The significant difference between Australian PM-knifing and US faithless electors is that when Australian MPs punt a sitting prime-minister, they appoint a replacement that’s always of the same party. And since Australian political parties have much more party unity than US ones do, this makes it a far less significant or heated issue - not to mention the fact that we the electorate didn’t choose who was going to be Party Figurehead in the first place so, eh, whatever.
As a rusted-on lefty and a political tragic, I don’t remember anyone I know personally who was actually outraged by Gillard replacing Rudd. I do remember a lot of political commentators telling me I ought to be outraged, and that the Australian electorate Doesn’t Like That Kind Of Thing. I would have been pretty bloody outraged if after Labor winning the election, a bunch of bozos from Coalition states had swept in and said “you know what? Tony Abbot’s going to form this government” - which is much more like the US faithless elector situation.
Hmmm … I’ve just been out of the house for an hour or so and it seems that both PA and GA have considerably tightened. Someone else mentioned that AZ has, too, but I don’t remember previous numbers. Perhaps this has already been mentioned, but PA right now has Biden leading by just over 15K votes (0.2%) and GA has him leading by just 1448. Am I missing something that makes this not so bad? Both are in recount territory, and GA has already said they will recount.
Linky? I don’t doubt you, but a quick google for “allegheny county ballot error” gives a lot of references to about 30K ballots that were sent out in error back in October (for the wrong precinct or something, and supposedly fixed).
Wow!
In the Political Geography course I’m currently teaching, we just finished the unit on the “US elections geographies”, and are about to start “Indigenous territorialities.” I’ll use this map to make the segue!
Someone talk me down from the ledge. On the PA Secretary of State page it shows provisional ballots so far at 969 Trump vs. 304 Biden. Pretty sure a big chunk of those are from Cambria County and are close to their in-person vote ratio. Please tell me that 100k provisional ballots are going to follow the in-person vote ratios in their respective counties…
The issue with PA is that the State Supreme Court, not the Legislature, okayed expanding the post-election deadline. States which already had such grace periods should not be affected — although with this malAdministration, who knows what they’d try?
The issue isn’t so much that states allow ballots that arrive late to be counted, but that the PA legislature does not codify this for PA (the 3-day cutoff was imposed by a judge, not the legislature). Other states have laws on the books already that say “will count if postmarked, and received by x days after” or whatever.
This time around, with mail delays, someone might have sent something a few days in advance and it did not arrive due to no fault of the sender.
As Trump and his toadies have proven time and time again, they don’t care about what is right and moral, they care about manipulating the system for their own good, including suppression of potentially opposing votes through any legal or quasi-legal means they can.
Excellent. If you want access to the originals that I used, you can find the tribal lands map (including a hi-res PDF) here: https://www3.epa.gov/region9/air/maps/az_tribe.html
and the updated AZ election map here:
Hopefully, it’s not too off-topic. I’d be interested. Al Gore was on election coverage last night, talking about his close race with Bush and how he felt about it. If the race gets really close, Biden might be in the same situation. Why would a recount not possibly go in his favor?
There is a traditional reluctance for the courts to invalidate ballots which were cast in accordance with the rules at the time they were cast, even if the rule is invalidated. There was an issue with a court in NC (I think) that waived the witness signature requirement on mail-in ballots. This was overturned at a higher court (not sure if the SC) but ballots that were sent unwitnessed during the period before the requirement was overturned were still ruled to be valid, as long as they were postmarked within a certain number of days (3?) after the original decision was overturned.
I love Raw Story for the incendiary headlines they come up with, not to mention the Recommended Daily Diet of Recreational Outrage they so reliably serve up!
Im sorry, so much news…I had two stories mixed up.
The ballot misprint and transfer happened in Wisconsin, a county in the Green Bay suburbs. And they used the National Guard - working in pairs- to transfer the votes.
The story is the first update at this link, .
It gave the Trump trolls plenty of good video of “poll workers creating ballots, though.
I think I can answer this briefly yet fully enough. The major-by-far fuck-up in Florida 2000 was that butterfly ballot clusterfuck, which was a systematic – that is, very one-sided – error that delivered more votes for Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan in Palm Beach County than there were registered Reform Party voters there, widely suspected of having come in error at the expense of Al Gore. These were votes that no amount of recounting could have ever recovered.
OTOH, the recounts focused on hanging chads and other miscellaneous ballot boo-boos, which I assume were highly random with respect to party rather than systematic or biased for or against any particular candidate. Thus, every vote changed in the recount could equally likely have been toward Bush or toward Gore. Thus, they should have statistically balanced each other more-or-less. The actual change in votes would hardly likely have overcome the systematic butterfly blunder, and in fact at 537 votes changed did not come even close.
