2020 Election Results 3: The Longest Episode of Democracy Ever

[Smee]

Pennsylvania narrowed to 65 000 votes, Erie county flipped blue. Come onnn PA, bring it home for Biden!

[GreyhoundFan]

 

3 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Is he still in the country?

 

I was wondering if Ivanka drugged him and locked him in the bunker.

[JoyfulSel]

1 minute ago, Smee said:

Pennsylvania narrowed to 65 000 votes, Erie county flipped blue. Come onnn PA, bring it home for Biden!

Georgia is now around 3,500 votes difference. Let's end this thing tonight!!!

[TuringMachine]

From NYT

Quote

A federal judge denied the Trump campaign’s request to stop vote counting in Philadelphia, but ordered officials to expand the number of people each side could have in the room

 

[thoughtful]

5 minutes ago, Destiny said:

He's been spewing this shit for MONTHS.

My brain, in the immortal voice of Daws Butler as Snagglepuss:

"Years, even!"

[GreyhoundFan]

This is a good point:

[Destiny]

3 minutes ago, thoughtful said:

My brain, in the immortal voice of Daws Butler as Snagglepuss:

"Years, even!"

Agreed. I was specifically talking about the election stuff, but you aren't wrong about that even. I stand corrected. 

Y'all, remember how I said I was going to be mad in 20 min? I am. Promises made, promises kept.

[formergothardite]

He seemed almost drugged. I didn't get the meltdown I feel like we deserve to see, but he does seem real, real down. Some part of him has to be realizing that the walls are closing in on him and he is fucked. 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[Giraffe]

34 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

He won't show up.

I bet you’re right. At this point I’ll be shocked if he attends the inauguration.

[Destiny]

Just now, formergothardite said:

He seemed almost drugged. I didn't get the meltdown I feel like we deserve to see, but he does seem real, real down. Some part of him has to be realizing that the walls are closing in on him and he is fucked. 

I think you're right. At this point, it's pretty much done unless there's a miracle of some sort. He's going to be booted out of the WH. I might have to go make a new avatar for the interim.

[thoughtful]

This is not guaranteed to be an accurate count, but here is a list that includes yet-to-be-counted votes in PA:

https://www.votespa.com/About-Elections/Pages/Counting-Dashboard.aspx

It shows over 74,000 still not counted in Philadelphia, plus some from Montgomery, Allegheny and Delaware counties, all likely to be for Biden, and Bucks and Erie, which could go either way.

Edited November 6, 2020 by thoughtful

[OldFadedStar]

Georgia is probably gonna flip to Biden within the hour!

 

Current numbers

Trump 2,446,850

Biden 2,443,364

Inching closer and closer

Edited November 6, 2020 by OldFadedStar
added numbers

[AmazonGrace]

 

[TuringMachine]

2 minutes ago, OldFadedStar said:

Georgia is probably gonna flip to Biden within the hour!

I know! I have been staring at NYT Georgia page for the last hour.

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

7 minutes ago, Giraffe said:

I bet you’re right. At this point I’ll be shocked if he attends the inauguration.

He has already said he won't attend if Biden wins.

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

From the WaPo: "I counted votes in Michigan. There’s no way to commit fraud."

Spoiler

I spent Election Day in a high school cafeteria, helping to count absentee ballots in Ann Arbor, Mich. I started at 7 a.m. and didn’t leave or have contact with the outside world until my shift ended 13 hours later. All of us either left our phones in our vehicles or checked the devices in at the door. Especially during an election this stressful, it was a relief to feel busy and useful and disconnected from the news — rather than anxious and paralyzed, endlessly scrolling for an update.

The next day, I saw the theory proliferating online that several ballots had “magically” surfaced in Michigan. At a counting center in Detroit, Trump supporters showed up and pounded on the windows and doors, demanding that the count be stopped and that they be let in. Rumors spread about other states, too, as commentators seized on mundane parts of the process as a sign of fraud — even things like some counties pausing the count overnight, to give poll workers some rest.

Those claims are totally detached from reality — from the painstaking, multilayered, tedious process of accounting for and tabulating every ballot. The count involves so many steps, so many layers of double-checking and supervision, that it would be virtually impossible to fake even a single ballot. It’s dangerous to suggest that anyone could fake enough ballots to change the result. From my experience, it’s also totally absurd.

From the moment I walked into the building, I was sequestered for the day. We couldn’t leave, other than to step outside and eat. (Sandwiches were provided for lunch and dinner.) We weren’t even allowed to go out to our cars. We learned only after we’d shown up who else would be on our voting board and what task we’d get for the day. No one could coordinate anything beforehand. My board had about seven people. Each of us was identified by our political party, so that each board could include a mix of Democrats and Republicans.

When we arrived in the morning, there were sealed bags of ballots, one for each of the three precincts assigned to our center. The city clerk had already checked that each person casting a ballot was registered to vote and that the identification number on their ballot and signature on the outer envelope matched the ones on record on the voter rolls. The clerk had also determined a total vote count and drawn up a list of ballots in that batch, and local police had watched the bags until our arrival. Precinct by precinct, we counted the number of ballots in the bags, making sure that matched the totals on the clerk’s list. Then we divided the ballots into stacks and began.

My job was at the front of the line: I took the outer envelope, checked again that it was signed and that the number on the outside matched the one on the ballot stub. Then I checked to ensure that the ballot hadn’t been erroneously assigned to the wrong precinct. I took the ballot out of its outer envelope. I tore off the ballot’s stub, which stuck out at the very top of the privacy sleeve, and set that aside. Eventually, I brought the pile of sleeved ballots over to the next station. Occasionally, a voter didn’t quite close the sleeve correctly, but even so, the process prevented me from getting a sense of how people voted. Once the ballot was out of its envelope, but still in its sleeve, and the stub has been torn off, the link between the voter’s name and how they voted is broken. The work was repetitive, but not especially mentally taxing — it was almost meditative.

At the next station, another volunteer took the ballot out of the privacy seal and made sure it was filled in correctly, in black or blue ink. Then they brought it to a tabulator, a high-speed, automated machine that processed ballots in batches of 50, outputting results automatically. If a ballot wasn’t filled in correctly — if the marks were in highlighter or something — then the ballot went to the duplicator table, staffed by one Democrat and one Republican. According to very strict rules, they copied over that ballot’s markings onto a fresh ballot, even if it contained mistakes (like voting for two presidential candidates instead of one). The original was kept as a record, and the fixed copy went to the tabulator to be scanned.

It would take a level of effort I can’t even comprehend to circumvent that process. The sheer volume of ballots, their exact ID numbers, the number of people involved who have never met each other and don’t have much opportunity to talk and don’t have their cellphones — all those layers add up and keep the process fair and the count accurate. Michigan also allows all political parties, as well as some nonpartisan groups, to each have one election challenger at the count. They walked around, taking notes. They could stand behind us and watch us work, and they could ask questions at any time about what we were doing and how we were doing it. We had about a dozen people circulating around the space, watching us all day. It was odd to feel that supervised, but I was glad to have them in the room. They would interrupt to ask things like “What are you doing now?” or “Can you explain that to me?” but the tone wasn’t confrontational. Things proceeded smoothly. Over 24 hours, Ann Arbor processed about 55,000 absentee votes, or 93 percent of the absentee ballots it had issued.

In the following days, it made me angry — angrier than I thought I would be — to see people dismiss all that work out of hand with no basis at all, or based on wild, concocted claims. So much work and care and attention go into ensuring that our elections run well. The cooked-up outrage, all those accusations or insinuations, also just felt dumb. It betrays a profound lack of knowledge about the process — a process that is completely knowable, if you take a moment to learn.

For those 13 hours that we counted our city’s ballots, it felt like a bubble of calm amid the country’s chaos. Across party lines, we were working together on something important. At lunch, still phone-less, we chatted about our jobs and our lives in the city and the first thing we would do when the coronavirus pandemic was over. We were all identified by our party registrations, but no one talked about whom they voted for. We participated in our democracy, and there was no ugliness about it.

The past four years have been so discouraging and divisive, and it has made a lot of Americans feel that our country’s institutions are totally broken. But this one, small, crucial thing actually does work. I wish more people could see that.

 

[DaisyD]

6 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

He has already said he won't attend if Biden wins.

Nobody wants him there anyway. Just put his shit on the front lawn. 

[thoughtful]

6 minutes ago, TuringMachine said:

I know! I have been staring at NYT Georgia page for the last hour.

I think I have the last 4 digits of those numbers memorized. When are you going to flip, GA? Will it help if I eat a peach?

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I love Anderson.

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[Cartmann99]

7 minutes ago, thoughtful said:

I think I have the last 4 digits of those numbers memorized. When are you going to flip, GA? Will it help if I eat a peach?

 

Try some boiled peanuts.

[GreyhoundFan]

Jake is totally out of give a fucks: