7 ms·

> That really can't be noted enough. That the count took so long is specifically because several legislatures decided to not allow any preprocessing of mail bal

by barumi 6y ago

> That really can't be noted enough. That the count took so long is specifically because several legislatures decided to not allow any preprocessing of mail ballots, and to count mail ballots last. Indeed this bears repeating. The whole process mounting to the election day was engineered to sabotage and outright throw out votes from the opposition, even if that comes at the expense of the core principles of the whole political system.

slg 6y ago
I really wonder how good faith conservatives can view these actions positively. One side tries to make it easier, safer, and quicker to vote. One side is trying the opposite. The only explanation they can come up with is voter fraud which has not been found to be a widescale problem by nearly every group that has looked into it.
- Master_Odin 6y ago
  They and their base are not operating in good faith. Trump and other high level GOP very publicly stated that doing these sorts of things to improve voting would only help Democrats and that's why they're opposed. The Us vs Them mentality that increasingly and openly permeates through politics is a cancer to the US' future.
  - slg 6y ago
    >They and their base are not operating in good faith. There are certainly some people and perhaps even most people in that group, however there are also still millions of people who do actually believe in small government. Do these people think that winning elections is more important than democracy or is there some reason that they have used to convince themselves that it is okay to make it harder to vote?
    - augustt 6y ago
      I suppose they genuinely believe easier voting brings with it massive fraud. Of course no amount of evidence will convince them otherwise - keep in mind this is the same party that just put a QAnon supporter in congress.
- garmaine 6y ago
  Yes, quite easily: you don’t want election results leaking and being reported early, while the polls are still open. This can spoil the results of the election. If you don’t count the votes until Election Day, that’s a lot easier to guarantee.
  - giantg2 6y ago
    Now if only they follow this for primaries. I'm tired of the first few states having 4-8 options and the last states might have 2-3 if they're lucky.
    - city41 6y ago
      Not to mention the arbitrary power given to stated during primaries merely by when they vote. Why does Iowa, a state that is over 90% white, get to influence the nomination that much?
  - Xylakant 6y ago
    No one asked for vote counting before Election Day. All that needed to happen was the preprocessing that mail-in ballots require. They need to be verified against voter lists, sorted by voting place etc. None of this even touches the actual ballot, but it requires substantial amounts of time.
    - garmaine 6y ago
      That by itself reveals A LOT of meta information that could be used to gauge outcomes and for a campaign to react accordingly. A campaign that knew which voters had returned ballots could look up their party registration and district and then use that for highly targeted voter turnout or suppression on the day of the election. Enough to turn the tide of a close election like this.
      - Xylakant 6y ago
        Is there any evidence any of this data has been available - let alone been used - for a campaign in any of the states that do preprocess mail-in votes? Because doing so in order to shift a few ten thousand votes would leave quite a bit of a trace.
- mixmastamyk 6y ago
  The ideas are simply not discussed on corporate media, so most folks don't think about them.
- giantg2 6y ago
  It's really the same on either side. It just changes with the circumstances. Some of the same people claiming the integrity of the vote shouldn't be questioned were the same people claiming the 2016 vote was compromised. And vice versa.
  - slg 6y ago
    Can you point to any mainstream democrat who made accusations that voters were changed or forged in 2016? Democrats were claiming the process was compromised. I don't remember anyone seriously questioning the integrity of the votes themselves.
    - giantg2 6y ago
      The claims weren't just that the system was compromised, but also that votes were manipulated or suppressed. Harry Reid made claims that the vote totals were manipulated. On a side note... thank you. At least you asked a question about my position rather than simply downvoting without an explanation.
      - slg 6y ago
        Mea culpa, I was wrong to say "no mainstream democrat", but that was a single retired congressperson. The Republicans now also have two members of Congress who believe that Democrats participate in ritual sacrifice of children to drink their blood so maybe we shouldn't focus on the extreme minority opinions of these parties. Voter fraud is a rallying cry of a large percentage of the Republican party. Votes being changed in 2016 or any other election is not a major rallying cry of a large percentage of the Democratic party.
        giantg2 6y ago
        I believe he was an active US senator at the time (2015-2016). I forget if he was majority leader or minority whip, it if that was during a different part of his tenure. I do agree that it seemed somewhat isolated in official statements. I did hear quite a few individuals in my personal life believe/state that since the system was compromised that must mean the votes/count must have been changed. I can see how the fraud claim is popular - if you're losing the popular vote consistently due to (simplistically) higher urban population, you might look for something to use as an excuse. This makes an easy excuse since in your constituent areas (rural) you would have the observation bias that almost everyone you know voted for your candidate and still lost. Sloppy voting system maintenance supplies plenty of anecdotal things to point to, like dead people kn the voting role.
- wbl 6y ago
  Voter fraud isn't made any harder or easier by checking incoming ballots as they come in against the voter list and sorting them by precinct ahead of time.
  - slg 6y ago
    To be clear I am talking about their entire approach to voting and not just counting them. Limiting mail in ballots, limiting early voting, limiting polling places, pushing for voter ID, pushing for a more proactive pruning of voter rolls, pushing against same day voter registration, and simply requiring registration at all. One side wants more people to vote and one side wants less people to vote. I can't get over how that latter side isn't considered un-American.
    - bavell 6y ago
      Please don't misinterpret a vocal minority as the will of 50% of the country. We all want every vote to be counted. There's a lot of drama and accusations flying around with emotions running hot.
      - slg 6y ago
        I am not judging the people of this country. I am judging the actions of one of its political parties. I am asking how the people who support this party can justify the party's policies.
      - pjc50 6y ago
        Plenty of people vote for Republicans who blatently don't want every vote to be counted. If you want every vote to be counted, stop voting for those candidates.
      - grahamburger 6y ago
        The most vocal of those minorities happens to be commander in chief of the world strongest, most heavily armed military. That makes the drama harder to ignore.
- hpoe 6y ago
  Okay this will probably not be popular but I am what I consider a good faith conservative so I'll answer your points in reverse order. 1st: "Every group that has looked into it" and "widespread". First at this point I don't trust many of the groups and institutions, because I have repeatedly over the past 4 years seen various groups act in a concerted manner to try and slander, libel and misrepresent trump while trying to drive people to be angry and irrational about. There have been multiple I've seen things reported that I've said to myself. "Okay if Trump really said that then I am way off of supporting him" but then I go look at the actual remarks and it is radically different from what he said. Any else remember a 2 week news cycle on whether or not cofeve was a racist dog whistle? Ultimately at the end of this my faith in mant previously authoritative institutions has been shaken. Also I don't know anyone that is claiming "widespread" voter fraud, no one believes there was "widespread" voter fraud in this election it was targeted specific voter fraud at particular places and counties is the contention. Everyone knew going into this what states needed to be won for biden to win. Many of these states were decided by less than 10,000 votes. In response to your contention about being against making it easier to vote. The fact of the matter is that the more room for error in the voting process the less likely people are to trust the outcome. If we imagine for a second we lived in a non-Covid world right now and there everyone voted like normal do you believe as many people would doubt the veracity of the election? Ultimately I consider integrity of the election to be of higher value than ease of access, because it doesn't matter who gets to vote if no one trusts the process. Again you asked how could a good faith conservative believe this. This is how, I could be wrong I could be off, but that is how I see things right now. Maybe that'll change but for right now that's how I reconcile being good faith and conservative.
  - lisper 6y ago
    > I am what I consider a good faith conservative > I don't know anyone that is claiming "widespread" voter fraud This makes it very hard for me to take your claim of good faith seriously. Yes, perhaps the exact word "widespread" did not come out of Donald Trump's mouth, but there can be no doubt in anyone's mind (if they are indeed dealing in good faith) that Donald Trump has in fact been consistently and emphatically -- and, most important, falsely -- alleging wide spread voter fraud. Try doing a web search for "trump claims wide spread voter fraud" if you don't believe me.
- aksss 6y ago
  “Widespread” and “nearly every” are notable wiggle words. In a tight election in a few states swung by a few counties, “widespread” has never been a requirement. Anyone can be forgiven for doubting the integrity of our election process in the face of worrying anecdote. The answer isn’t to call for blind faith by ignoring the red flags, but to shore up the process and improve its systemic integrity. What would your standard be if this concerned the finances of your own company? You wouldn’t be telling the organization to not worry and ignore warning signs. Some states eliminated witness signature requirements on absentee ballots; some states allowed new votes with no postmark up to a week after the election; videos showing the eviction of poll watchers, political placards posted at the entry of polling places; a “reporting error” with an extra zero corrected only after being called on it, software “glitches” resulting in 3000-vote over-count in one county corrected only after being challenged; a box of ballots produced after Election Day, 100% of whose contents went to one candidate; counting paused in the middle of the night. None of it helped by being refereed by a media plurality that clearly wanted a specific outcome all year. There’s enough widespread questionable anecdote to warrant a top to bottom audit, which nobody can afford. Every time the media (trusted by the public less than Catholic priests and politicians, btw) says there’s “no evidence of widespread fraud” in the face of this, it doesn’t help - it only raises another red flag. And this isn’t just the Presidential election, btw. That we are incapable of building and executing a process with inherent integrity is getting increasingly risky/dangerous.
  - slg 6y ago
    Biden is winning PA by 30k, MI by 150k, and WI by 20k. That alone wins it. It seems there would have needed to be 200k fraudulent votes for this election to have been changed. How is that not "widespread"? Also it isn't just the media that investigates voter fraud. Academics and political institutions have looked into it also and not found a problem. Trump's Administration even looked into it and couldn't find any significant problem. Is there anyone who you would trust that could certify this isn't a problem?
    - aksss 6y ago
      Pennies make dollars, baby. Instead of saying, we see no evidence of widespread fraud - where we have no idea in what context you’re using the word - let’s turn the conversation to making solid attestations about the integrity of the processes, which we certainly don’t hear. Instead we hear “don’t worry about it”. I think the accounting analogy is the best suited. You won’t say, with whistleblower reports in hand, that there’s no evidence of _widespread_ problems and leave it at that. The presence of recurring whistleblower reports about financial irregularities demands a different conversation: these are the preventative and detective controls we will put in place, and here’s the evidence that they worked, such that we can be assured a high degree of integrity in what we’re reporting. Right now, the evidence doesn’t even exist to be challenged. Party A puts the onus on Party B to prove that ballots without postmarks weren’t submitted on time and then say there’s no evidence of a problem. No, the problem in that example is the lack of postmarks to even begin to evaluate the suitability of the ballots. It’s hard to interpret the willful reticence to have this kind of conversation as a nation, especially because the shoe can absolutely be on the other foot some day. When the integrity of the institution is in question, the right response isn’t to tell people to look the other way. What I’m trying to convey is that nobody believes that a talking head on the news has any authority or personal expertise to tell people “everything’s fine” when the anecdotes just keep coming, particularly in places run by people with a conflict of interest in the outcome. You ask what authority would have credibility to be taken on their word that everything’s fine. The right question is how do we demonstrate that the processes have integrity. How do we increase the integrity of the processes such that we’re not relying on me accepting integrity on faith. You used the word “certify”. That’s a good word and we should dig into the strength behind those attestations. Right now they’re based on very weak control structures.
- sagichmal 6y ago
  > The only explanation they can come up with is voter fraud which has not been found to be a widescale problem by nearly every group that has looked into it. Not "nearly" every group. Every group. Election fraud is effectively nonexistent.
zepto 6y ago
There are plenty of things that were clear sabotage. Not tallying votes early doesn’t seem so clear cut to me. The argument is that if early vote counts came out in favor of Biden it could suppress voter turnout on the Republican side. I don’t know if that’s actually how it would have played out, but it does seem reasonable not to have results start to be reported before everyone has made their choice. More independence is generally better in voting systems.
- Xylakant 6y ago
  There’s a lot of work that needs to be done for mail-in votes. I only have first-hand experience with the German voting system, but from what I read the US system is similar: The actual ballot is in a sealed envelope. This envelope together with a signed paper (“Wahlschein” in Germany) is in a second envelope that goes in the mail. The process of counting that vote starts with opening the outer envelope and verifying that the ballot was issued to the person signing. Then verify that the inner envelope is properly sealed to ensure that the vote is actually secret. Collect the inner envelope with the actual filled-in ballot. No counting has happened yet, but this verification costs considerable time. All of this could be done even before Election Day with no effect on voter suppression - no one at that point can actually know the vote. In theory, even counting could be done as long as no result is leaked, though there’d be a risk. Explicitly not allowing the preprocessing - and as far as I followed the news, that’s what happened in PA - seems like a pretty clear cut case of “we want to draw the count out.” to me.
- relaxing 6y ago
  Plenty of states already count ballots early without leaks. If that can’t be trusted, can any aspect of the process? Even if a minority of the vote was known, how different would that be from public polling that also represent a slice of the electorate (which also is likely not 100% representative of the actual results.)
  - zepto 6y ago
    Well at the point I think everyone knows that polls can be way off. Of course a small sample of votes is likely to be too, but we aren’t talking about statistical inference here, we talking about political perception.

by barumi 6y ago

slg 6y ago

I really wonder how good faith conservatives can view these actions positively. One side tries to make it easier, safer, and quicker to vote. One side is trying the opposite. The only explanation they can come up with is voter fraud which has not been found to be a widescale problem by nearly every group that has looked into it.

Master_Odin 6y ago
They and their base are not operating in good faith. Trump and other high level GOP very publicly stated that doing these sorts of things to improve voting would only help Democrats and that's why they're opposed. The Us vs Them mentality that increasingly and openly permeates through politics is a cancer to the US' future.
- slg 6y ago
  >They and their base are not operating in good faith. There are certainly some people and perhaps even most people in that group, however there are also still millions of people who do actually believe in small government. Do these people think that winning elections is more important than democracy or is there some reason that they have used to convince themselves that it is okay to make it harder to vote?
  - augustt 6y ago
    I suppose they genuinely believe easier voting brings with it massive fraud. Of course no amount of evidence will convince them otherwise - keep in mind this is the same party that just put a QAnon supporter in congress.
garmaine 6y ago
Yes, quite easily: you don’t want election results leaking and being reported early, while the polls are still open. This can spoil the results of the election. If you don’t count the votes until Election Day, that’s a lot easier to guarantee.
- giantg2 6y ago
  Now if only they follow this for primaries. I'm tired of the first few states having 4-8 options and the last states might have 2-3 if they're lucky.
  - city41 6y ago
    Not to mention the arbitrary power given to stated during primaries merely by when they vote. Why does Iowa, a state that is over 90% white, get to influence the nomination that much?
- Xylakant 6y ago
  No one asked for vote counting before Election Day. All that needed to happen was the preprocessing that mail-in ballots require. They need to be verified against voter lists, sorted by voting place etc. None of this even touches the actual ballot, but it requires substantial amounts of time.
  - garmaine 6y ago
    That by itself reveals A LOT of meta information that could be used to gauge outcomes and for a campaign to react accordingly. A campaign that knew which voters had returned ballots could look up their party registration and district and then use that for highly targeted voter turnout or suppression on the day of the election. Enough to turn the tide of a close election like this.
    - Xylakant 6y ago
      Is there any evidence any of this data has been available - let alone been used - for a campaign in any of the states that do preprocess mail-in votes? Because doing so in order to shift a few ten thousand votes would leave quite a bit of a trace.
mixmastamyk 6y ago
The ideas are simply not discussed on corporate media, so most folks don't think about them.
giantg2 6y ago
It's really the same on either side. It just changes with the circumstances. Some of the same people claiming the integrity of the vote shouldn't be questioned were the same people claiming the 2016 vote was compromised. And vice versa.
- slg 6y ago
  Can you point to any mainstream democrat who made accusations that voters were changed or forged in 2016? Democrats were claiming the process was compromised. I don't remember anyone seriously questioning the integrity of the votes themselves.
  - giantg2 6y ago
    The claims weren't just that the system was compromised, but also that votes were manipulated or suppressed. Harry Reid made claims that the vote totals were manipulated. On a side note... thank you. At least you asked a question about my position rather than simply downvoting without an explanation.
    - slg 6y ago
      Mea culpa, I was wrong to say "no mainstream democrat", but that was a single retired congressperson. The Republicans now also have two members of Congress who believe that Democrats participate in ritual sacrifice of children to drink their blood so maybe we shouldn't focus on the extreme minority opinions of these parties. Voter fraud is a rallying cry of a large percentage of the Republican party. Votes being changed in 2016 or any other election is not a major rallying cry of a large percentage of the Democratic party.
      - giantg2 6y ago
        I believe he was an active US senator at the time (2015-2016). I forget if he was majority leader or minority whip, it if that was during a different part of his tenure. I do agree that it seemed somewhat isolated in official statements. I did hear quite a few individuals in my personal life believe/state that since the system was compromised that must mean the votes/count must have been changed. I can see how the fraud claim is popular - if you're losing the popular vote consistently due to (simplistically) higher urban population, you might look for something to use as an excuse. This makes an easy excuse since in your constituent areas (rural) you would have the observation bias that almost everyone you know voted for your candidate and still lost. Sloppy voting system maintenance supplies plenty of anecdotal things to point to, like dead people kn the voting role.
wbl 6y ago
Voter fraud isn't made any harder or easier by checking incoming ballots as they come in against the voter list and sorting them by precinct ahead of time.
- slg 6y ago
  To be clear I am talking about their entire approach to voting and not just counting them. Limiting mail in ballots, limiting early voting, limiting polling places, pushing for voter ID, pushing for a more proactive pruning of voter rolls, pushing against same day voter registration, and simply requiring registration at all. One side wants more people to vote and one side wants less people to vote. I can't get over how that latter side isn't considered un-American.
  - bavell 6y ago
    Please don't misinterpret a vocal minority as the will of 50% of the country. We all want every vote to be counted. There's a lot of drama and accusations flying around with emotions running hot.
    - slg 6y ago
      I am not judging the people of this country. I am judging the actions of one of its political parties. I am asking how the people who support this party can justify the party's policies.
    - pjc50 6y ago
      Plenty of people vote for Republicans who blatently don't want every vote to be counted. If you want every vote to be counted, stop voting for those candidates.
    - grahamburger 6y ago
      The most vocal of those minorities happens to be commander in chief of the world strongest, most heavily armed military. That makes the drama harder to ignore.
hpoe 6y ago
Okay this will probably not be popular but I am what I consider a good faith conservative so I'll answer your points in reverse order. 1st: "Every group that has looked into it" and "widespread". First at this point I don't trust many of the groups and institutions, because I have repeatedly over the past 4 years seen various groups act in a concerted manner to try and slander, libel and misrepresent trump while trying to drive people to be angry and irrational about. There have been multiple I've seen things reported that I've said to myself. "Okay if Trump really said that then I am way off of supporting him" but then I go look at the actual remarks and it is radically different from what he said. Any else remember a 2 week news cycle on whether or not cofeve was a racist dog whistle? Ultimately at the end of this my faith in mant previously authoritative institutions has been shaken. Also I don't know anyone that is claiming "widespread" voter fraud, no one believes there was "widespread" voter fraud in this election it was targeted specific voter fraud at particular places and counties is the contention. Everyone knew going into this what states needed to be won for biden to win. Many of these states were decided by less than 10,000 votes. In response to your contention about being against making it easier to vote. The fact of the matter is that the more room for error in the voting process the less likely people are to trust the outcome. If we imagine for a second we lived in a non-Covid world right now and there everyone voted like normal do you believe as many people would doubt the veracity of the election? Ultimately I consider integrity of the election to be of higher value than ease of access, because it doesn't matter who gets to vote if no one trusts the process. Again you asked how could a good faith conservative believe this. This is how, I could be wrong I could be off, but that is how I see things right now. Maybe that'll change but for right now that's how I reconcile being good faith and conservative.
- lisper 6y ago
  > I am what I consider a good faith conservative > I don't know anyone that is claiming "widespread" voter fraud This makes it very hard for me to take your claim of good faith seriously. Yes, perhaps the exact word "widespread" did not come out of Donald Trump's mouth, but there can be no doubt in anyone's mind (if they are indeed dealing in good faith) that Donald Trump has in fact been consistently and emphatically -- and, most important, falsely -- alleging wide spread voter fraud. Try doing a web search for "trump claims wide spread voter fraud" if you don't believe me.
aksss 6y ago
“Widespread” and “nearly every” are notable wiggle words. In a tight election in a few states swung by a few counties, “widespread” has never been a requirement. Anyone can be forgiven for doubting the integrity of our election process in the face of worrying anecdote. The answer isn’t to call for blind faith by ignoring the red flags, but to shore up the process and improve its systemic integrity. What would your standard be if this concerned the finances of your own company? You wouldn’t be telling the organization to not worry and ignore warning signs. Some states eliminated witness signature requirements on absentee ballots; some states allowed new votes with no postmark up to a week after the election; videos showing the eviction of poll watchers, political placards posted at the entry of polling places; a “reporting error” with an extra zero corrected only after being called on it, software “glitches” resulting in 3000-vote over-count in one county corrected only after being challenged; a box of ballots produced after Election Day, 100% of whose contents went to one candidate; counting paused in the middle of the night. None of it helped by being refereed by a media plurality that clearly wanted a specific outcome all year. There’s enough widespread questionable anecdote to warrant a top to bottom audit, which nobody can afford. Every time the media (trusted by the public less than Catholic priests and politicians, btw) says there’s “no evidence of widespread fraud” in the face of this, it doesn’t help - it only raises another red flag. And this isn’t just the Presidential election, btw. That we are incapable of building and executing a process with inherent integrity is getting increasingly risky/dangerous.
- slg 6y ago
  Biden is winning PA by 30k, MI by 150k, and WI by 20k. That alone wins it. It seems there would have needed to be 200k fraudulent votes for this election to have been changed. How is that not "widespread"? Also it isn't just the media that investigates voter fraud. Academics and political institutions have looked into it also and not found a problem. Trump's Administration even looked into it and couldn't find any significant problem. Is there anyone who you would trust that could certify this isn't a problem?
  - aksss 6y ago
    Pennies make dollars, baby. Instead of saying, we see no evidence of widespread fraud - where we have no idea in what context you’re using the word - let’s turn the conversation to making solid attestations about the integrity of the processes, which we certainly don’t hear. Instead we hear “don’t worry about it”. I think the accounting analogy is the best suited. You won’t say, with whistleblower reports in hand, that there’s no evidence of _widespread_ problems and leave it at that. The presence of recurring whistleblower reports about financial irregularities demands a different conversation: these are the preventative and detective controls we will put in place, and here’s the evidence that they worked, such that we can be assured a high degree of integrity in what we’re reporting. Right now, the evidence doesn’t even exist to be challenged. Party A puts the onus on Party B to prove that ballots without postmarks weren’t submitted on time and then say there’s no evidence of a problem. No, the problem in that example is the lack of postmarks to even begin to evaluate the suitability of the ballots. It’s hard to interpret the willful reticence to have this kind of conversation as a nation, especially because the shoe can absolutely be on the other foot some day. When the integrity of the institution is in question, the right response isn’t to tell people to look the other way. What I’m trying to convey is that nobody believes that a talking head on the news has any authority or personal expertise to tell people “everything’s fine” when the anecdotes just keep coming, particularly in places run by people with a conflict of interest in the outcome. You ask what authority would have credibility to be taken on their word that everything’s fine. The right question is how do we demonstrate that the processes have integrity. How do we increase the integrity of the processes such that we’re not relying on me accepting integrity on faith. You used the word “certify”. That’s a good word and we should dig into the strength behind those attestations. Right now they’re based on very weak control structures.
sagichmal 6y ago
> The only explanation they can come up with is voter fraud which has not been found to be a widescale problem by nearly every group that has looked into it. Not "nearly" every group. Every group. Election fraud is effectively nonexistent.

zepto 6y ago

There are plenty of things that were clear sabotage. Not tallying votes early doesn’t seem so clear cut to me. The argument is that if early vote counts came out in favor of Biden it could suppress voter turnout on the Republican side. I don’t know if that’s actually how it would have played out, but it does seem reasonable not to have results start to be reported before everyone has made their choice. More independence is generally better in voting systems.

Xylakant 6y ago
There’s a lot of work that needs to be done for mail-in votes. I only have first-hand experience with the German voting system, but from what I read the US system is similar: The actual ballot is in a sealed envelope. This envelope together with a signed paper (“Wahlschein” in Germany) is in a second envelope that goes in the mail. The process of counting that vote starts with opening the outer envelope and verifying that the ballot was issued to the person signing. Then verify that the inner envelope is properly sealed to ensure that the vote is actually secret. Collect the inner envelope with the actual filled-in ballot. No counting has happened yet, but this verification costs considerable time. All of this could be done even before Election Day with no effect on voter suppression - no one at that point can actually know the vote. In theory, even counting could be done as long as no result is leaked, though there’d be a risk. Explicitly not allowing the preprocessing - and as far as I followed the news, that’s what happened in PA - seems like a pretty clear cut case of “we want to draw the count out.” to me.
relaxing 6y ago
Plenty of states already count ballots early without leaks. If that can’t be trusted, can any aspect of the process? Even if a minority of the vote was known, how different would that be from public polling that also represent a slice of the electorate (which also is likely not 100% representative of the actual results.)
- zepto 6y ago
  Well at the point I think everyone knows that polls can be way off. Of course a small sample of votes is likely to be too, but we aren’t talking about statistical inference here, we talking about political perception.