Two, three years. Somthin.
In fact, some of that time was just about waiting. Some of those uncounted votes are ones where the voter has time to cure a deficiency by a certain time. The votes go uncounted until the deficiency is cured, or the deadline passes. In the case of provisional ballots, they can need individual attention, like verifying that the person did not cast another kind of ballot, etc. It always takes awhile to do. It’s just that normally no one’s waiting on those results.
According to Reuters, Trump is telling “allies” that he’ll run again 2024. So the good news is, he does seem to know he’s leaving. Bad news is, I expect he will try to have a government-in-exile kind of thing, where he’s going to keep saying he didn’t lose, and the whole “Biden’s not my president” thing takes on an uglier cast. Also, the various efforts to prosecute him will appear more political, at least to his followers and “low information voters.”
Note, I’m British, and don’t fully understand the US electoral system.
Question, just for clarification, why is the count taking so long? Is it because they are still waiting for some absentee ballots to arrive? Are they still counting the ballots cast on the day?
I also don’t understand it one bit. So there are 8823 votes to count, and this takes the whole weekend? I could do it on my own in what, five hours? Doesn’t make a lick of sense.
Too late to edit: in some states, workers even go to voters’ houses to help them cure deficient ballots. Again, these last categories are the most time consuming. They are the ballots that require something more – each of them, before they can be counted.
Each state has its own way of doing things. There are ballots cast in-person and ballots mailed in. Some states accept postal ballots up to a week later if they were postmarked by election day. Some ballots are “provisional” for various reasons and have to be checked. Some ballots were filled out in a potentially ambiguous way and may have to be “cured”. And everything has to be observed and tallied and doublechecked.
It’s a mess, but when no one is actively fucking with the system it usually works reasonably well.
In California, it’s 17 days. But no one cares because we aren’t a swing state.
The 5507 provisional ballots need to be handled individually. If they are validated, they move to the “ready for tabulation” pile. For example, this morning Pima County had thousands of provisionals and nothing “ready for tabulation”. Now they have no provisionals left and 3639 “ready for tabulation”.
My problem is that Georgia is basically done counting. Other states get called, even where there might be recounts. But no one’s calling Georgia, presumably until 11/20.
And that just allows Trump and his posse to say “Well, clearly the election’s still ongoing, so Biden’s not President-Elect yet.”
From 538:
Georgia: With almost all of the vote counted, Biden is up here by 14,057 votes, or 0.3 percentage points. The state has announced that, as part of a routine audit of the results, it will take the unusual step of recounting the entire presidential race by hand before results are certified on Nov. 20.
AP and Decision Desk have called other states with thinner margins.
(AP’s comment section on their Georgia totals is full of people just writing “CALL IT!”)
They’re not calling Georgia because they’re in the process of re-counting Georgia. By hand. That’s likely to take a while.
I prefer the way it’s done in the UK.
All postal ballots must arrive on or before polling day.
No votes can be corrected once they are made. If it is unclear, or if it breaks the rules, then it is put in the “doubtful votes” pile. Usually the number of doubtful votes is very small. The Returning Officer is the official who announces the final vote count. His responsibilities include reviewing the doubtful votes. He will decide to either accept the vote as for a particular candidate, or to reject it as a “spoiled paper”. It is only on very rare occasions that his decision alters the outcome.
I think what many people unfamiliar with the process fail to understand about the US election process is just how many damn things we vote for at the same time. I believe there were at least 20 different positions I could have voted people for, plus 4 ballot proposals. Tabulating all that data is not as simple as tabulating one race for MP.
Yup. I had 22 races to research and two ballot proposals.
One can do one’s own projection, though. As I see it, Biden is extremely likely to pick up Arizona (11) and Georgia (16) while Trump gets NC (15).
If that all pans out, it ends up Biden 306 to Trump 232. Pretty sure that’s where it’s going to end up. What the Orange Peril would call a “landslide victory” if it was the other way around. By the time this is formally settled, though, the orange one will be either permanently at Mar-a-Lago or else in Argentina or Moscow.
Do your prime ministers, and their lackeys, tend to cripple the postal service weeks before an election?
Hell, no.
We Americans would have given the same answer to that question until just a few months ago.
One thing we can count on is that the American public has the attention span of a gnat. So unless Agent Orange can find a way to get the huge amount of free airtime/bandwidth he’s had consistently for the past 4-5 years, this is going to be a heavy lift. And frankly I’m not seeing it because he will be Not News fairly soon. He got publicity because other people/orgs gave it to him. That’s going to happen a whole lot less very soon because there will be other, newer things to fill the gap. Harping on the same thing for 4 years isn’t going to work - even fans will get tired of it.
Not only that, he is going to soon suffer a severe cash crunch and will be very busy fighting against the many legal entanglements awaiting him.
I loathe Mike Pence, but I wonder how he’s feeling to learn that his big plans to run in 2024 have been kicked to the curb by his owner. I’m a horrid person. It makes me smile to imagine it.