The AP has called winners in elections for more than 170 years. How it's done | Hacker News Reader

The AP has called winners in elections for more than 170 years. How it's done

apnews.com

38 pointsrustoo28 comments

Funny thing, one of my favorite odd jobs in college was being a vote counter for AP.

Most of the vote counters would need to call the election centers over the phone and ask for results. Then they would input the results into a database system, which would feed into the overall tabulation for different elections.

I was one of the college students they would look for because they needed college students better at technology to be able to check the websites of some jurisdictions. So I ended up being paid a few hundred dollars to copy and paste one number from a website and eat amazing catered Italian food. For about 2 minutes of work and amazing food it was a great gig.

To get this thread back on topic:

The article has this as part of their reasoning:

> That’s because the method a voter chooses often speaks to whom they voted for. Since the issue of voting by mail became highly politicized in the 2020 election, most mail votes nationally have been cast by Democratic voters, while most in-person Election Day votes have been cast by Republicans.

But this year R have focused on both early and mail-in ballots in a reversal of their traditional approach of eschewing or even attacking these voting options and it seems the general consensus is that for the 2024 elections as of last week, more Rs than Ds had actually opted for early and mail-in voting:

* https://www.newsnationnow.com/politics/2024-election/early-m...

* https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/22/us/politics/trump-republi...

It seems a curious thing for AP (which has published pieces on this new trend) not to at least mention a disclaimer at this point? It seems like an obvious “what would people attack us for?” answer.

Disclosure: not an R or a D myself.

"Since...the 2020 election" is also not much of a precedent. That's three elections, only one of which would have been for a Senate candidate (in some states), and presumably at most one gubernatorial one except in states that might have had a special election (unless there are states with 2-year terms that I'm not aware of). Given how many more people vote in presidential election years compared to other years, and presumably fewer still do when there's not a statewide election either, it's hard to feel like there's enough info to infer much about whether this trend will hold this year.

I don't think the AP made an error here. Unless I'm misreading those articles, the situation is:

- Republican early voting has increased since 2020.

- Republicans have more in-person early votes, while Democrats have more mail-in early votes.

- Nationally, Democrats still have more overall early votes because early voting is dominated by mail-in votes.

Hold yourself when you hear that States are discussing a backdoor (edit: "workaround") on how they could trade Electoral College votes without amending the Constitution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...

Like a super Faithless elector.

It's going to make it easier for the AP I guess ? (unless plot twist: the States don't all keep their promises if they don't like the final result).

You mean like actual voter representation, instead?

They're not trading anything, the compact is one where all participating states agree that the only fair election is one where the candidate with the most votes should win, and so all of them have agreed that their electors will vote for the candidate who wins the most votes at the national level, regardless of what the local result is.

As it should be, for a national vote.

Oh yes, I totally agree with you I think this Electoral College system is absurdly complicated (and to be back to the topic, causes issues like predicting the outcome).

I shown this article because it is interesting from a "technical" perspective to see how the States are discussing together to figure out a backdoor, instead of doing what is the "right" thing: sitting on a table and amend the Constitution to abolish the Electoral College.

There’s no particular reason to call it a backdoor or not the “right” way.

a "hack", or a "workaround" is more appropriate perhaps, rather than a backdoor.

It reminds me of technical debt. Instead of rewriting the original buggy code, we add one more feature and we certainly don't change anything to the original code.

So instead we have:

"This is the logic, we do this A and this B, but oh well, anyway it's C"

Simpler is better, especially on crucial things such as elections.

It is horrendously difficult to amend the constitution. We would need much greater societal consensus to be make it easier to amend the constitution.

Changing the presidental vote to a popular vote would be the first step to doing that.

Getting 75% of states to support something is simpler than getting 50% of electoral college votes to agree on supporting the more popular candidate? Constitutional amendments are anything but simple.

Amending the Constitution is a metaphysical impossibility at this point. The Electoral College exists to give outsized political power to rural states, and they aren't going to agree to give that up.

Isn't it what California and other states are doing with the NPVIC ? "Ok you don't want give up your power, and to amend the Constitution, so screw you, we will decide without you"

I used to think getting rid of the Electoral College was "obviously" the right thing.

Then I learned more about how the US works, and realized that the electoral college is actually its strength! Without it cities would completely dominate rural areas, like completely.

Those rural areas would essentially have zero voice. Think about it: do you want a US where only a couple states control the entire thing?

And I don't mean like today where some states are predictably red or blue (i.e. where only the swing states "count") - in the current state red vs blue alternate positions on capital hill, so all those states eventually get their voice heard.

In a world without the Electoral College the rural states get zero voice. None.

I don't think the US would survive this.

The Electoral College only affects the election of the President, who does not (despite popular misconception) actually run the government the way a CEO runs a country, rather he represents one of three equal and (ostensibly) separate branches of government. The Electoral College doesn't determine the distribution of representatives in Congress, nor the election of judges.

Obviously rural states would not cease to have a voice in government if the President were elected by popular vote - which is in essence what the Electoral College is designed to prevent - because most Presidents have been and yet rural states somehow persist, pass legislation and maintain political power.

Why should someone in a rural area get a bigger say than someone in an urban one? California has more people than ~15 least populous states combined.

Also, all the rural red counties in CA effectively have no voice in the presidential election. It's a dumb, outdated, arbitrary system.

> Think about it: do you want a US where only a couple states control the entire thing?

You mean like the US we have, where the entire race is focused on 7 states?

The compact has the mechanism and effect you describe, but you seem to have added your own editorialization as to the motivation: "participating states agree that the only fair election is one where the candidate with the most votes should win."

That's not part of the bill in the one state that I reviewed (MA), nor in the text describing the compact generally.

[Voters in] States participating may in fact believe that multiple types of fair elections exist, but that they merely prefer this particular one.

?? Some people do agree that the Electoral College system was more suited for a previous time where the States were more disjointed and the federal government wanted to entice each state to participate in the system by giving the smaller states more power. In modern day, a system that's closer to people's actual votes makes more sense to some people. This simply allows changing from Electoral College where a candidate can win despite having less votes than another candidate, to a more true first-past-the-post.

Of course, I think ranked choice voting is much much better but I don't think it's fair to make this sound like some secret nefarious conspiracy. It's also not apparently related to the article

RCV could open the door to proportional representation too

The Constitution gives the states complete control over how they use their electors. If they want to say "we will give them to the popular vote winner if enough states will do the same such that the popular vote winner wins" then that is completely within their power.

Article 2, Section 1, Clause 2

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.

Article I, Section 10, Clause 3

> No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.

It is certainly an open question as to whether or not it would need the approval of Congress. Does the compact clause have more weight or does the plenary powers doctrine have more weight? Realistically, it depends who the nine justices of the supreme court are if it ever makes it that far.

At the same time, how these electors are chosen cannot trample on the civil right that citizens have to vote. States can’t just do whatever they want, if what they want to do is disenfranchise voters. At least that’s my hope.

It would probably depend on constitutional interpretation as to what a state legislature could do nowadays. South Carolina's legislature picked their electors until 1860 and if they wanted to revert to that an orignialist interpretation of the constitution would support it. One could make an argument that taking the right to vote away after granting it isn't in line with other later amendments or the spirit of the constitution and the justices seem more than capable of picking and choosing to make whatever outcome they want to happen, happen.

All that being said, switching to apportioning electors according to the popular vote winner would make many more people's votes count given that we're realistically waiting on the results of 7 states to decide the upcoming election.

While re-enfranchising far more people, who have 1/300th the voting power of someone in another state.

States are allowed to good things in service of the union.

That sounds great? Wouldn’t the only downside there be for candidates who can’t win the popular vote?

Hold yourself when you hear

This is what happens when they stop teaching civics in high school. People never learn how the government works, and then when they learn one uncommon nugget of information, the only way to fit it into their worldview is to turn it into some crazy conspiracy theory.

It's pretty much the definition of "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing."

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