There’s no evidence that the tallies in California are any more accurate than anywhere else. Manually-cured mistakes are surely a tiny percentage of the total. I’m not talking about the last 1-2%. It’s the fact that we spent the better part of a week with <2/3 of the votes counted, and even now are just barely above 3/4.
Mail-in ballots could be a reason for a few days delay, though even then it’s highly questionable whether that many ballots were literally sent in on the last day possible. Many states had all but finished counting on election day itself. California should be able to count at least those that had already arrived.
Counting ballots can be done entirely in parallel and so no overtime is necessary. They just need to hire more people. This does not make it more expensive. However many hours it takes, it will complete faster if divided among more people. This is exactly unlike the stereotypical pregnancy that takes 9 months no matter how many people you dedicate to it. It is what computer programmers call an “embarrassingly parallel” problem.
Election experts and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency reported no evidence of disappearing votes or widespread fraud during the 2024 presidential election. It is normal for voter turnout to fluctuate from election to election, experts said. Votes are still being counted, and it is too soon to compare vote totals.*
I don’t know about voter fraud, but there were attempts at voter suppression for sure. The bomb threats called into majority black districts are clear cases of voter suppression. Enough to swing it to Harris, I don’t know.
It could have been enough to make a difference in some of the swing states. It’s looking like around 1 percent in some of the swing states in favor of Trump, so the polls were not necessarily wrong. It’s being portrayed as a landslide for Trump, but the actual numbers to me are telling a different story.
Overall, I think it was much closer than is being portrayed now.
As more numbers come in, that seems to be borne out. Article. Some interesting quotes:
Trump’s victory was modest, as was the likely realignment in the electorate.[snip]
As a function of the two-party vote, Trump’s popular vote victory — his first — will probably be the smallest since Al Gore received more votes than George W. Bush in 2000.
Through the lens of state-by-state results:
it is likely to be the case that most of the seven swing states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — will have seen increases in vote totals. It’s another indication that the Harris campaign’s intense focus on those states provided a boost to her candidacy, albeit a fruitless one.
And through the lens of demographics:
Harris also probably got about the same number of votes from White people but fewer from Black and Latino voters than Biden did. Trump gained votes from White and Hispanic voters but, as we noted last week, probably not from Black voters. Harris and Trump both gained votes from the wealthiest Americans and both lost votes from those with the lowest incomes — a group that is more heavily non-White.
I find that last sentence particularly interesting. It’s consistent with the idea that the inflation-protest vote was from people who are personally not doing as badly as they think the economy is doing.
All this is still coming out now because:
several populous states have votes outstanding, most notably California, where millions of votes remain to be counted. There are, we estimate, hundreds of thousands left to count in New York, New Jersey and Washington, too, as well as smaller totals in a host of other states.
Kooks on the left are giving kooks on the right a run for their money. One of many similar posts:
Votes… uploaded to Starlink… and then destroyed as the satellite reenters. It would be a brilliant idea if votes or radio transmission or satellites or anything worked that way.
Anyway, it’s down to a 6.8M difference. And California is still only 87% counted.
I think one reason for the high turnout in 2020 is that large stimulus checks for everyone were a ballot issue, and THAT got the attention of people that wouldn’t have otherwise voted.
Disagree. The first round of checks was in March of 2020, right as the pandemic was shifting into high gear. By the time November rolled around, those checks were long forgotten. Second round was in December, after the election, and the third round was in March of 2021, under the Biden administration.
If people voted hoping that they’d get another stimulus check, they would have voted for Trump.
I doubt that this is true (my bolding). TikTok is chock-full of 2024 posts of people saying they’re voting for Trump because he will “gimme my stimmy”. In October 2023 rap star “Sexxy Red” said
The “stimmy” (apparently that’s the way it’s spelled) was mentioned all over social media this year. People connected it with Trump, and, apparently, assumed that a vote for Trump equals a new check arriving.
Not true, but it seems to have been widely-believed. Here are a few sources mentioning “stimmys”:
This data includes an estimate for 2024 of 244,666,890 which seems awfully precise for an estimate but whatevs.
The data, call this V, looks exponential which makes sense because population growth is exponential. So I took the log of the total number of votes, V_{log} to get something linear.
This is very nice (r^2 = 0.984).
Then I took the differences between the trendline and observed values and tested for stationarity. The augmented Dickey-Fuller test statistic was -4.69 with a teeny-tiny p-value (the null-hypothesis is non-stationary so a small p-value means stationary) so the data appears to be stationary. This means the the deviation from the trendline appears to be random.
Now we can measure how extreme the deviation from the trendline is for each election. Here is a plot of the cumulative distribution of the z-scores for the turnout in each election with quartiles marked i.e. for each data point get the expected proportion of data points lower than the data point, 0.5 is average and the boundaries of the quartiles are multiples of 0.25. Closer to 0.5 means less extreme.
Turnout in 2024 appears to be the least extreme since 1980, and 2020 was the most extreme since 2000. Several states made voting easier in 2020 and 2020 was a disaster of a year, and even then turnout was 86th percentile. We should expect about 3 in every 10 elections to be that extreme, and if we look at the last 10 elections there are… 3 that are that extreme (1996, 2000, 2020).
I dont know if this is the right place to post this…
The voting process over there in usa seems a bit complicated.
Here in India the day of voting is a public holiday (voting is spread out over 4 or 5 phases usually in the different states).
Voting here in India is through EVMs (Electronic Voting Machines) with a VVPAT (voter verified paper audit trail). Each voter can see ( through the transparent portion of the EVM) the party symbol and candidate name he has pressed on the EVM light up and the see the paper with the candidate name he or she voted for drop into the sealed box of the EVM.
During counting of votes (usually done 48 hours after the day of voting in the final phase)…the EVMs are
unsealed in the presence of agents of all the political parties and the tabulator is pressed by the presiding officer which instantly gives the results party wise and candidate wise in that particular EVM. Usually each EVM has apprx 1500 to 2000 votes. The trends of which party is winning are known within a couple of hours and final results are lnown within 6-8 hours.
10 percent of EVMs are randomly selected by the presiding officer/agents and the VVPAT paper audit trail is checked for those by manually counting the paper ballots of those boxes and cross verified with the electronic tabulator result of those boxes.
Im just curious how the american system is similar or different.
Oh and a government issued voter ID is mandatory for voting. The voter ID is mandatorily checked by the polling officer and can be checked by the political parties agents too before the voter is allowed to vote. Any person without a valid ID is not allowed to vote. Usually Aadhar (social security card with biometrics like finger prints and retina scans) or a driving license or a voter card issued by the Election Commission of India or other approved forms of voter identification are allowed. Voter IDs are mandatorily photo IDs i.e the ID card also has a photo of the person of it and a QR code.
Voting usually opens at 8 am on the day of voting and continues till 6 pm. Any citizen standing in queue by 6 pm will be allowed to vote beyond 6 pm on the election day.
Oh another feature of the voting is all voters who vote have their forefinger (a portion of the nail and the portion of finger about half and inch below the nail) marked by a line with indelible ink by the polling officer after he or she voted.
People after voting post pics in social media with their forefinger showing the indelible ink as proof of having voted.
That all sounds very logical, and totally unlike how many states do it here (though every state is different so it’s impossible to make any hard claims).
In California, mail-in voting is very popular and the ballots are counted even a week past the election date. They just have to be postmarked by the election.
There’s no ID checking and in fact it’s illegal in some cases. They check your signature, which as you can imagine is a very slow and error-prone process.
Since it’s mostly not in-person, there’s no ink marks or anything like that.
As much as I like mail-in voting, frankly I’d rather just have a photo ID and in-person voting only. There’s no reason why an ID has to be difficult to get, and we already have a mandate that employees may take time off to vote.
The latter half of your statement is a pointer toward the fact that Republicans cannot be trusted with such a process, and an argument in favor of mail-in voting. Given your framework, it’s documented historical fact that Republicans deliberately limit or outright close voting locations in left-leaning areas (say, near colleges) in favor of locations in right-leaning areas, and they also limit access to DMVs and similar ID-issuing agencies in poor areas while making sure they’re easily accessible in rich areas.
Barring some kind of ironclad constitutional protection for equal access to the ballot, general mail-in voting is unquestionably superior in terms of preserving the right to vote, because it’s much more difficult for asshole Republicans to ratfuck.
Here mail voting (called as postal ballots here) is allowed only for soldiers or paramilitary posted in far off areas and to the polling staff who are engaged in the polling process. Recently the Supreme Court of India has allowed postal ballots for the very elderly (> 85 year old) and the very sick (like cancer patients…but only with a doctor certificate).
I can’t understand why the election day is not a public holiday in usa…it facilitates more voting I think
Many states now have ID requirements. It’s basically the west and the northeast that don’t.
I haven’t seen any strong evidence that IDs pose a serious problem in states that require them. Most of them have very broad allowances for what counts as ID. There is a lot of hypothetical hand-wringing and not a lot of data.
It’s sort of ironic that Trump picked up the most votes among the poor, Hispanics, Native Americans, less-educated, and so on–all the sorts of marginalized groups that would hypothetically be more affected by strict voting laws, and yet that didn’t seem to be the case. Basically it was only rich white folk that moved to the left!
In any case, I’m sure there could be some kind of compromise to be made–including the possibility of a federal ID card that can’t be screwed with at the state/local level. Maybe the recent results will motivate the Democrats to collaborate.
