This is why I believe the only option for the Democrats, should they somehow still win, is to go all out. Biden and team need to realize this is a war, and approach things that way. Pack the courts. Impeach judges, including at lower levels like the odious Andrew Hanen. Pass strong civil rights and voting rights laws. All of it needs to be done.
Supreme Court of Texas rejects challenge to drive-through voting.
No reasons given.
In a same world that would be good news. The problem is that the Texas Supreme Court doesn’t get to make the final call. There are only three people who have any say in whether or not those votes will count. Those are US district judge Andrew Hanen and SCOTUS justices Gorsuch and Roberts. I should probably not even include judge Hanen since it’s almost guaranteed he will order the votes thrown out. Basically Gorsuch and Roberts are the only ones whose vote I’m not entirely sure of. My guess is that they lean Trump at this point. We’ll find out tomorrow or Tuesday.
My only hope is that Roberts and maybe Kavanaugh are just fine with measures that restrict the ability of people to vote, but are wary of the political blowback of throwing out votes that were cast in full compliance with the rules as they stood at the time.
Kavanaugh already showed his leanings with the Wisconsin ruling. Gorsuch might be willing to side with allowing the votes to count. I doubt we will see a 5-4 ruling for throwing the votes out. If both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh side with throwing the votes out, Roberts will join them in the hopes that a 6-3 ruling will somehow look better than a 5-4 ruling.
If those 127,000 votes are struck out, will those voters be eligible to vote again on Tuesday?
This same discussion is taking place across several threads. 
If anyone thinks that Republicans would try to nix an eighth of a million votes from just a single county, well… of course they would. If there’s one thing that a Republican fears it’s Democracy. And if there’s a second, it’s honor.
We’re now up to 93 million votes cast - about 1/3 in person and rest mail-in.
Keep 'em coming!
Yes, I’ve been posting totals from this site in this thread.
https://electproject.github.io/Early-Vote-2020G/index.html
Last updated: 11/01/2020 04:22 PM Eastern Time
Total Early Votes: 93,254,861 • In-Person Votes: 34,045,136 • Mail Ballots Returned: 59,209,725 • Mail Ballots Outstanding: 32,001,215
They ‘need’ to do that yes, but they won’t. The democratic party is still run by democrats who politically came of age in the 80s. The jump in authoritarianism is actually somewhat recent. I don’t know when exactly it started but I recently saw a study showing even from 2000 to 2020 there was a huge gap in anti-democracy behavior from the GOP.
Sadly it probably won’t happen until Gen X and younger take over the democratic party. Older democrats want to delude themselves that the GOP is a patriotic partner party, when younger people have seen how the GOP is an anti-democracy, neofascist, white nationalist party.
On that note, what do we know of the potential intake for the next Congress? I guess we won’t know until Wednesday, but will there be more of the likes of AOC?
Maybe it’s a false hope on my part, but I think that there’s a difference in perception that political justices like Robert and Kavanaugh would be sensitive to between the Court limiting opportunities to vote or insisting on strict adherence to pre-pandemic rules, and throwing out the votes of voters who did everything by the book.
And I could see them throwing this one Harris County’s way to be able to point to a “pro voter” ruling when they make other post-election rulings that reject ballots in “tipping point” swing states – e.g. “Sure we disqualified late arriving ballots in PA that swung the election to Trump, but remember how we reaffirmed those votes in Texas? See how even handed we are?”
I read an article a awhile ago that suggested Roberts’ perspective on election disputes is that he always favours state election officials over federal supervision. If that is a reliable indicator, it suggests he would rule in favour of the County here, because the local elections officials came up with the drive-through voting mechanism, under existing provisions of Texas state law.
https://electproject.github.io/Early-Vote-2020G/index.html
Last updated: 11/02/2020 01:24 AM Eastern Time
Total Early Votes: 94,006,161 • In-Person Votes: 34,045,137 • Mail Ballots Returned: 59,961,024 • Mail Ballots Outstanding: 31,385,941
Last updated: 11/02/2020 09:41 AM Eastern Time
Total Early Votes: 95,027,832 • In-Person Votes: 34,576,166 • Mail Ballots Returned: 60,451,666 • Mail Ballots Outstanding: 30,898,117
I will be interested in seeing a time series of early votes once this is all over. I’m not sure where to find those data though.
You could try emailing the professor who’s running that site, but I suspect he’s probably too busy right now to answer. I looked around but could not find a graph of this data.
Last updated: 11/02/2020 10:29 AM Eastern Time
Total Early Votes: 95,365,308 • In-Person Votes: 34,880,970 • Mail Ballots Returned: 60,484,338 • Mail Ballots Outstanding: 30,873,672
The number of Mail Ballots Outstanding is probably way too high. Professor McDonald discusses this in his Sunday Analysis for today. There’s several factors that contribute to this including ballots in transit and those received but not reported yet. He concludes “I believe on balance that there are more returned ballots than reflected in my tracking. How many, I cannot say.”
Could it also be people who have opted to wait until election day to drop them off by hand?
I haven’t seen too much discussion about how (apparently) high voter participation will impact the polling results. I assume that current polls are adjusted by historical trends in voter patterns. If the number of votes is atypical that’s gotta’ have some impact on the accuracy of the polls, right?