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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   18882 thread views

USA Election Day 2022 Megathread

Tuesday November 8, 2022 is Election Day in the United States of America. In addition to Congressional "midterms" at the federal level, many state governors and other more local offices are up for grabs. Given how things shook out over Election Day 2020, things could get a little crazy.

...or, perhaps, not! But here's the Megathread for if they do. Talk about your local concerns, your national predictions, your suspicions re: election fraud and interference, how you plan to vote, anything election related is welcome here. Culture War thread rules apply, with the addition of Small-Scale Questions and election-related "Bare Links" allowed in this thread only (unfortunately, there will not be a subthread repository due to current technical limitations).

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I'm going to make a complaint/point I've made before about the way Nate Silver/FiveThirtyEight handle their election prediction models and how they display the data.

The models they use are subject to pretty large swings:

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2022-election-forecast/senate/?cid=rrpromo

There's some irony that their Senate projection odds have now swung back to where they were back when they first unleashed their model.

It was even worse when it came to Trump's election.

I get that their claim is "we're only predicting what would happen if the elections were held today, we're not actually projecting a winner in the future!" But then what is really the point? Okay, its an interesting metric, but if by your own admission it is subject to massive future uncertainty, shouldn't you reflect that in how you display the data? What are people supposed to use this info for if it isn't accurate enough to guide their actual behavior?

My personal thought is that the model should have another bar on it that tracks their actual confidence in their model's outcome, with confidence increasing as election day approaches.

Nassim Taleb and Silver got into it back in 2018 on this topic, nicely summarized here:

https://towardsdatascience.com/why-you-should-care-about-the-nate-silver-vs-nassim-taleb-twitter-war-a581dce1f5fc

If the issue is, indeed, that there are massive amounts of 'undecided' voters early in the process and there are potential black swan-esque events that can swing the outcome unexpectedly, then surely, SURELY that should be a factor that is displayed prominently alongside your otherwise straightforward election poll aggregations?

"we're only predicting what would happen if the elections were held today, we're not actually projecting a winner in the future!"

I find this quote somewhat interesting because even though it's nominally election day today, many votes were cast early or absentee already. I voted last week. No information coming out over the weekend could have changed my ballot. I wonder if the current generation of models account for this at all.

Early or absentee voting by mail is insane ... I don't know how both voting integrity and voting anonymity could be protected.

And even the one in person is bizarre. You lock your vote and can't change your opinion while the campaign is running - what is the point in that.

Insofar as voting early is a conscious, voluntary decision then I would say we can expect the person casting the early vote to have concluded that they have seen enough to make up their mind and that (almost) nothing would change it, so they accept that they can't alter their vote once submitted.

For me, though, I get some extra utility from physically seeing my ballot deposited in a box on the day of the election. Genuinely hard for me to accept the idea that my ballot could sit in a mailroom or 'secure' box somewhere for more than a few hours, and still believe it couldn't have been tampered with.

Why not?

Consider a double-envelope system. Poll workers tick each return address off against registration rolls, then open it and extract the blank, inner envelope. These are passed en masse to a second set of workers/machines who open them and tally the actual votes. The first group sees no votes; the second sees no personal information.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure some county does a stupid implementation. But it’s definitely a solvable problem, and a longstanding one.

It's fairly predictable which neighbourhoods vote for whom. The return address is plenty of information on its own. A rogue mailman could make the votes disappear before they even formally make it into the system.

On top of that, even normal letters get lost or delayed in the mail all the time. It doesn't even need to be malice. If there were only postal votes, pure standard negligence operating procedure would likely cause a fair bit of difference all on its own.

I've often wondered why we don't see targeted ballot drop box spoilage.

Pour gasoline in the drop boxes in the right neighborhoods and you could tilt the election.

There are plenty of folks that are happy to commit arson and vandalism to demonstrate their rage against society, why wouldn't they do it in a way that yields results?

It does happen on occasion but it tends to be mentally ill schizos rather than any serious attempt to delegitimize the process

https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/fire-set-to-ballot-drop-box-in-bostons-copley-square-disgrace-to-democracy/2218074/

Also just post office workers being as lazy as possible.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-nj/pr/postal-employee-admits-dumping-mail-including-election-ballots-sent-west-orange-residents

How do you prevent a wife ticking a box she is not keen on while her husband is watching over her shoulder? That is also what the voting booth prevents.

I have old roommates voting ballots at home. Didn’t use them but seems like some issues there.

Fair point, it does allow coercion.

You lock your vote and can't change your opinion while the campaign is running - what is the point in that.

Convenience, and it seems fine if you've already decided on the election. In my city, there was an incident last week where a brain-damaged man dressed up as Hitler for Halloween because he thought it was funny and didn't understand why others would be offended. I would vote for RetardedHitler over the current governor, so I don't actually need further information on the candidates to determine who I'd vote for.

On the Fivethirtyeight podcast, Nate Silver stated that pretty much all polling released over the weekend is just pollsters "herding" to try to look better at the last moment and should be treated as having basically zero additional predictive validity. He sounds frustrated by the whole thing, really.

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