Charlamagne has a good point:
And Sham has the second fastest time in the Kentucky Derby – in the same race where Secretariat set the record.* It’s called first past the post for a reason.
*and went on to win the Triple Crown after beating Sham again in The Preakness then setting a record that will likely never be broken in The Belmont.
If someone you know advocates for hand counting ballots (like Trump!), feel free to disregard any other opinions they may have because they’re not a serious person.
Signed,
a retired accountant
Chris Cillizza’s latest.
Yep, there’s been a handful of us that have been pushing back on the “oh, she’ll win by 400+ EV’s easy” and “he’s in an unrecoverable tailspin and it’s all over now, pass me a cigar” going back to mid-fucking-August, and we’ve been ignored, dismissed, “Yeah-but”-ed, and handwaved away.
Looks like not much has changed - speedscrolling through 100 unread posts still kind of has a feel of “why do you need the rest of us here if you’ve got your mind (and a predetermined narrative) made up already?”.
So here’s one to play “devil’s advocate” - this makes me sad as hell, but there are reports that even her own people are starting to sense that she’s going to lose to the fucking scumbag.
That fact is the plurality of Americans are fascists and another chunk are too disengaged to care. It’s why America is collapsing.
So how are mail-in ballots counted?
If I’m not understanding something, please fight my ignorance.
I thought that the counting works like this:
- At the end of election day, they close the door of the polling place, and the workers in each precinct open up the voting machines (whether they are the old-fashioned mechanical machines, or the newer electronic ones)…and write down the totals.
- Then, they take out the boxes of early mail-in ballots, and check-- by hand–the name on each envelope versus the list of names of voters who used the machine that day, (to disqualify any ballot which would be voting twice.)
- Then, they open- by hand- each early mail-in vote, and write down ,by hand, “plus one” for each candidate.
- Then they add up, by hand, all the totals.
What is wrong with this? Counting all ballots at the same time on election night seems fair to me.
Early counting , weeks in advance, could be a tactic for improper influencing of the election. If the early results are leaked to the public, many people might be discouraged from voting, thinking “it’s no use, my candidate is too far behind”, or vice-versa “my candidate is so far ahead, my vote is unnecessary, so I can skip standing in line after work and go home to my kids.”
This kind of stuff is too tenuous … and honestly, to me, feels like fiction. Can’t trust much media these days. All this pro-Trump stuff lately feels like a manufactured effort.
Maybe I’m being dense but I don’t understand why Trump voters going early or late makes a difference. If a Trump voter votes early, that just means that he or she can’t and won’t cast a ballot on Election Day. So it evens out.
If Trump somehow gets big turnout in early voting and Election Day itself as well, then that’s trouble for Harris. But I don’t see how or why his turnout would be any higher than it was in 2020.
Pennsylvania is AFAIK unusual in that counting mail ballots does not start until the morning of Election Day, resulting in a slow count. Your plan might result in another day of delay, or at least half day. And delivering paper ballots, received in the county seat, days or weeks earlier, to each individual polling place, could lead to mix-ups. We were correct to stop doing that.
As for leaks with early counting, it does not tell you much because early voters are not the same as same day voters,
I used to think that taking many days to count ballots was fine, but in the Trump era taking too long would reduce legitimacy.
I hope you are wrong, but I’ve been thinking along these lines more every day.
To answer the OP directly, I don’t see how Trump can lose at this point. The polls are all a statistical tie and his voters are notoriously under-polled. I know that I would never admit to voting for him to a 3rd party. I think that Harris likely wins the popular vote but that Trump wins most of the battleground states and sweeps to an easy EC victory.
I pray that I’m wrong.
I can only speak for my county here in Maryland, where I am an election judge. We use scanners here to tabulate vote counts, precinct workers are never privy to the actual voting results until they’re published by the Board of Elections. Flash cards from the scanners and the ballots are transported to the county board.
Mail in ballots and provisional ballots, once cleared by board employees, are reviewed for spoilage (extracurricular marks, overvoting, etc.) and then fed into the scanner for tabulation. This process takes place at board HQ post-election.
Maybe a handful of exceptions are manually added to the vote totals but that’s it.
I’ll be generous and say the “Meh, whatever” faction may be the true plurality, but the Hard Righties just don’t need to pick up as many of them to make it past the post.
One way to think about it: Would Donald Trump, quickly reading through this thread, say the SDMB should be shut down? Yes.
Would the plurality of Americans say that? No way.
Or — how would the idea of shutting down the big networks - whose supposed licenses DJT threatens — poll? Poorly.
The portion who would deport the Dreamers is disturbing, but it still is not a plurality:
Trump can win because voters are not convinced he is anything like a fascist.
The vast majority of Americans would say “What’s the Straight Dope message Board?” 
I did have some petitioners come by my house in September asking me to sign in support of hand counting ballots. The nice lady reacted as though I was out of my gourd for telling her I had no interest in signing.
That, plus the almost unlimited power of the presidency, bolstered even further by the recent Supreme Court immunity ruling, makes any side discussion of Democratic downballot wins completely irrelevant, IMHO. If Trump wins, it will be a very dark day for America with consequences that are almost unimaginable.
I would surmise that pollsters have corrected heavily for their pro-Democratic bias in 2016 and 2020 and that the polls we’re seeing today are not only accurate but perhaps even skewed in favor of Trump.
I expect Trump to perform noticeably worse on Election Night than what the polls would suggest.
This is my take as well.