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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.
I read /u/walterodim as saying something like “Whether or not anything shady is happening, it’s going to look like it is. My point is that this appearance is bad in itself. However, I don’t want to get sidetracked into an object-level debate about whether anything actually shady is happening, so I’ll refrain from expressing a view on this” (probably because they have neither time nor inclination, something I can empathise with).
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