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Notes -
American midterm election predictions?
Does anyone wish to use this space to register predictions for outcomes in tomorrow's American midterm elections?
Personally, I take a kind of efficient markets approach to this stuff, so I'll defer to the betting consensus. But if you want your time-stamped judgment registered as part of the official Motte record, here's your chance!
Mods - please feel free to remove if you don't think this is a good fit for the space.
With Milwaukee County giving other areas of the state the heads up that they're going to be reporting their final results after the rest of the state is done, I'm expecting another episode of whatever this is.
To clear, I'm not darkly hinting - I expect Milwaukee to count things up late, I expect that Milwaukee is 80% Democrat or higher, and I expect a similarly goofy looking curve to result. Republicans will look at this as obvious fraud, Democrats will look at it as a totally normal thing to happen with a large tranche of D votes dropping late at night, and it might be enough to push Evers and Barnes to victories. I don't really have a strong opinion on whether anything shady is actually happening, but I think it looks awful and should have been reformed as soon as the bizarre 2020 result happened. This isn't even difficult to do - nearby Dane County has almost as many absentee ballots, but counts them quickly because they don't centralize the process. No one familiar with Dane and Milwaukee Counties will be surprised that Dane's handling is fast and efficient while Milwaukee's is comically ridiculous and damages trust.
The 2020 election had quite a few actual irregularities in addition to the aesthetic I presented, such as a quarter million people doing an end-run around normal ID procedures by claiming to be indefinitely confined. The sitting governor has consistently vetoed bills targeted at reducing fraud; in some cases, I think the pretexts for doing so are incredibly thin and it mostly just comes down to oppositional defiance. Edit - In other cases, I think the bills are pretty stupid, I'm not saying these are all good measures.
If you want me to state my best guess, it's that I don't think there is very much actual vote fraud in Wisconsin. My reason for saying that I don't feel strongly about that position is that while I don't see great evidence for there being widespread vote fraud, I don't think it's great that we have a system that plausibly could be exploited and actual results that are pretty weird looking. In my dream world, we'd knock it off with the adoption of mass mail voting, or at least knock it off with the loophole that allows avoiding identification. Given the current procedures, I have no idea how you'd go about detecting many types of fraud; if I moved out of Wisconsin next year, it seems like I'd have zero trouble continuing to vote in Wisconsin and the governor opposes measures that would prevent that.
So again, I don't personally think there's actually widespread fraud, but I think we're going to have shaky optics and plausible reasons for Republicans to be pissed off.
I agree. I don't think that was actually legal and I'm highly skeptical that these people actually confined themselves to their homes indefinitely, but I will absolutely grant that this is both the mostly likely reason for the spike and could reasonably be tolerated in 2020. My complaint isn't that it was tolerated in 2020, but that this loophole wasn't closed in 2022, which gives the appearance of bad faith and allowing avoidance of IDs.
They actually did. There probably is some cogent explanation for the weird patterns there, but they are actually are weird!
Again though, I really don't need to relitigate 2020, I would just strongly prefer that we stop using a system that's more or less guaranteed to get results that have terrible optics when it's pretty easy to just not do that. The refusal to correct these sorts of things is actually more suspicious to me than anything that I see in 2020.
It was a recent switch. Note that the other two counties in the initial picture that were still counting (Brown and Kenosha) are also on the list of counties that switched. I'm sure there is a logistical reason that they wanted to do so and it probably simplified something, but it seems more like it should be, "we tried that and it worked poorly" than something that has to be maintained for historical reasons.
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