It's a bit early to do a post-mortem when there's still millions of votes to count.
> The forecasts were off. We were forecasting Biden to get 54.4% of the two-party vote and it seems that he only got 52% or so. We forecasted Biden at 356 electoral votes and it seems that he’ll only end up with 280 or so.
> – The polls messed up more in some states than others. Florida is the clearest example of where the polls got it wrong.
No major poll I saw had Trump anywhere near these numbers. Clearly something went wrong.
Example: Poll saying Biden winning Wisconsin by +17: https://www.wbay.com/2020/10/28/biden-leads-trump-by-17-poin...
Actual result: Biden currently winning by .6%. If the poll is off by 16.4% its a garbage poll and needs serious re-evaluation.
What I'd be more interested in is an article with more meat than this one, something that analyzes a single model and talks about what, if anything, went wrong. 538 has already mentioned that they plan on doing a post-mortem.
The problem with presidential elections is that they happen infrequently with a large time gap between, and we only have a few decades of useful data to model from. For me, as a non-statistician, it's difficult for me to look at the numbers and know whether this one particular reality was adequately accounted for by the model. 538 gave chances of each candidate winning - they didn't state that they'll have exactly x margins of victory. Nate's stance before the election was that Biden could survive a significant polling error, and that's about where we seem to be now.
I'm looking forward to the 538 post-mortem.
Sure Florida was way off, but correct me if I’m wrong: If you rely on 95% confidence you can expect one prediction in 20 to go outside of it. There are 51 elections to the electoral collage, so you can expect two ore three states/districts to be outside of it.
Popular vote margins will also change once the big blue states finish counting which might take a while.
In a perfectly organized system (rarely found in reality) the counting would have finished within 2-3 hours after the end of voting.
Here’s a recording from 2019 elections in Canada. The last seat was determined 4 hours and 44 minutes later, and that is unusually delayed, but still a record time compared to U.S. counts: https://youtu.be/GYrY_945co0
Of course it might vary by population, but it shouldn’t need to be this inefficient to run or count advance votes, etc. Elections Canada might also make a difference rather than going state by state. And we don’t have a step after where votes are cast, etc., instead it’s a simple first past the post system.
Some background:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-votes-2019-election-...
https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=faq&do...
As a Canadian I’d often watch as polls close in different time zones and then roughly a half hour later, results trickle in. Usually within the first two or three hours, up to half the country’s votes, by population (at least), have been counted and results shared — even as polls are still closing in other parts. It’s expected that by 2am at the latest you could usually know the outcome, even in a contested race. The exception would be minority governments, which can form their own majority from coalitions over the next few days after a Canadian election. And they do still count all the votes by hand in Canada.
This kind of vote count inefficiency reminds me of tax code inefficiencies. Just because taxes are complicated to file in the U.S. does not mean it has to be that way in the rest of the world! :)
American-style slow results have more in common with the kinds of places that need time to "massage" the results than with the electoral processes in most democracies.
The overwhelming problem with American elections is electoral fraud, a term which encompasses such things as preventing eligible voters from voting, not counting legitimate ballots, voter intimidation, and jerrymandering. These problems cannot be fixed through measures intended to minimize voter fraud as they are the result of the state, and/or parties, abusing the democratic process rather than the citizen abusing it.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/24/fbi-has-not-seen-evidence-of...
The only real impediment/threat to voting is the Republican party doing any and everything they can to limit peoples’ ability to vote.
You need to commit a lot of voter fraud to swing an election, it has to be a very close election. Like one state and 20,000 to 100,000 vote. A once in a 30-50 year election. You need to figure out before hand which state will be swing state that decides the election.
Now you have to commit voter fraud 50,000 times in that state. You can't do it in person because the numbers are too larger so you have to do mail-in. How do you find 20,000-50,000 people across the state who you can get a mail in ballot for, steal it, and turn it in without anyone noticing.
This is basically an impossible task that even if you pull off has a low chance of making a difference, and a large chance of sending you to jail.
I would trust mail ballots because they are delivered to your residence. Pretty hard for a foreign actor to fake/game that kind of system -- or at least, harder than posting a bunch of inorganic FUD comments on social media such as HN.
That's 51 different voter registration laws, 51 different sets of candidates, 51 different ballots, 51 different voting procedures, etc. Each state's laws have been subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) changed to provide a benefit to whoever was in power at that time.
There's a hell of a lot more than that, the ballots include local votes as well.