Sam (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
l33tminion) wrote2020-11-11 04:15 pm
l33tminion) wrote2020-11-11 04:15 pm
The Attempt
A few things about the election:
Joe Biden won a not-particularly-narrow victory in this election. It's not a landslide, but it's not 2000-close or even 2016-close. It's unsurprising, Trump's never had majority support, Biden led in the polls the whole time. Sampling/modeling errors may cause polls to get the margins wrong, but they don't cause Biden voters polled to just disappear. The result of mail ballots being counted second is also unsurprising.
Counting votes after election night is normal. States don't complete the count in the four hours or whatever after the polls close. Many states allow ballots cast and mailed on election day to be received by some slightly later date, and that's not new this year.
In Pennsylvania specifically, the question of whether a state court was able to extend that deadline from November 3 to November 6 is an interesting one, but if it wasn't, tossing a bunch of legitimately-cast ballots that were following the rules at the time of the election is maybe not a reasonable remedy. And even if it is, the result doesn't hinge on that.
Also not a reasonable remedy for anything Trump's campaign alleges in court: Tossing tens of thousands of ballots. Or, for that matter, completely tossing the election results of entire states.
The media does "call" elections, Republicans don't have amnesia about this in other years or, in fact, in this year in every election that they won. That doesn't cause the election result, sure, but it's also not normal to "play it out" when the election has clearly been lost, or to publicly entertain fantasies of appointing electors who don't reflect the result of the election.
This is fundamentally unlike the 2000 election because in the year 2000, it was unclear who won the election. Stopping a recount for lack of time is also not like stalling the count because your opponent will win if the votes are counted.
It's both laughable that this attempt will succeed in getting Trump a second term as President despite Biden winning the election and serious that Republicans are making clear that they'd be down for this sort of coup if they could make it work. Secretary Pompeo might be joking when he says, "There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration," it's the same "joke" Trump's made about accepting the result only if he wins. What it definitely is is trolling. It's historically significant that President Trump is America's first troll President, and that governance through trolling is standard practice in the administration. Haha but also what are you doing, you're the Secretary of State!
Joe Biden won a not-particularly-narrow victory in this election. It's not a landslide, but it's not 2000-close or even 2016-close. It's unsurprising, Trump's never had majority support, Biden led in the polls the whole time. Sampling/modeling errors may cause polls to get the margins wrong, but they don't cause Biden voters polled to just disappear. The result of mail ballots being counted second is also unsurprising.
Counting votes after election night is normal. States don't complete the count in the four hours or whatever after the polls close. Many states allow ballots cast and mailed on election day to be received by some slightly later date, and that's not new this year.
In Pennsylvania specifically, the question of whether a state court was able to extend that deadline from November 3 to November 6 is an interesting one, but if it wasn't, tossing a bunch of legitimately-cast ballots that were following the rules at the time of the election is maybe not a reasonable remedy. And even if it is, the result doesn't hinge on that.
Also not a reasonable remedy for anything Trump's campaign alleges in court: Tossing tens of thousands of ballots. Or, for that matter, completely tossing the election results of entire states.
The media does "call" elections, Republicans don't have amnesia about this in other years or, in fact, in this year in every election that they won. That doesn't cause the election result, sure, but it's also not normal to "play it out" when the election has clearly been lost, or to publicly entertain fantasies of appointing electors who don't reflect the result of the election.
This is fundamentally unlike the 2000 election because in the year 2000, it was unclear who won the election. Stopping a recount for lack of time is also not like stalling the count because your opponent will win if the votes are counted.
It's both laughable that this attempt will succeed in getting Trump a second term as President despite Biden winning the election and serious that Republicans are making clear that they'd be down for this sort of coup if they could make it work. Secretary Pompeo might be joking when he says, "There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration," it's the same "joke" Trump's made about accepting the result only if he wins. What it definitely is is trolling. It's historically significant that President Trump is America's first troll President, and that governance through trolling is standard practice in the administration. Haha but also what are you doing, you're the Secretary of State!
no subject
Talking with a friend on the Union committee, he was talking about the recent Contract Approval election, also a mail-in ballot. For money reasons, they went not with first-class postage, but with another class, probably in the bulk rate category.
The problem? It is not postmarked. Those that mailed their ballots "late" (I put that in scare-quotes for a reason) didn't have their votes counted.
What was late? Any ballot that the union didn't receive by the deadline, since without a postmark it was impossible to determine lateness any other way.
Washington went mail-only years ago; but we use the same postal category for ballots. No. Postmark.
While this could be clarified with a bit of legislation, the fact that (I hear, for I have been boycotting news for a few weeks for sanity) there are still hold-outs for stupid, this could become a Thing for future elections.
I do hope it is not.
no subject
Maybe less in Washington, but in a lot of states a lot of voters got a first taste of the convenience of mail voting, and Republicans do not want convenient voting. A lot of people saw that their states could handle expanded access to mail-in voting just fine! Other states (like Pennsylvania, which could have had a pretty complete count done by election day) saw that they could have handled it fine if the Republican state government didn't intentionally sabotage it.