Here’s an example I’ve come across: -1 to a state’s polls for a GOP secretary of state, -1 for each GOP legislative branch, and -2 for a GOP governor.
Seems pretty harsh, eh? Even if Biden doesn’t outright lose even by this scheme, it certainly throws things into doubt.
How would you do it if forced?
Hard to predict what suppression will happen and how it will play out. There are so many ways to do it, in so many places, so many polling places shut down, so much squabbling over how many drop boxes there can be and where and when the ballots can be counted, so much litigation in the courts, and on and on . . .
Just today in the headlines, somewhere in California someone set a ballot drop box on fire. Chalk that up to voter suppression of a kind. Now they have to sift through the ashes and see if anything is recoverable there, and try to contact voters whose ballots might have been lost.
From what I’ve seen and heard these past few days, I would subtract the following from Biden’s average of highly accurate recent (and upcoming) polls:
GEORGIA - 4%
TEXAS - 4%
PENNSYLVANIA - 3%
ARIZONA, NORTH CAROLINA, OHIO, WISCONSIN, FLORIDA, NEVADA:1% each
Which means Biden loses Texas (but probably would have anyway); he loses Georgia, and maybe Ohio and North Carolina (but there’s a very good chance he would have otherwise won them); Pennsylvania becomes a nail-biter, rather than a clear Biden win (but Biden probably wins it, anyway); and he wins Florida, Wisconsin, and Nevada, as expected, though Florida is a lot closer than it should have been.
In other words, it reduces Biden’s overall chances of winning from about 90% to about 75%.
The biggest travesty is in Georgia, but it’s unlikely (though not impossible) that that ends up being the crucial state.
Wow. I bet the Texas authorities cite this as a reason to continue their limiting the number of ballot drop boxes. “See? More boxes leads to more vulnerabilities! Even though WE caused the very few examples of such vulnerabilities!” Exactly like the “bigger” (non)-issue of mail-in ballot fraud.
There’s no way I know of to factor it in. I think the pollsters try to do it by differentiating between all respondents and likely voters, the latter of which are more determined to vote. A lot of vote suppression is intended to sow doubts about the ability of vote before someone leaves their house to vote in the first place. That is to say, if someone is leading in the polls by 2%, I wouldn’t expect voter suppression to impact people who actually voted on election day (or through the mail) in favor of one candidate; rather, I’d expect that to be more evident in polling that indicates things like voter intent to show up at the polls, voter enthusiasm, etc.
I don’t know how that gets factored statistically, but that’s why when I look at a site like 270towin or 538 and see polling averages giving Biden a 1-2% lead in states like Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, or Georgia, I avoid the thought of Biden having an advantage in those states because they’ve been more red than blue over the years (maybe less so in NC). Anything less than a 4% lead in states where republicans have won statewide office consistently is not a safe lead.
A lot of people are motivated to vote against Trump this year; the question is how many people are motivated to vote for Trump, and are we under-counting them. It’s entirely possible that we are. But that leads to another question, which is whether a sudden and surprising Trump surge on election day would be greater than the surge against him, which could be no less surprising.