the winner was for weeks because no one could agree over who won the state of Florida.

In 2020 PA was not called until November 7th and may well be similar this year if it is as close. We are not allowed to start counting mail in ballots in advance as some other states are (like Florida I believe), so it is likely we won't be done counting for a few days. The State might still be called in advance of the count being complete if the gap is wide enough of course.

This just seems like an odd argument for why it takes so long. Hire a few more people.

Why? Nothing changes if you don't know the outcome the same night. The switchover doesn't happen for months. Why spend more budget on counting faster when it doesn't actually change anything. It is ok if it takes a few days before the outcome is decided.

And if Republicans want the answers faster they could allow PA to start counting votes earlier exactly as Republicans in Florida decided. It was Republicans in PA that keep voting against that change. So clearly they aren't that invested in a swift outcome. So why should the city or state spend more to get it faster?

if Republicans want the answers faster they could allow PA to start counting votes earlier

But you're also defending accepting new ballots days after the election anyway, so that's not a real argument for getting it done faster. It's so transparent.

I think it is ok to either have the cut off being received by election day or being mailed by election day, depending what the state or municipality prefers. I was defending that one of those is patently wrong. I think both are defensible. The second would have the trade off of taking more time in close elections, that is true. But as I point out elsewhere that isn't necessarily a problem. It's just a problem if you choose a course of action that will make it slower, THEN claim the very slowness is evidence of possible fraud.

The maximally-cynical view here is that all three ways of resolving a election that is fucked beyond the ability of state courts to adjudicate (state legislatures nominating electors, a contingent election in the House, and SCOTUS deciding the election Bush v Gore-style) favour Republicans, so anything that fucks elections is good for Republicans and anything that unfucks them is good for Democrats. This view predicts the views of national MAGA leadership reasonably well, but not the behaviour of the locally elected Republicans who actually administer elections.

Because in the world in which we live, for whatever reasons the late-counted votes seem to lean pretty heavily to the left -- the impact of a narrow win from the right on election day with 98% of polls reporting or whatever shifting to a narrow Kamala victory a week later on election confidence would be quite profound I think, especially in PA.

Do you want civil war national strife? This is how you get national strife.

(Not sure why you are so supportive of PA Republicans -- maybe they have undesirable goals here?)

Not sure why you are so supportive of PA Republicans -- maybe they have undesirable goals here?

Well my point is that they obviously don't think counting the votes faster is necessarily better. They also didn't think that mail in ballots were less secure, when they thought that increase would help them.

So if Republicans claim to be worried about the length and security of the process, but do things that make it longer and less secure when they believe it is of benefit to them, then it points to a certain direction about their motivations.

So given that, it is up to the Republican party to manage those expectations about how long it will take and that yes, later counted votes will skew Democrat, and that this is entirely normal given the situation they themselves set up. If they don't want to make it easier/more secure, but won't tell their supporters what that outcome will entail, then they are part of causing the problem themselves.

Otherwise what you are saying is that the actions of Republicans in PA will lead to an increase in civil strife therefore the state governments must spend more money and time, in order for Republican supporters not to think the election is rigged. You can see how that is potentially an issue? It leaves no incentives for the party to actually do things better.

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