About 20 million votes less than the 2020 election, with about 15 million less for the democrats, and a measely 4 million less for the republicans. Thought that was interesting.
Reporting appears to be %87 at this moment, expect the numbers to add up when it's %100.
Don't you register to vote anyway? You can't be counting unaccounted for ballots, are you? You probably have a paperwork for for every vote, it's not like counting the cash after busking.
Eventually You will have Total Number of Registered to Vote = Total Ballots + Total Absentees.
This will also give you the turnout. You can't have the turnout first unless you keep track of number of votes casted and in that case you will be able to tell if there were fake votes by comparing the final ballots counted and the number of votes you counted when casting.
This is all very basic, can someone explain what I'm missing here? Why people are pushing for this thing that doesn't make sense whatsoever?
California, for example, has about 7 million ballots that haven't been processed
Isn't that exactly what you're doing?
You're assuming that the election fraud narrative is pushed by people who care about whether it's true or not. The goal isn't truth-seeking, it's disenfranchisement; any data point is either used in service of the narrative, or it's discarded as irrelevant.
>Eventually You will have Total Number of Registered to Vote = Total Ballots + Total Absentees.
Yes, all people are saying is that absentees increased and ballots decreased.
So do the analysis from another point of view.
https://x.com/zerohedge/status/1854144250562429081
Assume (say your null hypothesis) that 2020 had fraud by creating ballots that voted for Biden just in enough in several GA, AZ, PA, MI counties.
Now, say in 2024 -- that fraud did not work (could not be done). How would it look at the number of voters who voted in 2024?
Is that plausible that it would like 'fewer people' voted in total, and also giving less votes to Harris?
If it is plausible, then that's the core of their argument, in my understanding.
Here’s another theory: the candidate with betting polling in 2020 won and the candidate with better polling in 2024 won.
Look at PA polls: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general...
The last 2 polls had Harris at 49, and 48. She ended up at 48.5%. Last 2 polls for Trump were 50 and 49. He ended up at 50.5%.
https://apps.npr.org/2024-election-results/pennsylvania.html...
Similar story for Wisconsin, (Harris polls 49 and 48; result: 48.9% and Trump polls 50 and 49; result: 49.7%) and Michigan (Harris polls 48 and 48; result: 48.3% and Trump polls 50 and 50; result: 49.8%)
Despite the end result, it was really was a minor polling error away from a Harris victory.
Also, FWIW, the total 3rd party vote in WI and MI was greater than the margin of victory for Trump in those states.
Control of the WH is immaterial because all voting is controlled by the states or local municipalities.
Another part is that the Republicans were much more prepared this time to stop the alleged fraud before it happened. They had lawyers ready to protest immediately when election judges were locked out of counting rooms or when counting stopped. They made sure they had enough election judges for all precincts and sometimes they set up cameras to count the number of voters entering the site.
Perhaps your point about polling is still the best answer
Deciding between the effort required for a political opponent to run a massive multi-state voter fraud conspiracy under your nose and the effort required for an over-the-top personality to make a wild accusation that was never proven in court, I think we can consult Occam’s Razor.
62 lawsuits in 9 states, 30 dismissed on merits, several from Trump appointed judges.
My recollection is that when the cases went to court, the lawyers backed away from claims of fraud: https://time.com/5914377/donald-trump-no-evidence-fraud/
Trump was consistently losing in all polls in 2020.
538 had Trump’s odds at 10%: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/
Betting markets had him at ~35%: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/elections/betting_odds/202...
Biden was favored in MI, WI, NV, PA, AZ, FL, NC and GA on Election Day meaning he had many paths to victory.
And polls were pretty accurate for Biden:
State - Polling Avg. (Result)
MI - 51.2% (50.6%)
WI - 52.1% (49.5%)
NV - 49.7% (50.1%)
PA - 50.2% (49.9%)
AZ - 48.7% (49.4%)
FL - 49.1% (47.9%)
NC - 48.9% (48.6%)
GA - 48.5% (49.5%)
The surprise wasn’t that Trump lost in 2020, is was that based on polling averages that he didn’t lose by more.
I do know that many of the "merits" you cite were never litigated. Were there any cases where the court granted discovery? So how can anyone guess at what a court would decide about the matter? Many of the news articles I read at the time suggested that the courts were just not interested in opening up cans of worms.
The polling average numbers are from Project 538. The dropdown lets you navigate to each state.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/
The election results are from Wikipedia.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_president...
2024 vote count so far: 139 million
2024 vote percentage counted so far: 87%
139 million divided by 87% equals 159 million.
Voter turnout this year will be higher than 2020.
Agree though that we'll get pretty close to that. CA,OR, WA alone likely have ~10 million votes uncounted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_Colleg...
Here are the (incomplete) vote counts from the three swing states that WSJ currently indicates at 99% counted:
2020 2024* Δ
Michigan 5,539,302 5,619,861 (99%) +80,559 (+1.45%)
N. Carolina 5,524,804 5,625,658 (99%) +100,854 (+1.83%)
Wisconsin 3,298,041 3,415,014 (99%) +116,973 (+3.55%)It’s good to know the absolute numbers, but I feel like they’re less significant than the relative numbers (what % of the population voted)
This is why it was a major issue for me that the Democrats did not hold a primary and just decided Kamala would be the candidate. If a major part of your campaign is "vote for us or democracy dies!" it's pretty hard to swallow if you increasingly feel that your voice doesn't matter in your own party.
It was just a glance on one of the shows during the returns last night, I maybe be completely wrong.
Not just election participation, no.
You do have to use the generally-free-to-use, generally-globally-accessible publishing systems that are available to nearly anyone with a computer to explain why you refused to vote. (This is my big issue with the "Refusing to vote is meaningless, because noone will know why you didn't vote." counterargument.)
Whether your assertions that you didn't vote because -for instance- none of the available candidates were people you wished to see in the positions they were running for get deleted because they are "Election misinformation" or similar is an open question.
I hope nothing makes it necessary, but I do hope it becomes commonplace. It's such a better experience to complete a ballot leisurely in one's own home, being able to discuss it with my own family and referencing a plethora of materials, than having to go out of my way to wait in line and have prepared everything ahead of time (and, hopefully, remembered it).
Are you certain your vote was counted and not lost? I vote in person because I know when I mail things they don't always get where I intended them to be (and especially when there is a deadline in place)
Just to say it works "asynchronously", too.
Colorado came out way against Trump, though, despite having been a swing state in recent memory.
I think the concern about things getting lost in the mail is reasonable, but is a separate issue; the mail system is supposed to be a highly trustworthy distribution system for sensitive documents. Hell, it's how you get your passport. That's why it's a state department (in the US, anyway) in the first place: it's an essential government function to have a communications channel with a given citizen.
I've been concerned about cuts made to the USPS leading up to the previous election, both because of the obvious impact on the USPS's ability to handle election materials, but also because of the potential impact on the arrival of other essential, time-sensitive documents. (Not essential, but my mother's anniversary card to myself and my partner fully bounced this year, after three weeks in transit. We only live 130 miles apart.)
My point is: threat models that center on the mail system somehow being unreliable are a valid concern, but missing the point.
Mail-in ballots have so many more issues with them - lack of privacy (so more room for coercion and harvesting), they make auditability more difficult.
Regardless of whether you think the relaxed voting requirements of 2020 led to widespread fraud, it inspired enough distrust that both parties should be advocating to bolster the reliability, auditability, and trustworthiness of the voting process, not decrease it further. The only thing that sucks more than losing an election is losing it under suspicious circumstances. Subject people to that enough times, and it doesn't lead anywhere good, regardless of your political team. Instead, create and enforce policies that improve trust rather than erode it.
a) you get bribed by some external sweepstakes or ad or any which way to vote for a candidate you genuinely don't support.
b) you in your home get hit by a vandal with a specific mission to make you vote for their candidate. Remember, this felon does not know when you get your ballot nor when you voted.
Hell, which is more likely to be tracked down? The Musk trials will take months. that felon will be arrested before the week ends.
a) bribing is more probable, happened by foreign country here this Sunday
b) it's a lot more dangerous for the entire society, it's not a vandal in your home, if anonymity is not implemented by voting process, then the local gang leader will force you (and all your neighbors) to vote for him, at the date he will tell you and you won't be able to do anything as he will be in power after these elections and will make possible to fake future elections.
And yes, that gang leader will be caught a lot quicker for voting fraud than any petty turf wars they may ensue.
(a) I don't think it'd be possible to extort votes in this manner in on a significant enough scale to influence an election without it being obvious that it was happening. All it would take is a few people to go "Oh yeah, someone broke into my house and held a gun to my head" to spark an investigation. Moreover, to a degree, this level of coercion is already occurring: a party platform of cutting taxes on your income bracket is effectively a bribe. A party platform that they'll cut healthcare funding if their candidate doesn't take a particular office is a gun to your head.
See also: the publicly known instances of 'vote bribing', e.g. Ben and Jerry's offering free ice cream, or Musk or Cards Against Humanity offering money/tickets/etc to people who have voted/make a plan to vote.
(b) for a vote-extorter, how would you verify that I voted as demanded? what if I don't mail that ballot? what if I deliberately screw up my signature? what if I submit my ballot before you extorted me? what if I vote in person later, invalidating my mail-in ballot? It's possible someone with access to the inner workings of the voting judgement process could detect some of these, but at that point, again, it's already compromised.
(c) If you have the resources to possibly (1) identify vote extortion targets (2) successfully threaten them in such a way that it would influence their vote (3) validate that they did indeed vote as you've demanded, you surely have the resources to attempt a more directed attack on, say, the mail system or the vote system itself. Trying to extort individual citizens en masse would radically increase the odds of detection of your operation.
(d) how do you know your election judges aren't under gunpoint? how do you know they haven't been bribed? Or your county clerk?
As I've said before, coercion doesn't need to be overt to be effective. Just a small amount of social pressure applied over a large number of people is enough to make a significant difference. That's why typically there are laws banning campaigning right outside polling places. Now what if the "polling place" is the entire country, over a period of multiple weeks? How are you going to enforce that?
Consider also that the electorate being able to trust that elections are free and fair is nearly as important as them actually being so. Its not enough to just say "that's probably not happening at sufficient scale to make a difference"; you need to be able to convincingly demonstrate to voters it actually isn't. Having a system that's robust to these types of cheating schemes (as in-person, secret paper ballot elections have been for centuries past) is the best way I know to do that.
Jimmy Carter spoke about this, literally in some town the sheriff watches you vote and chucks it into the trash if you didn't pick their candidate.
There's a whole industry about making fake IDs.
Lets start with, what "system"? There are a ton of governments that issue their own ID cards. Are you magically going to integrate with all of them or does everybody now also need a voter ID card issued from a singular source?
Next lets go onto "verified"? Historically there have been a lot of instances where the wrong black person was arrested because a white cop thought they were the guy in the photo. People cannot verify that a picture matches a face. This is going to lead to a bunch of discrimination complaints. There's also the big issue of people's appearances changing in less than 4 years. Or the simple case of a lot of people look the same and could just use each other's IDs (or get a fake one of that person).
Next lets go onto "just like they do at the airport". You can fly without ID [1] and you also might not be able to scan your ID [2]. They also don't check the photo against the system; just attempt to verify that the ID isn't fake and that the picture on the ID you gave them matches you.
Finally, the overarching idea that "voting by mail introduces fraud". It doesn't. Make a calendar event for ~1.6 months into the future to volunteer at your local election board and you can get first hand experience of the systems that keep 1 vote to 1 person in place even when using different voting methods.
[1]: https://www.tsa.gov/travel/frequently-asked-questions/i-forg...
[2]: https://old.reddit.com/r/delta/comments/1dpodgd/tsa_id_issue...
> There are a ton of governments that issue their own ID cards. Are you magically going to integrate with all of them or does everybody now also need a voter ID card issued from a singular source?
The entire US is now Real ID compliant.
> Next lets go onto "verified"? Historically there have been a lot of instances where the wrong black person was arrested because a white cop thought they were the guy in the photo. People cannot verify that a picture matches a face. This is going to lead to a bunch of discrimination complaints. There's also the big issue of people's appearances changing in less than 4 years. Or the simple case of a lot of people look the same and could just use each other's IDs (or get a fake one of that person).
That's a lot for a HN thread which we aren't going to be able to solve. For purposes of voting, I don't have any real concerns here.
> Next lets go onto "just like they do at the airport". You can fly without ID [1] and you also might not be able to scan your ID [2]. They also don't check the photo against the system; just attempt to verify that the ID isn't fake and that the picture on the ID you gave them matches you.
If we're verifying that the ID isn't fake by scanning it and you want to forge a vote badly enough to get a real, verifiable ID that has been swapped with a photo matching you...we have significantly raised the bar from simply providing any name that hasn't yet been used on a list.
This also makes it a lot harder to infringe of somebody else's right to vote by impersonating them, thus preventing them from being able to vote at all.
> Finally, the overarching idea that "voting by mail introduces fraud". It doesn't.
There have been numerous instances just in the last month of people showing up to vote and being told they've already voted by mail.
There's a big list of security and integrity problems inherent with mail in ballots that do not exist for in person voting.
First and foremost: ballot canvasing.
That is a flaw of the American model of allowing local governments to run state and national elections.
In many other countries, local government has no role to play in non-local elections. All elections are 100% run by either a state or national elections agency.
Look for example at the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC)
Having a common system reduces the variety, but ensures that there is an equivalent amount of resources to deal with adversaries.
For what it’s worth, India which has the most complex election requirements by a mile, uses a single system. Entered as an example of how election services are better delivered using a single system.
Yes. That's where the standards requirements I mentioned come in.
We should be discussing more issues! Why isn't there a candidate saying they'll increase the number of holidays, or making public transportation free, or giving people free dogs. Where is the candidate saying they'll make a 4 day work week a reality?
Conservatives went after the UPS and lobbied to make it harder in some states to vote by mail. They don't want high turnout. It is sadly a partisan point to "go out and vote" even if they want to appear bi-partisan.
> Why isn't there a candidate saying they'll increase the number of holidays, or making public transportation free, or giving people free dogs.
Because business owners lobby and don't want that? Follow the money. We see eve in tech with proof of productivity that companies want people to RTO. How do you think industries outside of tech will feel about making workers work less?
That's a problem in all voting systems (that the optimal strategy for candidates and for voters depends on your perceived knowledge of other voters -- you aren't incentivized to vote for the person who you think is actually best, and as a candidate you aren't incentivized to do what you think is best), ignoring some simplifications that sometimes arise in something simpler than a presidential election.
However, majority-rules voting is particularly bad at it, especially in a lot of real-world preference distributions. If you came out with a new party, magicked up a billion dollars in advertising, and thoroughly convinced the populace that you'd not screw much up and also make a 4-day work week a reality, you'd still likely lose. I might personally vote for you, but I'd bet a lot of money that you wouldn't stand a chance.
It's a little interesting that we have to vote for a single "president". An interesting byproduct is that _most_ people disagree about _most_ of the decisions (even in the same party), despite perhaps favoring them for one or two important reasons. If there were a neat way to divide up the power over education, abortion, ..., you could achieve a majority of people being happy about all of the major issues and maybe have a little more time to talk about some other (comparatively) minor ones.
Between the two party system, swing states, electoral colleges, and Media warfare - policy is irrelevant, and tribalism / vibes are what matter.
Essentially, your candidate could promise to import dissidents, be a tyrant, or contravene the values enshrined in the constitution - and it doesn’t matter.
So a candidate could promise a 4 day work week, but be part of the team with a more constrained media system, and they will lose.
This is wrong. We don’t know how many people voted for democrats or otherwise yet. Heck, California still has millions of votes to count.
Your mistake is that you’re comparing a known total from 2020 to a count in progress from 2024.
It not even guaranteed that Trump will win the popular vote, it depends on how the California votes land.
Well the odds are 1000:1 on Polymarket, so if it's at all possible that's a great bet!
Maybe you do not care.. and I guess you wouldn't have cared about the Holocaust either.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/26/us/los-angeles-times-endo...
Also people vastly underestimate the political calculus in full throated support of Palestinians and by association, Hamas. There is a whole other side of this conflict and that is with Jews who also care about the resolution, but also care about Israel and the fact they've had rockets constantly fired into their territory. They also vote overwhelmingly D. You alienate one group for another and you've made no ground in terms of voter share.
[1] https://dearborn.gov/sites/default/files/2024-11/UNOFFICIAL%...
That's fair. She lost a good number of votes, but 10M+ popular votes? Would that account for it?