Has anyone ever had Tied electoral votes?
I think 2000 was the closest to a tie 271 Bush 266 Gore There were other races where nobody had 50% or more and the house settled the race.
As the above clip from Hamilton is meant to illustrate, the election of 1800 ended in an electoral tie between Jefferson and Burr. Under the Constitution at the time, the man who won the most electoral votes became president and the one in second-place became Vice President. This threw the decision to the House of Representatives, where Alexander Hamilton eventually convinced enough Federalists to support Jefferson to give him the Presidency.
Almost all states will be called on Election Night.
They don’t announce any vote totals until all precincts are closed. Historically, they have done so before all absentee ballots, but that is because it was pretty rare for absentee ballots to change the result. In fact, usually, as the precincts are reporting in, the absentee ballots are already a part of the count.
With the knowledge that the absentee ballots make up the bulk of the votes, I would expect responsible states to hold off until they have counted them.
The difference is, is it would be like knowing that it was a novelty ticket, but getting excited about winning anyway, and being unbearably disappointed when you try to cash what you knew was a fraudulent ticket.
Even as pessimistic as I am, I really think there will be a little less election night drama than this, but I do think that PA will be a source of stress, and perhaps a few other states (WI, FL, and MI) as well.
How will he “get to 400EVs to begin with”? You don’t get any EV’s until the vote is completely counted and certified. Now then–will there be media reporting that a state has been decided even before all the ballots have been counted? Of course. That happens every election.
But I assume that responsible media don’t project victory in a given a state until enough votes have been counted to mathematically (almost) insure a winner. For example, when candidate A gets ahead of candidate B by more votes than are left to be counted. I assume election projections account for uncounted mail-in and other ballots in their formula.
So who will talk about EV’s before enough votes have been counted? FOX News? I guess maybe their pundits will but I think the news-side is still largely responsible aren’t they? Anyway… sure. Anyone can standup and broadcast that a candidate has won a state but unless enough votes are counted to reasonable make that announcement, everyone else would know they’re an idiot.
In 2012, Fox News–yes Fox News–called Ohio for Obama even though in the early tallies Romney was leading. Fox knew that the vote from Cleveland hadn’t come in yet and was going to overwhelm that early lead. The head of the DNC (can’t come up with his name now) just about blew a gasket and insisted on going down to the statistics office of Fox to berate them. But of course they were right. So apparently Fox News actually understands this business. Now how they will deal with the absentee ballots is a different matter since they have little experience there.
Some states have this mail ballot down to a routine and some really screwed it up during the primaries. I can only hope they learned something. And there will be an awful paucity of poll workers.
I’m fairly alarmist, but I really don’t see any way how this scenario in the thread title plays out. We’re talking about projections called by networks, a lot of which will be made once they look at exit polling data and pair that up with segments of the vote that come in. The only difference is that there might be - strictly guessing - 10-15% of the vote that’s outstanding really late into the evening due to mail-in balloting, but networks have made projections when barely 10% of the vote is in. They’re pretty good at crunching data, and fast.
Kentucky and Indiana come in first, with closing times at 6 p.m Central (7 p.m. Eastern), which will be at the same time as Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, other parts of Indiana, Virignia, and Vermont. Then about a half hour later, Ohio, North Carolina, and West Virginia will close. Many of these early states could be called for Trump, but they’re Trump-leaning states. The race will shift once it hits the upper Midwest and Western States, which is always the way it’s been.
By 8 p.m., I would imagine a scenario in which KY, IN, and WV are called for Trump; we’ll start sweating out NC, GA, FL, and other states like we normally do, and then many of the other states will fall into place as expected.
By 11 p.m. California, Oregon, Washington, and Illinois will be called for Biden; Texas, Missouri, and the Deep South, probably including Georgia, will be called for Trump. We’ll be waiting out the “battleground states,” which could include Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Arizona this time. Those states won’t be called; networks aren’t going to call them until they know it’s over.
To follow up on my earlier post, the potentially unsettling scenario that we probably can forecast is a really long election day/night/morning. Whereas we’re used to seeing the 270 election vote threshold met shortly sometime between 11 PM and 1 AM, we might go to bed at 2 or 3 AM with the leader having only 100 electoral votes projected. That’s why analysts are predicting a much longer time frame for predicting the winner.
Just looking at 270towin’s website, if you look at the map and then look at the poll closing times for each state, we can figure that the states that are hard left will go blue and hard right will go red, and that these states will be called by midnight - perhaps even by 11 p.m. Eastern. But the battleground states are going to go well into the night - quite possible into the next night and the night after. We’re talking VA, GA, NC, OH, MI, PA, MN, AZ, all leaning one way or the other but because of the slow process of counting mail-in ballots, they could remain without a final projection for a good day or two. Networks will be hesitant to call them, though I do wonder whether Sean Hannity and others might not try to preempt the news team on this one.
I don’t see a 408 EV lead for Trump; instead, I see what was once a one-night news cycle that stretched into the morning becoming a 2 or 3-day election event, which could end up not having the raced projected until Friday night of that week. And then of course there’s the possibility that Trump might refuse to concede or try to stop counting. All of this is very much within the realm of the possible, I’m afraid.
(Missed the edit window)
So then, imagine that we wake up on Wednesday morning, and we do our e-commute. We watch the news come in throughout the day. We could have Trump and Biden having already won a nearly 200 projected electors. Because Trump voters actually cast votes in person, and because those votes may get counted first, the official precincts show Trump leading according to official results in a handful of states that aren’t declared. So he’s leading. And then gradually, VA goes to Biden. Maybe Biden starts gradually moving ahead or simply nearing Trump in PA, OH, WI, and other states. That’s when we’ll know whether we’re about to have democracy’s ultimate stress test
That explanation of how our expectations change, and how unwilling we are to go back to our previous level of expectations, is well-put. Republicans already expect Trump to win, and if he doesn’t, it’s fraud. As all the votes are tallied, and if it comes out that Biden has won, they’re gonna blow a gasket. Millions will feel ROBBED of their just victory. If Trump wins, I won’t feel that it’s legit, given everything that he’s done, and allowed to be done on his campaign’s behalf. I’m sure millions more feel as I do.
The more I think about it, the more that comes out, the more that happens, the more screwed I think we are. This is why EVERY other president and candidate in my lifetime has taken pains to respect the democratic process. I cannot imagine how ugly this could get. No matter the outcome, there will be people taking to the street.
I read the “scenario in the thread” as, somebody keeping track of the vote totals as they come in will notice that Trump leads in states with 408 electoral votes, only for one state after another to switch from a Trump lead to a Biden lead once mail-in ballots start being counted. I doubt that anybody will “call” a state one way or the other based on early numbers. Okay, maybe DC and California…
Who knows? The networks may wait until each state actually releases an “official” final count before declaring a winner in the Presidential election - and possibly in the Senate elections as well.
One of televisions finest moments! IIRC (and I may not) it was actually Meghan Kelly who made the trip to the analytic office to challenge the call on Ohio ( and the election ). They actually explained why they thought Rove was wrong in detail and it was quite interesting.
The news office had called it fairly early - the scroll at the bottom of the screen was OBAMA WINS- while the anchors were still talking like Romney would get win. Karl Rove was in the studio claiming that they had Ohio because of a couple of counties that were allegedly going red, and he was REALLY confident, to the point of smugness. I don’t remember who else was was there.
There was a conspiracy theory that Rove had arranged for some sort of rigged vote in key areas, and the hacker group Anonymous foiled it.
Bolding mine.
The networks are the least of our concerns here. Where do the frothing RWs get their news? Not from CBS/NBC/ABC.
The news we need to worry about is the news they believe. Fox at best, Breitbart, etc., at worst. Plus of course the continuous Twitstream from their hero Fuhrer.
That’s the media that will cause craziness across the country.
There’s a degree opf Bayesian thinking they can put into this. You know going in what a state’s overall lean is, and what each county tends to do, sol right off the top some states are pretty obvious. You could call West Virginia and New York NOW, actually.
When the evening starts, you can probably slot at least 25-30 states without counting a single vote.
After that, in many cases it won’t be hard. If Biden has the lead in Virginia you expect, you can make it blue pretty early. If Trump suddenly jumps out a bit more in Texas than the polls expected, color it red. You can add a little more analysis early on too; if, for instance, Ohio is reporting before Pennsylvania (I don’t know if this happens but play along) and Biden is doing shockingly well there, you can start pouring blue ink onto PA. State results are highly correlated; there is no realistic chance that Biden kills Trump in Ohio but Trump brings home PA.
The counting COULD go for days; if it’s thin and Florida is the tipping point, well, who knows. But you might know really early on.
Putting Indiana in Biden’s column was an error on my part.
This is obviously premature, but right now, this is my 3 AM Eastern Time Map on November 4th.
Networks would probably have called these states, and perhaps a few other states like MN, FL, GA, and NC might be called as well.