2020 US election results discussion

[sooraj]

Wisconsin Presidential Election Results (97% Reported)
#JoeBiden → 49.5% (1,630,337)
#PresidentTrump → 48.8% (1,609,640)

[darshan]

I still can't figure out why anybody would vote for Biden, especially white Americans.

White doesn't mean that they won't vote on the party line. There was a reason why I found this to be a quiet election at work place with no one talking. Everyone was going to be voting down the party line irrespective of candidates. I have white friends whose parents are staunch Republicans but they are staunch Democrats. And all vote the same without looking at candidates. All educated with graduate degrees in highly technical fields and in MIC.

[sooraj]

Nevada Presidential Election Results (86% Reported)
#JoeBiden → 49.3% (588,252)
#PresidentTrump → 48.7% (580,605)

[hanumadu]

Michigan 91% reporting. Trump has .5% lead.

[Sonugn]

Michigan Presidential Election Results (86% Reported)
#PresidentTrump → 49.4% (2,409,844)
#JoeBiden → 48.9% (2,383,359)

Does this include the already cast "mail in votes"?

[AshishA]

US should outsource it's election to Election commission of India. For a country that sends men to moon can't even conduct elections properly.

[Ambar]

The person who is probably laughing the most today is Kamala Harris, she voted 1% in the primaries and now she knows it is her presidency with Biden just rubberstamping. Besides, if Biden wins, at the age of 78 he will be a one term president making the path clear for Kamala in 4 yrs.

The one other person who is mad with anger today other than Donald Trump is Hillary Clinton ! She must be kicking herself for not running !

[arshyam]

Is there no Election commission in the US? Don't bother, rhetorical question.

[sooraj]

Georgia Presidential Election Results (92% Reported)
#PresidentTrump → 50.5% (2,384,301)
#JoeBiden → 48.3% (2,280,541)

[sooraj]

Michigan Presidential Election Results (89% Reported)
#JoeBiden → 49.2% (2,470,704)
#PresidentTrump → 49.2% (2,469,367)

[Aditya_V]

Thats game set and match.

[KL Dubey]

I stand by my "quick check" scenario. Only need to follow 6 states : AZ, FL, GA, NC, OH, PA. Trump needed to win ALL of them. Since he has lost AZ already, he is gone. He did a good job keeping FL and OH, but that's not enough.

MI, NV, and WI will be highly likely Biden, the final results are just a little slow to come in this year due to mail voting.

At this point Joe looks like he has reached 270. Apart from that he still has a very good chance of winning PA (1.7 million votes remaining, mostly from urban areas). And he still has a real chance of flipping GA and NC (again, mostly urban votes remaining to be counted). If those occur, it would be a very convincing victory.

Joe has been haunted by the impression of being "weak". My prediction is that he will work overtime to compensate for that, and adopt policy positions that are not too different from Trump. The difference will be that he'll do things with a smile, and with a touch of humaneness that Trump couldn't project. That counts a lot among women voters, who seem to be the ones that have carried Joe through.

[sudarshan]

Hopefully in a couple of weeks more important considerations will take over in the minds of people in the US, than who is running the country. I mean considerations such as - basting the turkey, the football match, and Black Friday. Indians in the US, keep down, don't be standing around, totally exposed, in Black Friday queues. (Knowing the suicidally trusting bent of Indians, I don't believe they'll take that advice). If you can learn Spanish and pass off as Hispanic, do so. A better bet might be to learn Arabic though.

[pankajs]

2-3 of the Swing states the difference is within 1%.

Expect a recount and a court fight. The tally looks neck to neck and therefore the result cannot be declared without accounting for each swing state.

[Punjabi]

The person who is probably laughing the most today is Kamala Harris, she voted 1% in the primaries and now she knows it is her presidency with Biden just rubberstamping. Besides, if Biden wins, at the age of 78 he will be a one term president making the path clear for Kamala in 4 yrs.

The one other person who is mad with anger today other than Donald Trump is Hillary Clinton ! She must be kicking herself for not running !

I see this as a Obama doing...Biden is old, likely won't last 4 years in office. Black 'woman' becomes POTUS. He fancies her also. Mission accomplished. Bad for India anyway...the day Dems are sworn in, they'll attack NaMO to protect their favorite children in India...and Swinelets will be smiling and get some free military aid and continue to kill Indians...On the surface they'll pay lip service of usual BS of 2 democracies crap!

[Punjabi]

I stand by my "quick check" scenario. Only need to follow 6 states : AZ, FL, GA, NC, OH, PA. Trump needed to win ALL of them. Since he has lost AZ already, he is gone. He did a good job keeping FL and OH, but that's not enough.

MI, NV, and WI will be highly likely Biden, the final results are just a little slow to come in this year due to mail voting.

At this point Joe looks like he has reached 270. Apart from that he still has a very good chance of winning PA (1.7 million votes remaining, mostly from urban areas). And he still has a real chance of flipping GA and NC (again, mostly urban votes remaining to be counted). If those occur, it would be a very convincing victory.

Joe has been haunted by the impression of being "weak". My prediction is that he will work overtime to compensate for that, and adopt policy positions that are not too different from Trump. The difference will be that he'll do things with a smile, and with a touch of humaneness that Trump couldn't project. That counts a lot among women voters, who seem to be the ones that have carried Joe through.

Loss of Arizona was a dagger in Trump's backside... Biden is a career politician, will do nothing...after watching and often voting Dem, I have 0 faith in Dems doing anything for Indian Americans and generally speaking...

[sooraj]

On a campaign call with reporters, Bill Stepien says Wisconsin is a tight race within 1% and that is "recount territory" while in Michigan there are republican counties still left to be counted

[Dilbu]

[vijayk]

On a campaign call with reporters, Bill Stepien says Wisconsin is a tight race within 1% and that is "recount territory" while in Michigan there are republican counties still left to be counted

tension tension tension

[sooraj]

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
Last night I was leading, often solidly, in many key States, in almost all instances Democrat run & controlled. Then, one by one, they started to magically disappear as surprise ballot dumps were counted. VERY STRANGE, and the “pollsters” got it completely & historically wrong!

[yensoy]

Its no secret that the urban class that predominantly votes democratic prefers mail-in ballots to save time and minimize exposure, and these ballots are being counted now.

[Suraj]

I'd dump any 'historical theory' in the context of the elections. As in Indian opinion polls, the US pollsters have been wrong at both macro and state level so far into counting - often by several percentage points, e.g. in Florida. Covid affected everyone's approach, not just Democrats. It seems the election result will depend on WI and MI wafer thin margins and will lead to the courts.

[SBajwa]

Its no secret that the urban class that predominantly votes democratic prefers mail-in ballots to save time and minimize exposure, and these ballots are being counted now.

Nothing like that. This year the mail in ballots and ballots at polling station were
like a answer sheet where you fill in the circle next to your choice.
Then you walk over to the scanner machine that takes your paper scans it and tells you on screen whether counted or not.
So I had hoped that they were scanning those mailed in ballots much earlier than on November 3rd. why not?

There could be another reason where they are tallying/checking paper ballots with the scanned machine ballots and validating them.

There should be no delay., especially when NY and CAlifornia have already declared while Florida, PA, Mi, Wi, Nevada, etc. are waiting and waiting for what?

[vera_k]

^ There's no uniform process across the country. NY and CA have not reported results officially, but observers are assuming they will not flip the other way round given votes currently counted, and on historical trend as to what counties vote what way.

Going by past record, counties with Dem elections officials will keep finding votes until Trump is out. One reason why lots of litigation is expected.

[KL Dubey]

Loss of Arizona was a dagger in Trump's backside... Biden is a career politician, will do nothing...after watching and often voting Dem, I have 0 faith in Dems doing anything for Indian Americans and generally speaking...

I am not sure what Joe (or any president) is supposed to specially do for Indian-Americans, who are not my concern at all (I am not Indian-American). I haven't been following the requests/demands of Indian-Americans (do they have a list ?), and good luck to them....I do know that Asian-Americans sent a list of demands to both candidates and only Biden responded promising to do something. Trump did not respond.

In terms of India and Indians, some issues:

- Trump had promised to deliver a much better immigration system based on merit (both employment and family). Based on what was claimed, it would dramatically increase the speed of this by eliminating competition with illiterate Mexicans/Filipinos. This has not materialized. I do think the bill will be modified and introduced by the house. It is not really a Biden issue.

- Trump administration has recently introduced a series of really irritating visa rules and regulations targeting H-1B, F, and J visas...a lot of these professionals, scientists, and students are Indians. I do hope Biden will drop or roll back these dramas. Courts have already invalidated most of these rules, but still it leaves a very sour taste in the mouth.

- Against China, the Trump administration has supported strongly, but I expect continuity especially since this support is not ad hoc but based upon signed agreements and strategic purpose. Also, it has mainly been Pompeo driving this and I am not sure if Trump has played a strong role beyond telling Pompeo to "go screw China however you can".

[suryag]

Biden will make it the leads are growing in wimi

[darshan]

Many contested areas didn't have meaningful early voting mechanisms. People rather utilize those than mail in. When you don't have a choice, then you're stuck with mail in ballots and hoping that it arrives to you and goes back to the counting box. There's to be a choice available to come to conclusion that many preferred mail in ballots.

[KL Dubey]

There should be no delay., especially when NY and CAlifornia have already declared while Florida, PA, Mi, Wi, Nevada, etc. are waiting and waiting for what?

Lots of confusion in the posts...so far there is no evidence of any fraud. It is simple counting, especially the huge number of mail ballots this year.

CA and NY have NOT officially declared. Who told you that ? Both states have only counted about 65% of the vote. No state secretary can announce a result till votes are full counted.

But all news channels/pollsters have correctly declared the winner in NY and CA because these states are so gadhaa-leaning that getting 50% of the vote numbers is all you need to make a 100% certain prediction. The wait is invariably in the states where the contest is close and you really need >95-99% votes counted for predicting a result confidently. This occurs in every election in the US, nothing special this time.

[arshyam]

I think this thread can be a good compendium of atrocity literature about the US's broken election system. As vera_k said above "Dem" (or rep, for that matter) controlled election officials - how can anyone claim to be neutral with such a setup? And these are the guys who lecture everyone else about democracy and freedom...duh. So much for the land of the free and what not. Contrast this to how the much-maligned Bihar is going about the assembly elections.

Sorry folks, enjoying my schadenfreude onlee...

[darshan]

You're certainly correct. There's lot to desire given the resources at disposal.

[KL Dubey]

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
Last night I was leading, often solidly, in many key States, in almost all instances Democrat run & controlled. Then, one by one, they started to magically disappear as surprise ballot dumps were counted. VERY STRANGE, and the “pollsters” got it completely & historically wrong!

Now this is totally stupid of Trump. The leads are disappearing because most of the remaining votes are from highly-populated urban areas that almost invariably ride a donkey and not an elephant. These areas have the most counting workload and the number of election personnel doesn't scale linearly with the workload, especially with all the mail ballots!

[vera_k]

It's a valid point given that the rules are not uniform. For example, if a ballot does not have a post mark and shows up for a count, it is presumed in some places to have been cast before the deadline .

[arshyam]

I think this thread can be a good compendium of atrocity literature about the US's broken election system.

To start with, Wiki chacha says the following:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections ... ion_system

In the US, elections are actually conducted by local authorities, working under local, state, and federal law and regulation, as well as the US Constitution. It is a highly decentralized system.[28]

In around half of US states, the secretary of state is the official in charge of elections; in other states it is someone appointed for the job, or a commission.[28] It is this person or commission who is responsible for certifying, tabulating, and reporting votes for the state

Further reading under the Criticism section says:

As detailed in a state-by-state breakdown,[36] the United States has a long-standing tradition of publicly announcing the incomplete, unofficial vote counts on election night (the late evening of election day) despite that many of the mail-in and absentee votes have not been counted yet.[36] In some states, in fact, none of them have yet been counted by that time.[36] This tradition was based on the assumption that the incomplete, unofficial count on election night is probably going to match the official count, which is officially finished and certified several weeks later. An intrinsic weakness of this assumption, and of the tradition of premature announcements based on it, is that the public is likely to misapprehend that particular candidates have certainly won before any official vote count has been completed, whereas in fact all that is truly known is that those candidates have some degree of likelihood of having won; the magnitude of the likelihood (all the way from very reliable to not reliable at all) varies by state because the details of election procedures vary by state.[36] This problem affects all non–in-person votes, even those cast weeks before election day—not just late-arriving ones.

In 2014 scientists from Princeton University did a study on the influence of the "elite", and their derived power from special interest lobbying, versus the "ordinary" US citizen within the US political system. They found that the US was looking more like an oligarchy than a real representative democracy; thus eroding a government of the people, by the people, for the people as stated by Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address. In fact, the study found that average citizens had an almost nonexistent influence on public policies and that the ordinary citizen had little or no independent influence on policy at all.[37]

There were many US presidential elections in which foreign countries manipulate the voters.[38] The Electoral College is criticised for being un-democratic as well (it can choose a candidate who did not win the popular vote) and for encouraging campaigns to only focus on swing states.[39]

Allegations of voter impersonation, of which there are only 31 documented cases in the United States from the 2000–2014 period, have led to calls for Voter ID laws in the United States.[40]

Notable instances of allegations of stolen elections and election fraud include the 1948 United States Senate election in Texas, in which 202 "patently fraudulent"[41]:608 ballots gave future President Lyndon Johnson a seat in the US Senate and the 2018 North Carolina 9th congressional district election in which ballot tampering was admitted in witness testimony, including filling in blank votes to favor Republican candidates.[42]

Sanford Levinson argues that next to the fact that campaign financing and gerrymandering are seen as serious problems for democracy, also one of the root causes of the American democratic deficit lies in the United States Constitution itself,[43] for example there is a lack of proportional representation in the Senate for highly populated states such as California.[44]

The first-past-the-post system has also been criticized for creating a de-facto two-party system (as postulated in Duverger's law) that suppresses voices that do not hold views consistent with the largest faction in a particular party, as well as limiting voters' choices in elections.

So, if the highly editorialized Wikipedia itself sounds so critical, one can safely assume the ground reality is even worse. For example, elections in poorer (read coloured) areas tend to have poor voting equipment, making a valid ballot a hit or miss. I recall reading about punch-card based voting machines (not sure if used now) that used to be poorly serviced and calibrated, so the voter's choice would get punched against the wrong candidate or between two candidates' names, making the ballot invalid. Then the lack of transparency in counting, most famously seen in Florida 2001, is another feather in the cap.

These are the issues I could recall off the top of my mind, looking forward to more detailed write-ups/articles/experiences on these points.

[arshyam]

I am quite genuinely surprised that a proud democracy didn't think to have a neutral election authority, which is a rather basic requirement for a free and fair election. I wonder if the usual European busybodies send observers to "observe" the US elections for fairness? They seem to do this for a lot of "third world" countries, whereas their gaze should start with the comfy environs to their west... Seems long overdue now.

[Ambar]

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
Last night I was leading, often solidly, in many key States, in almost all instances Democrat run & controlled. Then, one by one, they started to magically disappear as surprise ballot dumps were counted. VERY STRANGE, and the “pollsters” got it completely & historically wrong!

Now this is totally stupid of Trump. The leads are disappearing because most of the remaining votes are from highly-populated urban areas that almost invariably ride a donkey and not an elephant. These areas have the most counting workload and the number of election personnel doesn't scale linearly with the workload, especially with all the mail ballots!

That is not the point, the point is they keep "finding" stacks of new ballot that they claim were uncounted previously. In MI they pulled something off which is statistically impossible unless i am misunderstand it , i.e. ~140000 ballots that were counted past midnight were all for Biden with 0 for Trump. There are issues where Philly seems to have allowed people to vote after the official close of polling station, NC which has allowed people to vote without IDs, and AZ where ballots filled with sharpies are being discounted. This is like Bihar and UP elections of the 90s.

[vijayk]

If Nevada changes,T has a chance otherwise he is done if he loses MI/WI and even if he wins NC, GA, PA, NC also

[darshan]

NC which has allowed people to vote without IDs

This is where I was getting most text messages not addressed to me. It's ridiculous to not have any system to cross check if any information of mine was associated to some other voter. Especially places where rules of voting are so relaxed.

[sudarshan]

That is not the point, the point is they keep "finding" stacks of new ballot that they claim were uncounted previously. In MI they pulled something off which is statistically impossible unless i am misunderstand it , i.e. ~140000 ballots that were counted past midnight were all for Biden with 0 for Trump. There are issues where Philly seems to have allowed people to vote after the official close of polling station, NC which has allowed people to vote without IDs, and AZ where ballots filled with sharpies are being discounted. This is like Bihar and UP elections of the 90s.

Any references or at least pointers to this 140,000 ballots thingy? Not saying it can't be true, but that's a serious allegation of outright fraud, if there's some documentation of it, that would be so much better.

[A Sharma]

I voted in PA with no ID check

[Zynda]

It seems like Biden has won WI with a margin of around 20k votes. So, is the final nail on the coffin for Trump's chances?