Yeah, I think it’s actually even worse that. They have actually even been rewarded for their appeasement of Trump by being voted back into power. Sometimes it is difficult to make such a claim as it requires personal punishment over a collective failure, but with the likes of Graham and Collins, these are people who are directly responsible.
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Presumably just the misunderstanding between ‘cast’ and ‘count’? I do find it odd that you can post your vote before the election and it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t arrive ‘in time’. Why is that? Why aren’t all postal ballots supposed to be received as returned (not just sent) by the day of the Election?
Ha…my mind wanders unerringly into the gutter.
Biden achieved an absolutely top result, the highest ever in 120 years if I got that right. One can actually only be amazed that Trump managed to mobilize so many supporters anyway. That actually just shows how deeply divided that country is and that will not just magically dissappear overnight. His presidency was not a slip-up, or just a protest. You can see that absolutely clearly now. And unfortunately you have to come to terms with that and finally accept it at some point.
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There are two schools of thought:
- If election day is x, then if you choose to mail in your ballot it has to get there by date x
- If election day is x, then all events up until date x are relevant and you need to give people who have to vote by mail the opportunity to include those events in their decision. Ergo, you have to give a grace period for it to arrive after election day.
I think both have merit and different states have favored a different interpretation. Florida takes stance 1, but I think we are the outlier.
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Agreed.
I fear for the future. I wish the US would be inconsequential to the rest of the world, but sadly this is absolutely not so. I think there will be geopolitical realignment in the coming years. That’s what I fear anyway. The rest of the world have now seen that Americans are okay with Trump. These 4 years have been a waiting game for many government, hoping that the hell would be over in 2020. Everybody must make new calculuses now. It is now likely that the Republicans will win in 2024 with a similar authoritarian that is just a bit less ridiculous and incompetent. And competent Right Wing authoritarians are dangerous like hell, as my Russian friends would nod in agreement to.
It also needs to reflect logistical difficulty, less so now. US servicemen in the Pacific were allowed to present their ballots to the USPS right up to election day in 1944. It would take weeks to get a letter from some of those islands back to the US and to their home states.
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Disagree concerning the top result. Sure, they had higher election attendance, but if Trump, an epic disaster that will be compared to Caligula in the future, does not make them have a voter turnout of 75% (as far as I know, it is still not 75%, which should be an absoutely minimum with Trump)), then I don’t think people should say nice things about their voter turnout. It is low, dangerously low for having seen Trump rule for 4 years. And a narrow win for Biden isn’t a top result. Normally, it would be against an incumbent, but this was Trump and it should be different due to Trump, but it is only narrowly so. Far from good enough.
Agree with the rest you say though, which is sad, but so it is.
National vote % is widening, 3% and climbing for Biden. Likely to end up around +4. Hue and cry that pollsters are wildly off seems overblown. Sure, some were. Some are systematically partisan. But average going in was somewhere around Biden +7, with +/- 3. That is just mediocre, not wildly off
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Oh come on, come on. Enough suspense and whatnot. Now give us some updates.
how long until Nevada posts results? It’s today at some point.
John Curtice and other Poll specialists appear to agree with you on the polls not being as wild as people were claiming earlier.
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Pennsylvania has started moving again. 136k diff now. Previously it was 164k
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A taste of what is to come.
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Comparison’s of the US turn out against that of other countries should not be made without acknowledgment of just how fucking useless our system is and how much more difficult it is to cast a vote in many parts of the country. The reality is that in a pandemic that had reached peak levels, Biden achieved a greater number of votes than anyone had ever received in history, a number significantly over recent years.
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According to NYT
Georgia is holding a news conference now
— Nevada plans to release new totals at noon Eastern
— Arizona’s largest county will have an update at 9 p.m. Eastern
Can someone confirm what these times would be for UK/Euro time zone 
I live in New York, so my vote for pres doesn’t really matter either. The state is painted blue before elections begin, so why bother voting?
(I vote- but looking at voter turnout #s and making a statement about Americans can be tough to do)[quote=“Limiescouse, post:1271, topic:905, full:true”]
Comparison’s of the US turn out against that of other countries should not be made without acknowledgment of just how fucking useless our system is and how much more difficult it is to cast a vote in many parts of the country. The reality is that in a pandemic that had reached peak levels, Biden achieved a greater number of votes than anyone had ever received in history, a number significantly over recent years.
[/quote]
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One of the common arguments is that the general public will criticize a poll that was the wrong side of 50-50 even if in absolute terms it was really close, but will ignore a poll that got it “right” despite a large absolute miss in the point estimates. For instance, no one ever mentioned the 2012 polls because they “predicted Obama would win” but they missed by a greater margin than they did in the much criticized 2016 cycle. This year, the criticisms are mostly the exact opposite of that (“Sure, you got Wisconsin right, but you were way off”) which is in many ways a more reasonable argument* but definitely appears that in many cases it is a baked in criticism that people now piss on the polls no matter what.
*needs to be acknowledged that the most intense criticism of polling misses came when votes were still very preliminary, which further reinforces the idea that they are reflexive rather than based on a strong analysis.
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@jgw_geneseo agreed. I don’t know how anyone can watch election night at think it absurd how votes in only about 10 states actually count.
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