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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.

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.
    - garmaine 6y ago
      How would we know? But ultimately it doesn’t matter. This is the first election with near universal mail-in ballots, so no prior election would have had the coverage necessary to make this data useful. Secondly, just because it hasn’t been done yet doesn’t mean it won’t happen in the future. The point is to proactively prevent possible election manipulation, not merely react to demonstrated problems.

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.
  - garmaine 6y ago
    How would we know? But ultimately it doesn’t matter. This is the first election with near universal mail-in ballots, so no prior election would have had the coverage necessary to make this data useful. Secondly, just because it hasn’t been done yet doesn’t mean it won’t happen in the future. The point is to proactively prevent possible election manipulation, not merely react to demonstrated problems.