Does this mean thath the polls for this presidential election are even more wrong than they were in 2016?
If your implication is true, I think there is going to have to be a serious re-assessment by the establishment regarding the divergence of their politics vs the populace --and there would be a realization that propaganda only goes so far and coercion is the missing ingredient.
If the establishment is right, then obviously they had the right pulse and nothing changes.
Things I've learnt in the last 2 months, Americans have real problems counting votes. I'm not talking about disputed votes (hanging chads), I'm talking about real actual undisputable votes. Also seem to be problems with the concept of free and fair voting - people having to queue for hours to vote is a sign of voter suppression, not of a healthy democracy.
In the UK, we vote either in person on the day (from 6AM until 10PM), or in advance by post (which has to arrive at the designated location by the time polls close, either by post, or by dropping into a voting station). If a charismatic person in a pub gets everyone to go voting you can get a rush just before the polls close as 300 people turn up, but an hour would be extreme.
Postal votes are opened daily in the run up to the election in front of observers from the various parties as they come in, verified, and stored in a sealed box.
On the actual day the in person boxes are sealed at 10pm (or slightly later if people are still queueing) and transported to a central counting location.
These counting locations tend to count 50,000 at a time, and in my experience 50-100 people do the counting (in front of observers from the parties), the counts start almost straight away, and the first results come in after an hour or so. Most results are in after about 6 hours, and unless there are transport problems (storms preventing votes from islands getting where they need to go) everywhere has declared within about 10 hours.
Now the US has more than the 32 million votes cast in the UK's December election, but this method scales easily enough.
So why does it take days for votes to be counted?
So a mailed in vote that needs to be tallied may not arrive to be counted till Nov 5 or 6 or 9 (depending on state deadline).
How do you know every vote is counted without a cut off period defined? It can take years to deliver some mail: https://www.itv.com/news/anglia/2020-05-29/soldier-s-letter-...
If the margin is less than the number of unreturned postal votes, surely there will be a question which can never be answered.
Yes.
The final Democracy Institute poll (https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1354506/us-election-202...) that came out Saturday predicts a Trump victory contrary to most other polls, because it found that 79% of Trump voters do not tell others that they support him, while only 21% of Biden voters are shy.
USC's poll predicts a Biden victory, but when experimental questions are asked to figure out how those polled really feel, it forecasts a Trump win (https://dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories/3338/experimental-poll...).