“Is this just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better, or is this real?”
My understanding is that Florida counts the mail in ballots in advance, so we should know that state’s result relatively early — unless it turns out to be very close.
I agree with you making note of state and county leans will help know what is likely to happen. Same for what early returns will tell you. It’s worth mentioning too that paying attention to where the outstanding votes are will also be telling. If Trump has a narrow lead in a state where he won easily last time and most of the rural vote is in but the urban areas are largely still out, that would indicate big trouble for him. Same for Biden if the situation is reversed in a state Clinton easily won in 2016 where his lead is narrow with most of the urban vote in but most of the rural vote is still to be counted.
Good to know. That’s one thing I’m honestly not sure about - when states count and report mail-in votes.
In addition to mail-in votes, many states have early voting in person.
Here in Broward County (=Ft. Lauderdale) in FL, early in-person voting is open 12 hours per day for the 14 days preceding Election day.
Which is the the max amount of early voting permitted by state law. The minimum required is 8 hours per day for 8 days.
These early votes are collected using the same ballots & counting techniques as on Election Day, just in fewer locations. When & how are these votes counted? I have no idea. It could be in real time.
The obvious tradeoff for every county in the land is any counting of early or of mail-in ballots done before Election Day needs to stay secret to avoid polluting the results of Election Day itself. That’s tough to do given the enormous pressure to leak and the partisan nature of many electoral bureaucracies.
But spending the 6 weeks from now (our mail-in ballots are already out) to Election Day storing up work that then needs to be done carefully and thoroughly under great time pressure with too few resources seems kinda stupid too, when it’s so easy to do much of the work earlier under less pressure. The longer ballots sit uncounted the greater the likelihood some will be lost or “lost” from wherever / however they’re stored.
I.e., the Pennsylvania problem. PA doesn’t begin to count mail in ballots until Election Day and then has one of the nation’s earliest vote certification dates, Nov. 11. There could be over a million ballots that will need to be counted in a short period of time. Add in the “naked ballot” problem and a GOP legislature and it becomes easy to think that this will be the state that Donald and his army of lawyers will target this year.
Leave hundreds of thousands of ballots uncounted and let the legislature send whatever group of electors it deems “the will of the people.” Then the hope, and not an entirely unreasonable one, is that a friendly Supreme Court will rule “too bad, so sad” and we get another four years of incompetency.
Some of the questions being asked about when ballots can be received and when they can be counted can be found here: Why Four Pivotal Swing States Likely Won’t Be Called On Election Night | FiveThirtyEight
Some more info:
Florida counts early (starting 22 days before). Arizona can also start early. MI, WI, and PA can’t start until election day, and are still having court challenges about how late ballots can arrive if they are postmarked in time (as well as lawsuits about other things like signature verification).
Some less swingy states: Iowa starts counting the day before, but may not be done by election night. Georgia can start early. MN also starts counting a few weeks before election day.
Another example: NC allows early counting, but also allows ballots to be received all the way until Nov 6 (as long as they were postmarked by election day).
The nightmare scenario is a solid Trump lead in the states that count early (FL, NC, GA, IA), allowing mainstream networks to call those races for Trump on election night. A decent Trump lead in election-day voting in the “blue wall” states, and maybe a closer-than-expected Biden win in MN (or, gasp, a Trump win in MN - but if that happens Trump probably wins no matter what).
So you could have a Nov 4 morning map like this: 270toWin - 2024 Presidential Election Interactive Map (pretty close to the one asahi put up-thread).
Now, no network is going to call the race for Trump even if he has election day leads in the “uncalled” states, but that won’t stop him from Tweeting that he won. I could totally see the lawyers mucking things up in PA enough that they miss their deadline. Will it be enough? Maybe…
I really don’t see the 408 number, though. 322 is the highest I can get it for Trump on election night.
It’s pretty clear that Trump is going to declare victory early on election night and state that any further ballot counting is election fraud, he will then rely on friendly GOP officials in battleground states and GOP judges to support his claim. It will be a chaotic mess and he will declare himself president.
King, more likely.
On the other hand, given that the post office just delivered a letter sent 100 years ago, there are going to have to be hard stop-count limits after the election.
One ‘nightmare’ scenario is that Trump wins on election night, but over the next two weeks clumps of votes keep trickling in that make the race closer and closer - then the election is called due to a deadline. Democrats will freak out.
On the other hand, if votes keep trickling in over weeks and the vote is not closed, Republicans will call foul and fight to close the counting. We could be looking at Bush V. Gore all over again, except with the stakes and anger ramped up to 11.
A landslide victory is likely the only way to avoid a cluster fuck election, and that seems unlikely in a polarized nation.
The other wild card is political violence and riots on election day suppressing the vote. In a close election, the losing side will probably also claim voter suppression if anything like that happens. And since this is 2020, count on it.
Heck, I’m convinced that Fox will show Trump ahead in battlegrounds states, no matter what the vote totals actually are. They’ll just make shit up.
To be a bit more precise, it doesn’t have to be a LANDSLIDE, it just as to be clear. If the morning after Biden is leading 296-202 with Florida and Arizona still to be called, it’s nowhere near a landslide, but it’s over.
Even if Trump claims there was massive fraudlent voting all over the place,and he actually won more than 400 EV’s? I mean, he claimed a bunch of bullshit last election when he WON.
Even if Barr is on Trump’s side, and uses the power of the Justice Department to immediately investigate the criminal activities of those terrible Democrats?
Even if Fox News and other right leaning outlets, websites and social media groups <cough, Russians, cough> are all over the airwaves and internet loudly proclaiming a Trump Victory?
Even if the Republican toadies in the Senate <cough, all of them, cough> chime in immediately about how "this election was stolen from our Rightful Leader Trump?
Don’t worry.
What will happen is that the networks won’t call a state until things are clear. So if there a lot of ballots outstanding, they won’t give it to either candidate. Remember, they use things like exit polls and other measures to call states as soon as the polls close. That’s going to be trickier this year, so you won’t see it happening immediately.
But, unless it’s a landslide, what you will see on Election night is that neither candidate is going to have 270 votes.
Agreed. And Trump is already positioning himself to claim victory in that event.
Trump could use a football run-out-the-clock strategy to burn time until December 8. As long as he can win a big lead on Election Night, then prevent the votes from being counted until the Dec. 8 deadline arrives (to certify elector slates), then those uncounted votes no longer count.
There is already Supreme Court precedent that stops votes from being counted. I expect that this is exactly what is going to happen.
I don’t think most networks will call the election until there’s a reason to call it - except for Fox of course.
There’s growing tension between the News division and the editorial/entertainment division. It’s possible that some GOP-leaning pollster or pundit like Rove, Ruddy, or someone else claims that his analysis shows Trump winning PA, OH, WI, MN, MI.
Obviously, the counting would continue, but as we saw in 2000, when Fox News called the election for Bush in Florida, other reporting agencies got sucked into that vortex as well. There’s also social media, which we didn’t have back then.
Hyperventilation and anxiety aside, there’s no way whatsoever to say with certainty what scenario will unfold, but it’s vital to be aware of the different ways the GOP can play tricks with the outcome.
Back in 2008, didn’t Rove twist himself in knots at some point on Fox News election night, and tried to INSIST that McCain was winning when it was obvious he was not? I have a vague memory of this.
And it’s my impression that Fox News in it’s current state is calling the election for Trump already, before any votes have even been counted.