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Let's try to have an election thread without the usual P&S garbage. So a few local rules:

BADecker, franky1, anyone else who can't stay on topic - I'm sure you can find many other threads to derail.

On topic: facts and discussion on early voting, turnout, exit polls, results, etc.

Borderline on topic: election issues as long as it's factual and about 2020 November federal elections.

Off topic: merits (or lack thereof) of candidates, political parties, political views, etc. Anything not directly related to elections. Personal attacks. Complaining about this thread (start a REEEE if you need to).

I will likely delete posts that are only partially off topic - don't take this personally, just edit out the off topic part and repost. There is definitely no lack of threads around here to discuss all that other stuff.

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Nov 2 Update

Record-breaking early voting (from targetsmart):

https://meem.link/i/a/RgmqMf.jpg
Edited 2020-11-30 to fix a broken image

Last minute 538 average:

https://meem.link/i/a/J9WFZx.jpg
Edited 2020-11-30 to fix a broken image

Last minute RCP average:

https://meem.link/i/a/4jX7iK.jpg
Edited 2020-11-30 to fix a broken image

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Original Oct 18

I'll start off with early voting numbers: https://targetearly.targetsmart.com/

Unsurprisingly the numbers are way way up. It's almost as if there is some off topic event or circumstance (I'm just kidding, it's the friggin' pandemic) influencing the turnout.

https://meem.link/i/a/zxDkFm.jpg
Edited 2020-11-30 to fix a broken image

In the areas I travel through, I have seen some interesting things in yard signs.

These are a variety of highly democratic to highly republic areas over several hundred miles.

It's very common to see Trump signs in yards, with a fraction of those having a yard sign also for one or two local or state Repub candidates.

For the yards with Demo signs, they will be for local or state candidates primarily. Maybe one yard in four or five will have a Biden sign.

Today's the 4th anniversary of the birth of this now-famous infographic -- #neverforget

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Eknfx_oUcAAxNFu?format=jpg&name=medium

If Hillary was running again, I'd say its all over for the dems:

https://i.imgur.com/CnAhxs3.png

However, Joe's not Hillary - nor is he Trump - and those two reasons combined might be enough to push him to victory... Unfortunately this assessment probably falls under discussion of merits of candidates. Hopefully I provided more information than OT discussion but I won't be offended if you delete this comment.

Whilst historical data on postal votes suggests there's no clear advantage (https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/08/do-republicans-or-democrats-benefit-mail-voting-it-turns-out-neither) to the Democrats, I do wonder whether it will be different this time around due to the differences between how Democrat voters and Republican voters view the pandemic. Generalising obviously, but the differences in mindset could play a crucial role, with Republicans placing more emphasis on personal freedoms, and so planning to turn up on polling day, whilst more cautious Dem voters mail-in ahead of time. The problem with leaving it to the last minute of course is the rising trajectory of the pandemic. You may plan to turn up on the day, but you could contract Covid, or be self-isolating, or you could get last minute jitters due to rapidly rising case numbers, and not vote at all. Not suggesting it will have a huge effect, but with tight margins in the swing states, it might not need to.

Honestly I don't understand why everyone, except the few percent who allegedly haven't made up their minds, wouldn't vote by mail or at least vote early. There is no rational reason to wait until election day - which is a Tuesday so one may need to take a day off work to stand in line for 3 hours. Even if a candidate croaks between now and the election day people would likely still be voting for whatever the party ticket is and relying on the electors to sort it out.

I got a mail in ballot sent to me so I voted for the 1st time in 30 years.
Call me lazy and politically apathetic, I concur.
Maybe if the retarded electoral college system would be shitcanned and simply go with popular vote winner instead , I'd have more incentive to vote,
because my state always goes with my candidate anyway.

Congratulations, or something.

Funny enough my state is the same way. It always votes the same way and has never had an impact or bearing on the outcome of a presidential election, ever! But I voted anyway, and yeah getting the ballot in the mail does make the process a lot easier. I was tempted to vote for Brock Pierce just to screw around, but nah:

https://i.imgur.com/0l8zSSj.jpg

Funny how they put Trump at the bottom -- they make Trump voters have to do some reading before casting their vote.

I thought about making 10 copies of my ballot and sending them all in different envelopes (not really), but the thing is there is only 1 special envelope that they will accept for your ballot, and you have to sign the outside of the envelope. Kind of strange but seemingly effective.

I honestly don't know how they would know to turn away voters at polling stations who have already submitted their ballot by mail. Hopefully somebody is in charge of keeping track of that shit.

Depends on the state. In some states they do have a near-real-time list of who requested mail-in ballots and who submitted them. If the mail-in vote hasn't arrived by then and you manage to cast a vote in person, your mail-in vote should be discarded when mail-ins are counted.

Design of such documents requires juggling the locations of candidates on the form, to overcome the biases.

But it would not surprise me if they skipped the science stuff.

It appears to be very scientific - sorted alphabetically.

A large amount of states have this system rolled out to the public to, which is an amazing thing for people to be able to verify if their vote was counted and such. I think most states use the term ballot tracking, which is pretty much just allowing you to track your ballot in the states system to ensure that it was counted for voting.

Here's a list - https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-track-your-absentee-ballot-by-state

Problem is that I couldn't find a chart that I'd used before for this very purpose. I know a few states on here, like New York, allow absentee ballots to be tracked BUT ONLY for overseas voters.

Dumb to not have this system fully functioning everywhere.


Would probably make more sense to put the two top parties on top though, right?

Then again your decision on who to vote for shouldn't change based on where they are on the ballot.

What's a top party though? Technically you can't know until the votes are counted and ballot design shouldn't rely on polls.


Precisely.

Not unusual at all to have the incumbent president at the bottom of the list.. I’m sure it happens all the time..

Are all the other races on that ballot ordered in the same way?


That whole pesky “United States” part with its electoral college..
Whoever agreed to that in the first place must be morons right?

So if he simply changed his name to _Trump, he'd be at the top of the list? That's got to confer at least a small advantage. Even competing as 'Donald, The' would bump him up a few places.
Unless when you change your name, you're only allowed to use alphabetic characters - in which case what about the squiggle formerly known as Pence Prince?

Well, if you look at 20 years of Bushes and Clintons in the White House, the alphabetical order conspiracy might be onto something ;D

I can 100% guarantee you that position in a list is an important factor in which item people pick from that list. This is basic survey design.

FYI I voted this morning and Trump/Pence was at the top of the list...

That's interesting. Where was Biden? Any other candidates?

I think Biden was second, followed by LIB then GRN. Didn't even know we had a Green Party candidate, seems we do.

So maybe they did order by some arbitrary popularity metric but that sounds really sketchy. Unless all ballots in your state are completely random and yours just happened to be that way.

The ballots were entered by touchscreen, then printed out on thermal paper both in English and scan codes. Then you actually "vote" by inserting this page into a scanner that's on top of a collection can. This system is capable of randomizing and presenting data impartially, and then accurately recording votes.

The collection bin system does allow double checking vote tallies and audit.

I'll grudgingly say I like the system, seems to have the advantages of both old style paper and modern electronic. With the paper stored, as long as the thermal image survives, there is a paper trail.

Could humans abuse it? Could they be caught every time? I think so.

There is certainly evidence to support this, even in US presidential elections. Quotes below from this article (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-39082465).


Whilst most people are not affected, it does impact the decisions of people who are unsure who to pick, but also want to (or feel obligated to) vote for someone. This does make sense. Universal suffrage is a hard-won right, and I can imagine there are people who will make absolutely certain they take advantage of that right, even if they have no real preference of candidate.

In 2016,
Also:


Apparently (as of 2017) California and Ohio are the exception:

The "state's officials" bit could be important there - particularly if this is happening in swing states.


Bit of an aside, but presumably (and in fact from personal experience, although not in the US) the effect is more pronounced in committee elections - I have received ballot papers where you can vote for 3 candidates, but there are 10 standing, 5 from each major party. If you just want 3 from your choice of party, but aren't bothered which ones, there's an obvious benefit to being top of the list.

Bloomberg spent / spending up to $100 million against trump in Florida.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/20/bloomberg-trump-florida-spending-430236

As everyone here in NY knows Trump / Bloomberg really don't like each other.
But it is interesting to see how much he is willing to spend just to make Trumps life more difficult.

Also, kind of shows the point that Trump really does not have any supporters with deep pockets and ready cash. If he did countering that kind of cash dump since mid September would be simple.

-Dave

This is my new projection of how things are going this year, with the election (unsurprisingly) hinging on Florida:

https://i.imgur.com/SSZ8eGw.png

If the polls are even slightly more accurate this time around then theoretically Florida should go to Biden, if only by a few chin hairs. Here is a link to the unadulterated electoral map as things currently stand:

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/2020_elections_electoral_college_map.html

You can also create your own map scenarios here to fantasize how you think its going to play out:

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/create_your_own_president_map.html

Right now I think its a genuine toss-up. The statistical probability that the election will be decided by as many or fewer votes as it was in 2000 is almost nil, but I think it will be the closest election we've had since then.

I think WI and AZ are blue-er than Florida... maybe PA too. Even Rasmussen puts Biden ahead in those states, just barely.

I hear/read that the early voting results so far in FL are looking very promising for a Trump win there, and Biden just greatly hurt his chances in PA and OH with his comments about "phasing out"/shutting down the oil industry...

Starting to get more confident in a Trump win again..

https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1320127823512821765

I'm not too optimistic.

Democratic voter turnout has to be historic considering there was a large chunk of voters that stayed home in 2016 and regretted it. Republicans in Florida has had surprisingly decent numbers based on early voting, but Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania I'm afraid won't even be close. I REALLY hope I'm wrong but I doubt dem's are going to stay home.

A part from people staying home last cycle, maybe voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania  resonated with Trump on manufacturing jobs. Combine this with his energy independent strategy, could he possible snag one of the three? Who knows. PA and WI might be possible, MI isn't close according to the RCP. iirc MI wasn't even within the margin of error for some of the polls.

Silver's model gave Trump a 12 in 100 chance compared to a roughly 1/4 chance last year. His chances were roughly 1/4 one month ago but of course his campaign took a nose dive with the first debate and COVID diagnosis.

Trump's been on the campaign trail hosting multiple rallies a day so Biden is sitting comfortably right now while Trump is on the trail. This complacency is what caused Clinton to lose.

Looks like for in person early voting they're at  ~ 640k for republicans, 500k for dems.

Mail in is 1.64m to 1.04m in favor of democrats.

So democrats actually have a significant lead now, but that's expected to shrink pretty consistently up till election day since a higher % of Republicans have yet to vote (they're more likely to vote in person).

https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/elections/2020/10/23/florida-republicans-surge-ahead-with-in-person-early-voting/

I look at all the material that has Biden winning but then I look outside at all the Trump people. I haven't seen people gather for Biden anywhere here. I believe Florida at least is going to Trump.

There are some houses with Biden/Harris stuff on them though. It's not as one sided as 2016.

The real question is who do you think is more qualified to figure out the opinion of ~150 million people?  Polling companies with a proven track record over thousands of elections  - some spanning more than 5 decades, or you when you look outside?

Speaking of things people see, I do hope that the lines at precincts will impart the same herd mentality (not to be confused with herd immunity) and sense of urgency like lines at Apple stores or TP shortage in March did and will encourage more people to vote. At the end of the day, at the end of November 3 in particular, that's really the only thing that matters regardless of crowds, yard signs, polls, and forum debates. As little as a 10% change in turnout of a specific demographic can in theory flip the whole election.

The whole Republican strategy seems broken to me. They're talking about all the wrong things. At this point, I'm thinking that Biden is going to win by a landslide. He's currently ahead in Florida and Arizona, which Trump needs to win. The polls may still tighten, but I suspect that pollsters are more likely to have overcorrected than undercorrected after 2016; in other words, I expect polling error to go in the opposite direction to 2016.

On election night, we should watch Florida and Arizona, since they're apparently going to have some solid results early. If Biden wins either, then it's over. If Trump wins both, then it'll go into a big mess of delays and litigation in the other swing states. If Trump wins FL&AZ, then it also implies a fairly tight election, which gives Trump the opportunity to try for various tricks such as trying to have mail-in ballots thrown out in the remaining states. But I think Biden wins Florida and Arizona, which will be a bit of an anticlimactic end to the whole thing.

Ticket-splitting has become rare, so Trump's disaster of a campaign is likely to lead to the Democrats taking the Senate as well. It's always bad when either party has full control, since then the government can actually do stuff, and everything the government does is harmful. Disappointing.

Biden represents a return to the neoliberal status quo, which I would not have expected. The neoliberal ideology and post-WWII world order has been falling apart worldwide, and we seemed (still seem?) headed inexorably toward something else. The protracted and disastrous wars in the middle east were major blows to the political strength of the US and neoliberalism's strength in domestic politics, as was the 2008 financial crisis. Trump's open and loud rejection of neoliberalism seemed like the final nail in the coffin. But now Biden will attempt to "go backward". People voting for Biden want and expect a return to something "ordinary", but I think it'll be moreso Biden fighting to recreate something that can no longer exist in this world.

Wanna bet me another 0.01? Or?

That's rational assuming the slant isn't purposeful and an attempt to create an impression Biden's ahead.

It has become difficult to conduct polling with the advent of the cell phone, and the outrageous number of spam calls in recent years have made it even more difficult.

I don't think pollsters have been able to fix their problems from 2016. In 2018, there was one poll that had Andrew Gilliam up by (https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2018/governor/fl/florida_governor_desantis_vs_gillum-6518.html) 7 points right before election day (FL governor), and DeSantis ended up winning. The other polls right before election day had DeSantis down by 4-5 points.

Part of the problem is the strength of the Democrat propaganda machine and its strategy of labeling Trump supporters and Republicans as racist. This makes Republicans more likely to hide their political views, especially from strangers (pollsters). I would trust voting data regarding party affiliation more than polls, but this is infallible, for example, approximately 30% of people at Trump rallies are Democrats, and may vote for Trump.

After what happened last time, I don't have faith in the pollsters at all. To come up with my results what I did was look at an average of polls from 2016 at this time of year and find the difference between what they projected vs. what actually happened (what I referred to as "M.O.E." in the table below). It's basically working on an assumption that they will be equally as wrong this time around. If they are even just slightly more correct, Biden has a good shot of winning Florida; WI and AZ not so much.

https://i.imgur.com/HPR3XHb.png

State	M.O.E.	Biden has	Biden needs
Pennsylvania	5.9	5.1	0.8
Florida	2.0	1.5	0.5
Wisconsin	7.2	4.6	2.6
Michigan	6.5	7.8	-1.3
North Carolina	6.2	1.5	4.7
Arizona	5.0	2.4	2.6

I know this is all stemming from Trumps 'fake polls' rhetoric, and I'm never going to convince you to not be a poll-denier, but...

The polls for the 2018 House, Senate and Gubernatorial races were over remarkably accurate.  As in they got lucky.  The average poll was within 2.8% with a slight bias for Democrats of 0.4%.   And that included state and district polling which is far less accurate historically than the major polls you see in the days before a presidential election.

Looking at just the polls that were off the most and then using those handful of poll to calculate the reliability of the thousands of other polls doesn't really make sense.  You have to look at all the results.

Let's try to get back on track. Democrats said this, Republicans said that - doesn't matter much anymore with about a week to go.

I find it quite amazing that 40% of 2016 turnout have already voted... 55 million people by some estimates. Democrats up by about 8-10% (by party registration numbers where available) but as TwitchySeal noted about Florida, Republicans will likely keep catching up as the election day draws closer. Makes me wonder what the total turnout is going to be.


I don't believe the margin of error is going to be exactly the same... if for no other reason than demographic and other changes in the 4 years. Some polling issues specific to Trump (underweighing non-college-educated voters for example) have probably been addressed so I would expect smaller and less-one-sided errors this time around.

Quoting myself from another Trump thread:


With a week and a couple of days to go I still see this as a major issue. And I really think a lot of the republicans' are going to get blindsided by it.
Beyond Covid there are a lot of people who have been hit hard by the current administrations economic policies and they are pissed.

theymos said it well too.


But I will add to it. They are talking about the wrong things in the wrong areas.
If you are a Republican in PA you care about JOBS, coal / steel / manufacturing, whatever yeah you might have opinions / views even strong ones about immigration but for most of them it's probably not their main concern. Reversing it in AZ, more probably care about immigration then manufacturing and farming jobs. But you are not seeing the targeting of ads where they should be in my opinion.

Putting the 2 together:

Having ads that say Biden bad, Trump good. Biden raise taxes, Trump lower taxes works in some areas. But not the ones where people have been looking at their tax bill that went up big time for the last 2 years.

Same with many small businesses that sprung up along the US / Canada border. In the grand scheme of things NAFTA might have been good / or it might have been bad.
For the people who setup businesses that relied on it and certain functionality of it, well they are not happy. Saw a bunch on TV the other day their congressman was talking about how much better it was now. Yeah, closed border due to covid and 50% loss of cross border traffic before that. It's sooooo much better. Long term it might be better. But for now they seem to feel that long term is so far down the road it's not coming.

-Dave

Oh 100%

I'm pretty sure that like, in regards to how stuff gets listed on a ballot, everyone is randomized in terms of order based on the county that you're in. I know that's been a common thing to complain about like:

"WHY IS TRUMP ON THE TOP OF THIS BALLOT" (You can insert Biden for that too)

"WHY IS JO JORGENSEN ON THIS ONE, IT CONFUSES PEOPLE TO VOTE FOR THEM INSTEAD OF JOE BIDEN" - wtf?

People are amazing.

If Trump wins, it will indicate that polling has utterly failed, which would be interesting. However, the 2016 polls weren't actually that far off, with most being within their margins of error; it was mainly an issue of people ignoring the margins of error and "just knowing" that Trump couldn't possibly win. Now the situation is more-or-less reversed: a lot of people "just know" that the polls are wrong and Trump will somehow pull it off, so they're baking in a several-point swing from current polls. However, if the election were held today, polls would have to be much more wrong than they were in 2016 for Trump to win, and if pollsters overcorrected as I suspect, then the real result may swing against Trump compared to polls, not even for him.

While there are several very bad things about Trump, I think that a Trump victory would be far better than a Biden victory. Trump is more anti-war and anti-regulation, and he's much less effective at actually getting the government to do things. It'd also lead to increased distrust of government and perhaps some serious anti-federalist and secessionist movements among blue states, which is excellent from a libertarian perspective. And on a personal level I'd also find it hilarious to see Democrats' reaction if Trump pulls off a surprise victory again. But I just don't think that it's going to happen. The best we can probably hope for is that the Republicans retain the Senate and we get at least 2 years of gridlock, though even this is in serious doubt.

Out the dozen or so tracked by RealClearPolitics, there was one poller that got the election right in 2016: USC Dornsife (https://dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories/3295/2020-daybreak-poll-qna-with-jill-darling-survey-director/) (back then it was listed as "USC/LA Times"). They consistently showed Trump up by a few points in places where it mattered throughout the 2016 election while everybody else showed Hillary with relatively wide leads. I thought they were crazy, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one.

This year, as of right now they have Biden up overall by 12.3%, which is higher than all the other pollers listed on RCP.

Rasmussen currently has the only poll with Trump ahead, by 1% (with 2% of likely voters still undecided).

I mentioned that I look at the polling material. I know that it's 87/100 a Biden win. And for the record I'm an independent that was leaning heavily towards Bernie. I don't have a horse in this race.

I live in the densest county in Florida. I see pro-trump gatherings all the time. I don't see any Biden people. My place in the state of Florida is kind of important. It would be a fair assessment that any place north of where I am goes to trump. If you add that to my area also going to Trump I'm really confident that he will win Florida.

So if you only trust that the polls are accurate than Trump should lose florida 2/3 times. Are you willing to bet BTC0.02 that Biden wins florida? Because I am willing to bet that it goes to Trump. I certainly can't call the whole election, it's more than likely that Biden wins, but if you're in that camp you can't get complacent. Remember in 2016 Hillary was supposed to win (and even though she won the popular vote), she lost.

I never claimed I'm more qualified than the experts, but if it's raining outside and the weatherman says it's not and I'm wearing clothes made out of newspaper, I'm not stepping out and getting arrested for public nudity. 

What do you mean by "gatherings"? And in what way does it affect the election? I don't know how it works in Florida but I'm in one of the battleground-ish states and there isn't any great enthusiasm for crowds, mainly due to the pandemic, but the turnout in early voting is still massive on both sides.


LOL everyone's so feisty with the bets... If Twitchy accepts could you please take it to a new thread - better for you two to hash it out and less distraction here.

I work for a living so I commute. I drive past people that gather by the side of the highway with Trump signs. One such gathering has easily upwards of 100 people. And it happens all the time. These people have votes and they're going to use them.

It's also completely possible that the Biden crowds are not dumb enough to congregate during a pandemic, but there is still a big difference in the amount of Trump signs versus Biden signs.

Also I've talked to people and there really are a lot of passionate Trump people even right now. People who believe all that right wing propaganda about Antifa and BLM and that if Biden becomes president it's over for America and all that nonsense.



Yep, if Twitchy accepts we PM, get our own thread, I wouldn't dream of hijacking yours.  I'm just putting some BTC on the line to show I'm serious.

Those who are betting in favor of Biden please note these points:

1. Postal voting numbers are as expected. Early voting has helped to reduce the Dem-Rep gap, as per the data from Hawkfish. Check this: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/23/early-voting-numbers-swing-states-431363

2. A number of very recent polls are showing Trump ahead in Florida and North Carolina. Some of them are showing that he's ahead in Arizona and Pennsylvania as well.

3. Hardly anyone is noticing this point. Libertarian candidate is not getting as much support as in 2016. This will bolster the chances of GOP in states such as Arizona and Michigan. Gary Johnson received 3.28% of the vote in 2016, while the Green Party candidate received only 1.07%. This time the trend indicate that both the parties will poll somewhere around 1% to 1.5% each. Jill Stein didn't received more than 1.5% of the vote in any of the battleground states, but Gary Johnson got 5.18% in Colorado, 4.15% in New Hampshire, 4.13% in Arizona, 3.84% in Minnesota, 3.78% in Iowa, 3.59% in Michigan and 3.58% in Wisconsin. Evan McMullin also chewed up some GOP votes in 2016.

4. After a fierce spat between Justice Elena Kagan and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the SCOTUS ruled that the state of Wisconsin doesn't need to count the postal ballots which are received after the election day on Nov 3rd. This is perhaps the first legal spat related to the outcome of the POTUS elections that landed in the supreme court. We'll see more in the coming weeks. The indications are clear.

Note: I don't want to pick sides. Just pointed out some of the observations.

The Trump voters are reacting to a hostile and suppressive media with massive, spontaneous demonstrations. These cannot be suppressed from Facebook, Twitter and the mainstream media. If they suppress one, there's six more popping up.

I'm seeing it around here also. Quite impressive.

I don't see any Biden people. ....

The part of that statement that should be of concern is the "any." And I agree, I've seen  zero for Biden.

i voted the other day around 10am on a weekday. about a dozen supporter for each candidate, each group on either side at the entrance. they didnt interact with the others or voters, just waved sighs at cars.

no line. one voter leaving and one voter in a booth, which were well spread out. registration person took my info, informed me the mail in ballet i had requested (as a backup) wouldn't count if it turned up. i assured her it would be shredded as soon as i saw my vote sealed. btw they used a water bottle thing to seal the envelopes so no masks need to be removed or any somewhat nasty sponges at the stations were needed.

i went in with an n95 and face shield with a P100 respirator as a backup, which i didnt use. i had all that cause there was no friggin way my vote wasnt gonna get counted by some "mail fraud" sleight of hand crap. i was gonna vote in person unless i was covid positive or physically in the hospital or something.

edit: 2016 there were tons of trump signs, like everywhere, along with hillary ones too of course. this year? very few of either candidate.

This is really my line of thought. I really can't see pollsters making the same mistake twice when it comes to Trump and his voters.

I'd think that they may be polling a little bit in his favor to ensure that they don't embarrass themselves again. Literally all bullshit theory that I'm just pulling out of my ass, though that's just what I expect to happen this time around.

I've voted though. I trust the mail system and think that it's fine to just send an absentee ballot in. At least in my state there aren't any concerns relating to voting by mail.

In Texas of all places more people have already voted than the total turnout in 2016:

https://www.npr.org/2020/10/30/929578710/more-than-9-million-texans-cast-ballots-early-topping-states-total-turnout-in-20

Overall 80+ million people have voted, or 60%+ of 2016 turnout.

I'll pass, thanks though.  Already have enough on the line to make things plenty exciting for me.

I feel like Florida is closer to a coin flip than any other state, btw, not anywhere near a Biden 2:1 favorite.

---

They're reacting to a conservative Media (and Trump) narrative that the media is the enemy of the people and only Trump can save them.

In other words:

They're reacting to the Federal Government narrative that the media is the enemy of the people and only The Federal Government can save them.


I would give you a ton of examples of Trump claiming something was fake news with made up 'phony anonymous sources' that were later proven to be true with Trump fully aware they were true while calling them fake - but we both know that no amount of evidence would ever change your mind if it involved Trump looking really bad.

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538 has been doing daily election podcasts recently - definitely worth a listen.

Their forcast has Biden winning about 90% of the time.  The gap is so large that Biden would still win if he was on the bad end of all the battle ground margins of error. The only way they see Trump winning is if the the polls are completely missing something - which they put at 10%.

https://i.gyazo.com/c5b864c50034a637d7e19e482ad87e3c.png


https://i.gyazo.com/49361a48de26edec33c97a251fdacb78.png

....

Indeed, the enthusiasm of the Biden Harris crowd shows.

Harris's appearance in Fort Worth gathered TRILLIONS of human cells. They were organized neatly into a few dozen actual humans.

https://www.breitbart.com/2020-election/2020/10/30/dozens-attend-kamala-harris-campaign-event-fort-worth/

Hasn't Texas been solid red for decades? Why would she be campaigning there a few days before the election?


Let me check...



https://i.gyazo.com/fd03fd7562033debd10e04f549235d1b.png

Oh damn.  33%.  That's about the same chances they gave Trump to win in 2016.

This is pretty crazy news. Still have a TON of ballots that are probably still in the pipeline and others that'll prefer to vote in person. So this year is going to most likely by the year of record breaking voter turnout as it's pretty easy to vote this year.


I personally still think Trump is going to squeak by in Texas, then pull a win in Florida. Who knows what'll happen from there, but once those two things happen we'll be looking at a much easier pill to swallow (for conservatives) of 30-70 Biden, instead of 10-90 Biden.

This race is going to be MUCH tigther then the pollsters, 538 included, make it out to be. I'm happy that 538 shows how things can change so very quickly.

Trump's in a worse position election-wise than he was in 2016, lots of people are angry with his policies and would vote for Biden to get Trump out of office.

Whatever Hillary did that pissed off voters is nowhere near the amount of outrage that Trump caused. In fact with fresh new BlackLivesMatter protests cropping up ever couple weeks, I wouldn't be surprised if most blacks vote for Biden. But more demographics would have to follow suit for a Biden election to be successful.

If Trump wins, I say we can put all the people in the business of making polls and forecasts in the bread lines. Or maybe they can all go work in climate science?

And if Trump loses, you can believe every future will be accurate for the rest of your life.

Just as rational.

You attributed the quote to me incorrectly.

I'm sure you know that "people in the business of making polls and forecasts" operate with probabilities, and those probabilities are almost never 0% or 100%. If Trump had as dice roll chance of getting elected it doesn't mean all dice should be thrown away if he rolls a double six.

BLM riots making people vote Biden? Lol no.. They will make people vote Trump (and be quiet about it)..

In 2016 lots of conservatives were unsure of his policies, now they know he will side with conservatism 90% mostly and will make good conservative appointments..

Biden has, by far, more bipartisan support than any other presidential candidate in modern history.



From right around the peak of the protests:
https://i.gyazo.com/09d29fbaf6140ad3d36a13f34e862718.png
https://i.gyazo.com/90448c54127a13c3431252d7542ced44.png

Presidential election is boring. How about the Senate:

https://www.270towin.com/2020-senate-election/

If you believe the polls - and presumably people would be less inclined to lie in Senate polls so why not - Democrats need to flip one of the toss-up spots to gain control.

https://meem.link/i/a/FZoD8C.jpg
Edited 2020-11-30 to fix a broken image

^^^ Out of the 5 races that are labelled as toss up, Montana and Iowa may go for GOP. The two from Georgia may also end up with the GOP. NC looks like it may flip to the Democrats. So it may get 50-50. If we add Murkowski in the Democrat column, then Democrats will be in control of the senate with a margin of 51-49. So unless a miracle occurs, the Dems will control the senate.

BTW.. a miracle may occur. From what I have heard, in Michigan John James is rapidly closing the gap with Gary Peters. And in AZ, Martha McSally is only 3-4 points behind Mark Kelly. So in case the GOP wins one aming AZ/MI/NC, then they may control the senate. 

If Biden wins, Democrats can control the Senate without Murkowski's help in a 50:50 split - VP is the tie breaker.

Interestingly, Biden is now up well over Clinton polling numbers in Pennsylvania. I seriously don't see the pollsters risking underestimating Trump voter turnout there this time around, but the difference lies within the margin of error for all polls, so..

This is one last map; a worst-case scenario for Biden where cedes Pennsylvania and Florida and everything comes down to Arizona:

https://i.imgur.com/MWO3wsy.png

If Arizona flips to Biden, there's a possibility that North Carolina and Georgia could flip to Biden as well. Wisconsin is also a wildcard, certainly not a "gimmie" for the dems.

Apparently there is an attempt to throw out drive-thru ballots in Houston:

https://www.texastribune.org/2020/10/31/harris-county-drive-thru-votes/

To their credit, Texas Supreme Court rejected the case but now the plaintiffs are fishing in a federal court. This is quite bizarre even by 2020 standards. There is nothing wrong with the ballots and the county got the permission from the secretary of state to do the drive thru. Not to mention that Texas is (was?) solid red despite Houston, Austin, etc.

Arizona is troublesome for the GOP. If you look at the past elections, you can see that the opinion polls have always underestimated the Democrat support in Hispanic-heavy states such as Nevada, Arizona, Texas.etc. On top of that, Arizona is one of the states where there is a huge difference in the early voting numbers. Let's compare Arizona with Nevada (which seems to be going in the other direction).

AZ in 2016, early voting (by voter registration):

Dem - 554,910 (33.6%)
GOP - 659,600 (40.0%)
Trump margin of victory: 3.50%

AZ in 2020, early voting:

Dem - 879,178 (38.2%)
GOP - 836,123 (36.3%).

As you can see, the proportion of Dem voters are up by around 4.5%, while that of GOP is down by -3.7%. That is a net change of 8.2%, which is more than double that of the 2016 margin. No other state is showing this much difference in early voting.

Now, Nevada, for comparison.
NV in 2016, early voting:

Dem - 324,293 (42.1%)
GOP - 278,668 (36.2%)
Trump margin in 2016: -2.42%

NV in 2020, early voting:

Dem - 405,994 (39.6%)
GOP - 373,130 (36.4%)

All the figures for 2020 are as of Oct 31. Early voting turnout is 86.5% of the 2016 actual turnout in AZ, and 91.2% in NV. Arizona is looking very doubtful for the Republicans, unless there is a huge in-person turnout on 3rd Nov.

2020 numbers sourced from: https://electproject.github.io/Early-Vote-2020G/index.html
2016 numbers from: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1fz_V3oAUL8XJMEudq5wm5hDT_f554uagt6sIm_sJDro/edit?usp=sharing

We're almost done. The election starts in a few hours (or does it... do any voting places actually open at mignight? I have no clue... probably doesn't matter with early voting anyway) and it will be over by this time tomorrow (or will it... recounts, tweetstorms, lawsuits are very likely).

I have updated the OP with latest 538 and RCP averges. They have Biden up by 8.0% and 6.7% respectively.

Polling places open up at 7 AM. Some states like Pennsylvania immediately start counting mail in ballots at 7 AM sharp.

Florida closes polls sharp and gets the results out the night of, so we will know the winner tomorrow.

Speaking of Florida, early voting turnout (not including Monday's mail-ins I guess) has Democrats with a ~100k vote advantage... which is probably nothing, considering that despite the record-breaking early voting there are likely still a few million people coming to vote tomorrow.

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article246891077.html

First will be eastern parts of Indiana and Kentucky at 6pm EST. Polls will close in Eastern Florida at 7pm EST. A large chunk of results will be available immediately after the closing of polls, because states such as Florida will start counting the postal ballots on election day morning. They will be releasing the results as soon as the polls close. But there are states such as Georgia, which will start tabulating the postal ballots only after the polls close.

In states such as Florida, where the early ballots are counted first, there may be a "Blue mirage" during the initial few hours. But as election day votes start to get counted, a "red shift" will occur. And in the end, late postal ballots will be counted and this will again shift the momentum to Blue. The exact opposite will happen in states such as Pennsylvania, where election day votes will be counted first.

For more details, check this: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/election-results-timing/

Please refer this map, to know the poll closing times (all in EST).

What I have not seen discussed is the fact that in 2016 Trump won, but many stayed home or did not vote for him. Really a lot of Republicans and Independents.

This time most of those undecided voters are pro Trump. Not all but most. Plus, some Democrats who are appalled at their choices, or who have reasons. Like blacks.

That's a great many votes.

The media and the pollsters would have us believe that there are that many MORE democrats who have came out of the woodwork in their tremendous enthusiasm for the rock star Joe Biden.

I don't buy it. There was enthusiasm for Hillary, no question about that. This time around the Democratic enthusiam is as near to zero as possible.

Not only do a percentage of the younger crowd actually like Trump and will or have voted for him, but others, faced with a choice of toking on some weed or going out for Biden, are going to stay at home.

Yeah this is something that more people need to know. Any record breaking absentee / early voting advantages will most likely be soaked up by in person voting. Voter turnout will end up being higher this year, though.

We MAY know the winner today. Even though they're going to start counting the absentee ballots today, they may not have the resources to get it out ASAP. I'm guessing that if we end up knowing today it's going to be LATER in the night - lke 12-4 AM.

Who the fuck knows what litigation is going to end up doing to certain votes though. Litigation could flip this all up, though I think we all know that isn't going to be popular - just like Bush v Gore wasn't popular.

Trump is leading so far:

https://meem.link/i/a/sVowkN.jpg
Edited 2020-11-30 to fix a broken image

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/results-president.html

Biden is ahead by 3% with over 50% reported in FL.

NYTimes has Trump a clear favorite to win FL right now.


https://i.gyazo.com/c9bbbf19f100e21f85145dfe1c9b47c2.png



I don't think there's evidence that any of this is accurate, which would explain why it's not being discussed.

And now Trump is up by 2% and NYT says Trump's probability to win FL is 90%.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/results-florida-president.html

Edit: TwitchySeal beat me to it LOL

Edit2: 66% counted, Biden again up by ~1.3%

Edit3: FL still very very close...

https://meem.link/i/a/3f6zGe.jpg
Edited 2020-11-30 to fix a broken image

What is the situation in North Carolina? As far as I can see, very few votes have been counted there till now, but NYT is saying that Biden is having a two-third chance of winning NC. It looks very surprising, as I thought that FL was tighter than NC for Trump. BTW, huge shift in Miami-Dade county. Hillary won this county by 300,000 or so in 2016. Biden is having a lead of only around 85,000 now.

Not sure what they base it on... exit polls and/or turnout by county?

Meanwhile FL seems to be done. Trump is leading by nearly 200k votes and the remaining uncounted votes are mainly in pro-Trump counties.

Trump still has a good shot..
Michigan is red!!

On the edge of my seat..

OK.. now they (NYT) changed North Carolina to +0.9 for Trump.

They are claiming that 62% of the votes are reported. But I checked Fox News, and they are reporting only 51%. Anyway, now it is more or less clear that sub-belt is getting swept by Trump. The race will shift to the rust-belt now.

Michigan numbers are confusing, so I'll leave that. With more than half of the votes counted, Ohio is showing a 12.3% lead for Biden. This should be troublesome for Trump. He need to get a lead of 13% from the remaining 49%.

Edit: Biden's lead down to 11.1% in Ohio as they start counting in-person votes.

Michigan has counted very few votes but overall Trump seems to have a better chance than predicted, again :)

I was gonna ask..


Still think it's a landslide?
Neh..

The American voting circus of entertainment is working on me.. +beers

This suspense is much fun..

Cheers!

Did I ever think it's a landslide? Not sure. I'm getting senile but I think I'd remember something like that.

Maybe not you specifically.. But such confidence in a Biden win..

Are all the latest "polls" within ""margin of error""??

"Math"

"Science"

@suchmoon & @eddie13: enjoy the suspense rather than fighting. This election is much tighter than anyone thought it was. Obviously one of you will lose 0.1 BTC sometime this month (in case PA results come out within the next few weeks), but for now let's just sit back and enjoy the show.

Ohio and NC getting really interesting. In Ohio, Biden was ahead by 12.3% when 51% of the vote was counted. Now they have counted 56% and Biden is up by 8.2%. Biden is still leading in NC, but now they have started to count the in-person votes.

My guess: it will come down to Pennsylvania (unless Biden wins AZ). You guys need to wait 3-4 weeks to get results from PA.

Oh I'm enjoying it - perhaps a bit too much, looking at the growing pile of empty cans... eddie13 mentioned beer too so I think we're 100% on the same page.

Speaking of suspense, NYT called New York for Biden with 0 votes counted, while Florida still hasn't been called... quite ridiculous.

I'm calling Florida for Trump

10% of votes remaining, he has a 3% lead.

(I'm assuming the early votes and mail in ballots were counted first)

Pretty Bummed FL is going to Trump.

NYTimes is saying that if Trump takes NC and GA, the likelihood of knowing the outcome of the election within 24 hours drops to almost 0% and most likely it won't be till Friday at the earliest.  Ugh.

First numbers from MI and AZ coming up.

Interesting tidbit about Ohio, where Biden is still leading:


So it seems like he can actually pull it off.

Whereas in NC, where Biden is leading by about 250k votes:


Which doesn't really tell us if he can hold on to that lead because it's unclear how many of those 680k and 490k would go to each candidate.

Well in California, I believe .00000001% votes have been officially counted and Biden has the lead so I'm projecting California's 55 evotes go to Biden.

Just call me Nostradamus....

@suchmoon, I don't agree with you on Ohio.

Ohio first counts the postal ballots. I think this phase is over for most of the counties. In the second phase, in person ballots are being counted and that is why we are witnessing Trump gaining a lot of votes. In the third phase, the postal ballots which arrived during the last 3-4 days will be counted. Depending on their number, the third phase ballots will decide the outcome of the elections in Ohio. The same is the case with North Carolina as well. Most of the votes may be in counties won by Hillary in 2016. But these are in-person votes, and not postal votes.

Edit: With 70% of the votes in, Trump leading in OH by 0.6%. 15% remains in NC, and Biden leads by 26,000 (0.5%).

Yeah, you're probably right, there is still a lot of variance.

Now over on the Senate side of things, Democracts flipped the Colorado seat, which wasn't a huge surprise. NC seat is somewhat correlated to presidential results I guess.

Cheers bro!
Especially with something at stake, this is better than a superbowl X4 easy..
Seems way closer than the polls had so far..
(Can we  now agree that polls are bullshit?)

Super proud of Michigan so far..

The battle now moves to Arizona, and it looks to me that Biden is in a very good position to get 11 electoral votes from this state.

More than 70% of the votes have been counted, and Biden is having a very large lead (9.5%). Similar to the case with OH, in the first phase they are counting the early in-person votes and postal votes. Election day in-person votes are being counted now, but Trump needs to win more than two-third of the remaining votes to have any chance here.

If Biden wins Arizona, he will be in a very good position to get at least 269 electoral votes.

Great, you saved me some typing, just wanted to post that Biden seems to have flipped Maricopa county big time (from -3 in 2016 to +10-ish now) and that's like half of Arizona.

Watching CNN, they don't seem as confident in a blue win as 2016, but they seem like they are just making 1,000 excuses as to why states/counties are going red in 2020..

Thought they were supposed to be 100% sure of a Biden win since the polls say so?
Backpedaling.. Trump is gonna win..
Pollsters BTFO 4ever, even if Trump still looses..

Looking at exit polls Biden should win Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Pennsylvania is not so certain.

This is probably skewed by mail-ins. Which should favor Biden even more.

Neh.
I can tell by the demeanor of CNN employees that Trump is gonna take this..
Trying to call all "duh" states for biden to make it look competitive..

Trump has this..

Mail ins are usually counted first.. Late voting favors the Trumpster..

Yup, most likely.

Trump has pulled through and will probably win Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, and Florida.

Pennsylvania will probably end up going to Trump.

Trump will probably win this race IMO. Betting markets have completely flipped on their head here. But I guess there's still a lot of time.

Rust belt for Trump!!!!
Go go go go go go!!!

Michigan!!! You can Doooooo Eeettttt!

According to Fox News, Joe Biden wins Arizona. Now it becomes really difficult for Trump to get to the 270 mark. He can do that only if he wins Pennsylvania, and one among the western rust-belt states (MI/MN/WI). Nevada results can be important as well. In case Trump wins NV (chances are very low), then he still has a chance to go above 270.

What about Trump flipping Virginia? EH?

Dig AZ in their bountyhole..

No Pennsylvania is 90%+ going to Biden. They just have to count the absentee ballots. 2.6 Million of them. We won't know until Friday.

Possible. But I guess at least some of the postal ballots are already counted. According to Fox News, with 54% of the votes counted, Trump is having a lead of around 15%. Most of the remaining votes are from Philadelphia and it is possible for Biden to close the gap.

Chances of a Trump re-election almost disappeared with the loss of Arizona. That state and its 11 electoral votes were so crucial. Now Trump needs to win at least one among these three - Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Just to add, Trump is far behind in NE-2, and therefore he will lose one crucial electoral vote. ME-2 looks very tight as of now.

Looks like Georgia might be moving towards Biden. NYT flipped it's forecast to the blue side - 67% Biden's chance to win, while it was as high as 80%+ towards Trump just a couple of hours ago. Vast majority of remaining votes are in Atlanta and suburbs.

https://meem.link/i/a/H3ng1N.jpg
Edited 2020-11-30 to fix a broken image

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/results-georgia-president.html

Edit: NYT finally called Florida for Trump, which they should've done 3 hours ago. Still holding up Texas for no reason.

So far things are going as planned on my map (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5282839.msg55499827#msg55499827)... Biden can lose Pennsylvania - its ok - he just needs to win WI and MI and he's in.

Wayne County (Detroit) is still pretty far behind in their count, and the vast majority of those yet to be counted are dem votes.

Wonder how many days this is going to take. Hopefully not more than one, two at most.

Now they will just keep counting and counting until biden wins and then stop....
Real votes, fake votes, no matter..
Trump "loses" now..

Civil war in 10.. 9.. 8.. 7.....
You strapped?

At this point, I would say that Biden is having a significant advantage. First it was his Arizona win which changed the course. Then he won the 2nd district of Nebraska. On top of this, he is having a comfortable lead in Nevada as well. So only way for Trump to win now is to get electoral votes from either Michigan or Wisconsin, in addition to Pennsylvania. And let's not forget the fact that the NYT needle is showing an advantage for Biden in Georgia.

The Senate flip is looking very unlikely at this time. Democrats lost a seat in Alabama, as expected, and picked up one in Colorado and likely one in Arizona. They need to defend their seat in Michigan and flip two more... out of 4 remaining: Maine, North Carolina, one in Georgia that went to a runoff, and another one in Georgia also likely heading to a runoff. And that's assuming that Biden wins and gets a tie breaker.

It's interesting how much Biden is outperforming Hillary in some of the most populous counties in Georgia. Not sure what's going on there, must be fraud according to the above ;)

https://meem.link/i/a/gEkDm8.jpg
Edited 2020-11-30 to fix a broken image

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/results-georgia-president.html

Yeah Trump won..
Should have called the rust belt.. (cnn/all)

polls btfo

Suddenly out of nowhere Wisconsin looks competitive. 8% votes yet to be counted and Trump is up by 4.1%. Kenosha County (where the riots occurred recently) is showing a big shift towards GOP. I would say that right now Wisconsin looks 50/50. Trump is still up in Michigan by 8.2%, but 28% of the votes are yet to be counted and I expect him to lose by 3-4 points. His lead in PA has been reduced to 13.4%, and 36% ballots remain there to be counted. And in Georgia, Trump is looking quite vulnerable.

CNN "calls" don't determine election outcomes and CNN doesn't count the votes.

If the shoe was on the other foot you'd be advocating for counting every vote before calling it, wouldn't you :)

Why does Trump keep making this ridiculous lies?

Exhibit A:

Question is - what's better for the crypto market? Trump or Biden?

idk maybe lol

Is me calling the winner now triggering to some?
oops..

Trump wins the ec.. (prediction)

You think I trust Detroit and Philadelphia PA to keep counting to infinity?

Putin..

Where do you see 8% remaining? NYT shows 19% remaining in Wisconsin, and 60% remaining in Milwaukee, which should favor Biden significantly.

In Pennsylvania though... I don't see where Biden can get the votes to cover the ~600k deficit he has now. Neither Philly nor Pittsburgh seem to have that many votes left to count and the rest of the state is bright red.

The rest of the country is bright red.. Mandate 2.0.. ;)
How many more judges?

ok ok I better stop..

Sorry.. I'm excited that it's even near to close and just talking shit..

Currently looking a lot like a final result of:
Biden 248 / Trump 290
 :o

This is why Trump stated that they should stop counting votes and that the US have already a winner?
We are going to be on hold for the winner during the next few hours. There are some states that might reverse the so far result and this is what Trump is afraid of right now...


Reference from the Independent:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election-2020/trump-won-election-ballots-count-supreme-court-biden-b1581628.html

I don't think they will. They'll keep counting until Biden wins, then continue counting until all votes cast by the deadline are counted... by which point Biden will likely have won by even more.

Trump knows that mail-in ballots will favour Biden, which is why for example the Rep legislature of Pennsylvania banned the early counting of postal votes. If you ban early counting, and then try to ban late counting too, it sounds a lot like an attempt to just not count those pesky postal votes at all...

According to The Guardian there are still almost 3 million Pennsylvania votes, 2 million Michigan votes and 350K North Carolina votes to count. They all have a much smaller proportion of margin, if these are added to Biden’s current 238 electoral votes then he gets very close to 270.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2020/nov/03/us-election-2020-live-results-donald-trump-joe-biden-who-won-presidential-republican-democrat

EDIT: Biden is leading in Wisconsin by a tiny margin

It's still looking fairly close, but edging I think towards a Biden win. At least, Trump has a more difficult route to victory.

Trump is ahead in N Carolina and Georgia, and will surely also pick up the few points from Alaska.
Latest news from Wisconsin has Biden 15k ahead with ~175k votes to be counted, and from Michigan has Trump ahead by 10k with ~500k still to be counted (but the expectation is that most of these will be Dem, and easily outweigh that current 10k deficit).
Pennsylvania is obviously a big one and will take some time to be counted, but even if Biden loses there, if he takes Wisconsin and Michigan I think that puts him close to the winning line.

Edit: within 10 minutes of writing that, Biden has now taken the lead in Michigan!

Unfortunately for Trump that's not how it works. All votes need to be counted. Even when media "calls" the results on election night, those states still keep counting and certify the results sometimes weeks later... something the general public doesn't usually care about and Trump seems to be playing with that ignorance.


Could be a few days in places like Pennsylvania. However if Biden takes NV, AZ, WI, and MI, which are closer to being complete than PA - it's over for Trump.

Edit: NYT removed their "needle" from Georgia... I'm still impressed by how close it is.

I think AZ already declared for Biden. If WI and MI - Biden is ahead in both - finish counting today, then NV would seal it* - not sure if NV have said when they expect to finish counting though.

*_{Seal it apart from the demands for recounts, official legal challenges, and gun-toting mobs roaming the streets.}

NYT - which is what I'm looking at - hasn't called AZ yet but yeah, it looks solidly in Biden's favor. Nearly all votes counted, Biden leads by 100k, not sure what they're waiting for. Late mail-ins?

Regarding Nevada:

Here we go, twitter rant has been initiated.  

https://i.gyazo.com/274be0e82124ee26d8701d28aebe6c9e.png


Can I get a show of hands from anyone that believes Trump?  

My TDS is making it seem like he's definitely, 100% lying and really just trying take votes away from Americans because he doesn't want to lose his power.

He claims the evil states are controlled by Dems but MI/WI/PA have Republican legislatures and don't allow mail-ins to be counted before election day.

Do people really have a hard time believing democrats want Trump out so bad that they would cheat?  Did you not pay attention to the democratic primary? 

This implies Democrats would cheat in the closest-fought states, which are controlled by Republicans, and also cheated most polls to overestimate their chances. That really doesn't make sense.

It could well be that at 10 o’clock on election night, Trump is winning in Michigan, he’s winning in Pennsylvania, he’s winning in Wisconsin, and he gets on the television and he says, ‘Thank you, Americans, for reelecting me. It’s all over. Have a good day.’ But then, the next day, and the day following, all of those mail-in ballots start getting counted, and it turns out that Biden has won those states, at which point Trump says, ‘See? I told you the whole thing was fraudulent. I told you those mail-in ballots were crooked. And we’re not going to leave office.’ So that is a worry that I and a lot of people have.

- Bernard Sanders

NYT has a nifty chart for the remaining paths to victory:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/forecast-uncounted-votes-president.html

(scroll down to the tree-like thing).

BTW there was a snafu of some sort with the completed percentage in Arizona, so it's not yet 98%+ counted as some sites previously reported. So it could technically still be in play.

It looks like I'll probably end up being right about Biden winning, but I was right only through sheer dumb luck, since I was basing that mainly on polling, and the polling looks to be ridiculously off across the board. I thought that the polling methodology which these pollsters use seemed reasonable & science-based, and would probably be more accurate than 2016 (which wasn't even really that inaccurate), but I guess these pollsters actually have no idea what they're doing. Maybe the whole idea of random sampling is just too difficult to perform nowadays because nobody answers their phones, and online panels are self-selected rather than truly random. The big polling misses two presidential elections in a row is one of the main stories here, and the polling industry is going to have to make major changes if they want anyone to take them seriously going forward.

There's a chance that Trump could still pull it off, but it's difficult from here. He definitely can't lose GA or NC, which it looks like he might, and then he'd have to gain one or more (depending on which) of NV, WI, MI, or PA, all of which he's behind in. If it comes down to just one or maybe two states, I could see him successfully pulling some shenanigans to get a bunch of Democratic ballots thrown out, but it's not as if it's easy to do this: the courts are not just going to rubber-stamp anything that Trump wants, even if they're full of Republican judges, and it's not even easy to find stacks of ballots that you could somehow justify throwing out and which will be sufficiently Dem-leaning. Maybe Trump will try it, but I don't see it working if he has to "steal" several states this way, and even stealing one state like this is a bit of a long shot in itself. And while he might talk tough and refuse to ever concede, he's not actually going to refuse to leave the white house on inauguration day or anything like that.

It looks like the Republicans will retain the Senate, which I'm happy about. That means at least 2 years of gridlock. Biden can still do a lot of harm through the executive branch, and he will get bipartisan agreement on things like pro-war policies, but with the Republicans intentionally trying to obstruct him as much as possible, the damage will be limited. I'm especially happy that Gary Peters will apparently lose his MI Senate seat: I've seen several hearings with him participating, and he's a neoliberal authoritarian of the worst kind. (Not sure if his replacement is any better, though...)

The other issue is and I have said it a few times. A downstate NY Democrat and a NY Republican probably agree on more things then a downstate NY Democrat and a NM Democrat. Or a SC Republican and a ND Republican. They would never admit it in public 

Yeah, a SC Republican is going to be for fracking but....are they going to risk re-election on it if it really becomes an issue.

I would like to think the "party line voting" that has been going on for years is going to have to change or sooner or later they are all going to get voted out on their asses.

-Dave

The ramp up to a totalitarian party requires utter orthodoxy.

It's looking very good for Biden now. Won WI, ahead in MI and NV... and projected to win PA by a decent margin. And Trump is throwing lawsuits in all directions... which is as strong an indicator as any of the way this is going. Apparently the protests from Trump supporters have started in Detroit. Let's hope this doesn't get violent.

https://i.imgur.com/mkmco1H.jpg
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/upshot/pennsylvania-election-results-ballots.html

Postal vote counts in PA so far match very closely to NYT projections (image on same page), so there's reason to believe the PA call by the NYT will be fairly accurate.

CNN just called Michigan.

I am now going to allow myself to get my hopes up.

I don't know if the absentee ballots are going to be enough to propel Biden to victory there, depends on if the rest of the absentee ballots LOOK like the first batch in terms of how many of them are going to biden. If they're 4:1 Biden, then yes he'll be able to win, though if they're 3:1 Biden, it may not be enough.

Pretty sure it's not 2.6M though.

Senate is going to (most likely) end up Red though.


This has been a WILD RIDE OF EMOTIONS LOL.

Nevada, Arizona, and Pennsylvania are the ones that really matter here.

(Given I think GA and NC are going to end up for Trump)

Funny what happens during the dark of night, isn't it?

Votes get counted? In some states they will be counted all the way until Friday.

And then the guy complaining about them being counted will demand they be counted again.

I think og was referring to Trump going into authoritarian mode at 3 am though.

If this thread wasn't moderated by a nazi I'd put some money on GA going to Biden.

At the end of the day (well, one of those days within the next week or so) this election will probably turn out to be a good result for Democrats, considering that they had a barely alive candidate and still managed to flip a few states. Certainly not the type of a "blue wave" some hoped for but defeating an incumbent is always tough.

Pretty sure there are some bitcoin services for that, bunch of ETH's ones as well.

PolyMarket (ETH) - https://polymarket.com/market/which-party-will-win-georgia-in-the-2020-presidential-election

BTC is going to be a bunch of gambling websites.

But back to the point - I do think that Trump will end up with Georgia. I know that the absentee ballots are being counted, which is cutting Trumps margin to razor thing territory. Expecting Trump to win by something like 2000-5000 votes at the end of all of this. Nothing to be extremely happy about, as Georgia voted for Trump by a 5% margin in 2016. Though Biden is very strong among the Black voters in Georgia.

As I end most posts ----- WE'LL SEE.

Looking like Biden might pull it off by a hair now. One thing is certain, the media was WAY off with their predictions of a landslide victory.

Most of the Liberal media seemed to follow 538s lead (ABC News) that the two most likely scenarios were Biden wins FL and the election is called early (landslide), or it would be a nail biter,  and Trump would spread disinformation/declare victory before there was a clear winner.
Biden’s Favored In Our Final Presidential Forecast, But It’s A Fine Line Between A Landslide And A Nail-Biter
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/final-2020-presidential-election-forecast/

It's conservative media pushing anti liberal media stories that don't have much truth to them.  Pretty smart from a marketing perspective.  

Wall Street seems to be happy:

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/04/election-stock-market-futures-open-to-close-news.html

https://image.cnbcfm.com/api/v1/image/106779589-1604524007766-20201104_close_election_week_rally.png

Bitcoin seems to be happy:

https://www.coindesk.com/price/bitcoin

https://meem.link/i/a/tYJgVP.jpg
Edited 2020-11-30 to fix a broken image

If Biden is elected we are going to see a boom in prices both in the stock markets but also in the crypto markets.
Trump wasn't so popular in the Wall Street due to his radical opinions and the way that he wanted to cut the bonds from other countries. Biden is going to give a hope to the money makers that this is going to change.

There's also the point that if Biden wins, he then faces a Republican-controlled senate. It's this I think that's a key driver of the buoyant markets. Biden is not going to be able to implement higher taxes, tougher regulations, etc., if he has to get through the Rep senate to do so. Republicans have also flipped some House seats. A Biden administration is not going to have free rein.

He also can look forward to a shitload of investigations.

I think there's a possibility of some sort of fracture in the Republicans though.  It's could be a weird dynamic with Senators finally able to speak freely about Trump and most likely there will be unapologetic Pro Trump Republicans on one side and openly disgusted with Trump Republicans on the other.

yeah, and up to this point, with Trump calling that he will not accept results, there is no Republicans that are calling this down and that all votes should be counted, and results accepted as it is, it was unthinkable for America before Trump, and now they are speaking about it, with four more Trump years, two mandates would be in question, he would probably asking for third mandate

Biden is in such strong lead at the moment that it seems very unlikely for Trump to win. Sure he can ask for a recount of the votes but this won't make Biden votes disappear. I think Trump knows he is finished and there is not much he can do. There were never three mandates before, this seems very unlikely in my opinion.

They will still be afraid of the base and of getting primaried out. Trump will likely try to keep the Republican base excited and loyal to him even if he loses... he's already doing fundraising to fight the "rigged election".

Nope. every republican will abandon Trump if Biden becomes the president

AS the polls suggest that Biden is near winning, Bitcoin has jumped from below $15,000 to, say, $15,250... in the last 20 minutes.

8)

Going to be tight, and even if Biden wins the polls were yet again very wrong and professional poll aggregators, like 538, are looking pretty dumb right now. They gave Trump a 10% chance of winning overall and a 30% chance of winning Florida, NC, and Georgia, though it seems like all of those predictions are wrong.

Not really sure on how you could mess up the polling stuff so bad in 2016 and not just be much more conservative this time around -- but I guess it has happened again. It's not like Trump has changed the voters that he targets or has changed his campaign in a massive way.

Same white uneducated demographic with a bit of a difference on Latinos and Cubans which may have been the harder part to predict.

This doesn't sound so bad, given how close Georgia is turning out to be. But they did significantly overestimate Biden's chances in some other places. Wisconsin is way closer than predicted for example.

In other news... Trumps lawsuits are being dismissed in Georgia and Michigan, which is not a surprise to anyone:

https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-sues-3-states-election-c93acbc3e1f31baf3e9023b9b61696f7

In Philly observers did get closer access to watch the counting process. Trump is also suing in Nevada and will probably demand a recount in Wisconsin.

May be of interest... I'm predicting six months maybe longer of stupid drama.

https://www.scotusblog.com/election-litigation/

Biden trails by less than 2000 votes in Georgia and there are >5000 ballots to be counted in a heavily blue Clayton county, that's been going for Biden ~4:1. So that one county can make it game over for Trump. There are ~10k votes remaining in other counties too and almost everything, including red counties, has been going for Biden so it's looking very good for him.

I am getting confused. In case the fight about the election outcome ends up in the supreme court, will Biden be able to sworn in as the president on January 2021? There are going to be tons of lawsuits. Republican observers were kicked out of the counting center in Michigan, access was denied to Republican observers in Pennsylvania, dead people voting in Nevada and so on.. 

I doubt this will go anywhere. A few random lawsuits that Trump campaign tried to file have been thrown out because the lawyers couldn't produce evidence. They could force a couple of recounts (WI and GA) but that's about it.

The only votes that actually matter are the 538 electors that meet on the Monday after the second Wednesday in December.

If nobody receives a majority of the 538 votes, the House of Representatives will choose the next president.

So, no.

Georgia has to get a recount because of the 9k military ballots that are presumably going to be sent in tomorrow. But the recounts don't do anything. Florida's recount bumped Bush by a couple hundred votes so there's no way the state will flip if Biden gets a sizeable lead.

PA is all but gone for Trump which would end this shit show. NC is not going to be decided until Nov. 12th so even if Trump outperforms, we still don't know the winner until the 12th.

Senate is at a 48 48 split.

Another close race is the Georgia Senate race.

David Perdue (R) is at 49.9% and needs a majority in order to avoid a run off which he couldn't get, so we have two Georgia run offs which would decide the senate majority. The other race is Kelly Loeffler (R) v. Warnock. Apparently Loeffler is worth 500 million dollars and lives in a 10 million dollar home so this person is probably some self serving narcissist running for the senate for the prestige. Apparently that was the best republican Georgia could put up.


Thom Tillis (R) SHOULD* win NC, so Republicans are at 49 seats. Alaska will ofc elect their Republican senator, so R's are at 50.

The picture of Kamala Harris walking down the chamber smiling waving her hands around as she tie breaks every piece of legislation is not a pretty sight...Republicans will dump all they have into the race hoping to get at least one.

agree, and the difference in Michigan and Wisconsin is now even higher than 4 years ago, when Trump claimed this countries
these lawsuits are just chit-chat, and will not produce anything significant legally, since there is no evidence at all, but could produce unrest in the country and i think that this is primary goal for Trump, although do not know what will be next step for him


yeah, flip should happen today, and that should end this show that is currently on the run, three days on TV, i have heard that online food purchase jumped significantly during this show, and people are probably staying at home, so this could be a type of quarantine for people

Hope you're right.  But this shit show might just be getting started.

https://i.gyazo.com/2750b83d6c0c0e395052599c3cb82210.png

Don't even have to look at PA. Biden at the time of this post takes the lead in Georgia by ~1k votes with >99% reporting.

Regardless of your political views, votes trickling in by the hundreds at 5 AM in Georgia two days after the election has passed is beyond mental retardation on behalf of state officials.

agree, but final difference in PA would be 100k+ for Biden, if this trend continue till the end of the counting, and it will, so there would not be any suspicion there, i presume that Trump will try to blame everyone and claim re-election, but do not see how he can do something

I didn't know I could file a case with the SC via tweet :)

Seriously though, he needs to bring a plausible case that has the potential of changing the outcome of the election. If he loses PA, which he will, he has no case.

Edit: Biden ahead in PA.

Decision Desk calls it. Biden's the 46th President of the United States.

https://results.decisiondeskhq.com/


PA was going to flip, AZ was never going to flip, neither was NV. Figured anyone that was being realistic would have called it 24 hours ago, but here we are.

yeah, he is ahead in PA, and will probably have good advantage at the end, just looking at trend, which is mainly 75% of new votes for Biden, so he can allow to lose Arizona, that can happen in the end, but PA is enough to reach 270
GA could overturn back, as i understood there is 9000 US army votes there, and difference is really low (<1000 votes), but that will not be important, if Biden wins PA

Assuming AZ, GA and PA are done, If Biden takes NV and GA he will have 306 electoral votes.


https://i.gyazo.com/012007915be00ad7f404e78de41d6547.png

Its over when the media says its over.

The media says it's not technically over till one candidate receives a majority of votes from the electors on December 15th, or the House of Representatives chooses the next president.

Even in case Republicans somehow manage to win the two remaining seats in Georgia (Perdue and Loeffler), their majority will be reduced to 52-48. But then there are at least two "Republican" senators who vote with Democrats most of the time - Murkowski and Collins. So even in the best case scenario for Republicans, the actual balance in the senate is going to be 50-50.

Democrats effectively gained 2 seats (1 proper Senate seat + VP tiebreaker) but I would expect the GA runoffs to be fierce. Now that a state-wide Georgia election has been shown to be winnable for Democrats they will probably gamble a $100 million on it.

I'd say over. 

I think Trump will drag it out beyond that point. Even if the media turns against him and stops granting him airtime, he still has his own communication channels. The man will never, ever accept that he's been defeated in anything, or that he's been wrong in anything. Can you imagine him admitting that he called wrong on even the most insignificant event, such as a coin toss or a dice roll? Or that he lost in a golf match? Let alone that he's come second in a two-horse race for leader-of-the-free-world, with billions of people watching on.

For Biden supporters the election has two possible outcomes:
Biden wins
Biden loses

For Trump supporters* the election has two possible outcomes:
Trump wins
Trump wins but is cheated out of victory

It's absurd. The problem is that a proportion of the Trump base are backing him through faith rather than reason. That's why facts have no effect on them.
Of course some benighted countries do have elections where the result is determined prior to ballots being counted. America really shouldn't want to become one of those countries.

*_{Not all Trump supporters, obviously. But the loudest ones tend to grab the attention.}

---

Further to this, the fallout could get messy and violent. Will he leave the White House quietly? Will he encourage armed extremist nut-jobs to vote with their guns? I think it's a genuine concern. It's difficult to rule anything out at this point. The Biden campaign's tongue-in-cheek comment that "the United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House" could yet come to pass.

Trump tweeted few minutes ago. 🤣🤣🤣

https://i.postimg.cc/zDMrs2dV/IMG-20201107-215404.jpg

Trump is either making a fool of himself, or this is another "I was wiretapped" situation where everyone that calls him a liar are making fools of themselves and will be shown when the proof drops.. (remember that one?)

Trump likes to set his opponents and the media up like that..

According to ABC, Biden got Pennsylvania, so game over. 273 vs 214.

Of course Trump will do the American thing to do: Sue  :D

looks like most news outlets have agreed.

well except for fox; it has reserved its call.

edit: fox news has now called it for biden.

Fox called NV as well.

NBC, CNN, AP all call it for Biden.

Election was like ripping a band aid off slowly.

It won't matter if he sues since Pennsylvania has a law instated saying a president can't overturn what happens in that state's election. No matter what.
He can request for a recount but that's about it, can't sue the law of was written over 200 years of democracy. Your not in a communist country trump. ;D
Watch 4:04 and listen to what he says. Lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania:  "Math is math!" ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxOu8HXve14

He restated what happens in the Pennsylvania judicial system(which is different and why they call it a commonwealth there) this morning on the same station for all to hear while the counting was still going on.
Now if it was in any other state, like Arizona and Nevada because of those people are still standing in line and waiting to have their votes verified with showing they are a legal american citizen by government issued i.d, then he might delay the passing of power to the democrats.

A news outlet “calling” a race means nothing. It is the electoral college that determines who becomes president. There will likely be litigation that goes to the Supreme Court.

The media has gotten a lot wrong over the past four years, and I have no reason to believe they have gotten any better.

A news outlet calling a race is a very strong indicator of the outcome.  That's why Biden is 'the projected winner'.

What you mean to say is that sometimes they get it wrong and the chances of Trump winning are greater than 0%.  And I agree. 

Want to place a bet that no matter how much litigation happens Biden still wins?

-Dave

I had to delete a lot of posts just now so I think this warrants reminding that this thread is about the 2020 election. I understand that some detours are inevitable, but let's try to stay on topic. This means no agitprop, no grievances you may have about one party or another, no personal attacks, and let's keep the conspiracy theories to a minimum... perhaps limited only to the ones endorsed by Trump (or Biden, if there are any) if we must.

Aww, but I was just going to discuss the theory that Trump / Pence were going to pull a Ford / Nixon.  Trump will step down, make Pence president and Pence will give Trump a presidential pardon to keep him out of jail (even though he rightfully belongs there).

Not a conspiracy theory.

It's pretty likely he either pardons himself, or gets pence to pardon him.

Regardless, we're about to see a lot of pardons.

I'll allow it as a prediction :)

---

I guess the next thing to watch out for would any shenanigans by Republican state legislatures in the swing states trying to meddle with elector delegations. I can't imagine them going that far but I couldn't imagine a losing candidate refusing to concede so I don't know anymore.

I love the idea that Democrats could pull off a nationwide voting scam/scandal to make Biden president, and yet choose to let Mitch McConnell be re-elected.

Beautiful. Why do we even have the elections then? Must be some pesky state laws requiring that. Can they try to change those laws? I don't see how that could be done retroactively.

Money can't make too much difference, as seen from the senate elections in Kentucky, South Carolina and Iowa. The Democrats poured in more than $100 million to each of these races, hoping to flip them. But in the end, the GOP incumbents won by a very comfortable margin. The huge influx of money actually provoked a backlash from the natives of these states, as there were reports that a lot of people voiced concern about the attempts being made by the liberals in California and New York to influence the elections in smaller states.

The betting odds (https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/3698/Who-will-win-the-2020-US-presidential-election) are currently roughly 10:1 for Trump to be the next president (a $1 bet wins $10). If you would be willing to offer these odds, I may be willing to consider a bet with you.

While there is not any evidence that Trump committed any crime while in office, IMO it would be prudent for him to pardon everyone in his administration, including himself as I would presume that he would be the subject to politically motivated prosecutions.

In order for any state legislature to change a law, including the law that governs who electoral college voters are, the law would need to be signed by the governor, or have sufficient support in the legislature to override a veto. The only state this could possibly be done in is GA and AZ, which would not be enough to change the election outcome. It would also be damaging politically for those who vote in favor of this type of proposal. 

That site is showing 8:1 at the moment but it does seem to bounce a lot.

Since this is the Bitcoin board, not the USD board how about BTC0.015 of my funds against yours no matter where BTC is at the time. That when the electoral college votes next month (or whenever they meet) that they vote Biden in.

If Trump or Biden concedes before then the bet becomes payable at that time.

-Dave

I would be willing to bet you BTC0.001875 to win BTC0.015* with the following terms:
If Trump is President as of 12:01 PM Jan 20, 2021(one minute after his first term ends), I win the bet
If Biden is President as of 12:01 PM, Jan 20, 2021, you win the bet
If anyone else is President as of 12:01 PM, Jan 20, 2021, the bet is a draw
If Biden or Trump concedes, the bet is payable to the other party, however, the bet will not be final until 12:01 PM, Jan 20, 2021. This allows one party to concede, and end up becoming president (for example if they won a court case)

*for clarification, I am risking BTC0.001875 and you are risking BTC0.015

The logic behind the above terms is that Trump's legal strategy is not necessarily to win 270 electoral votes, it is to deny Biden from getting 270 votes. If the electoral college meets and there is no winner (neither candidate receives 270 votes), congress votes on the next president, with each state getting one vote.

The above offer will expire 24 hours from the date of this post if it has not been accepted.

Please move your bet to a separate thread. It's better for your own sake to not have it in someone else's self-mod thread and off topic here. TYVM.

In 2016 too, there were some rumors about "unfaithful electors" who said they won't vote according to what the voters in their state wanted them to do. But in the end nothing like that happened to overturn the result. No one really in practical world can do that. It will destroy all credibility of election and the respective party as a whole.

www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/which-candidates-did-the-seven-faithless-electors-support-election-2016/


Republicans if they do this stuff, the public will lose the trust on them and I am sure just for saving Trump's reputation, the party won't do that!

Just checked Realclearpolitics, and they still have Biden at 259.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/elections/live_results/2020/president/

They haven't yet called the outcome in Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Alaska. However, DecisionHQ has Biden at 279, with tossups at AZ, NC, GA and AK. Also, two of the senate races (North Carolina and Alaska) are also not called yet. Really shameful... the fact remains that United States presidential election results are not known even one week after the election day.. Some of the developed nations are much better than this..

To be fair, the US election is like 50 developed nations all having their election on the same day for the same leader.

One week has passed since the elections, and we don't know who won states such as Arizona, Georgia and Alaska. I am really surprised with the delay from Alaska. They have just processed around 65% of the vote. Why the counting is getting so much delayed there? Are they transporting the ballots in dog sleds and carts pulled by polar bears?

BTW, Biden's lead in Arizona has been reduced to 12,813 votes (remember that this was one of the states called very early by Fox News). Approximately 45,819 ballots remain to be counted (including 27,602 provisional ballots).

https://arizona.vote/ballot-progress.html

They have some rule that you can't open absentee votes till a week after the election.  I guess they want them to be all together at once and they need time for the votes to come in from the North Pole.

IIRC Kodiak Island was boat only three or four times a week.

Many other areas would be very slow by our standards, in seasons when small aircraft cannot fly.

Hmm.. interesting.

BTW, Biden's lead continues to decline in Arizona. But the big question is whether there are enough votes remaining, so that Trump can flip the lead. According to the latest update from the authorities, only 24,738 votes remain to be counted (including 18,514 provisional ballots). Right now Trump is trailing by around 11,635 votes and his chances are not looking very bright.

If you take a look here: https://arizona.vote/ballot-progress.html

It looks like the majority of those ballots are from Maricopa and Pima both of which are more for Biden then Trump.
Apache is also going for Biden.

Cochise and Yuma are going for Trump but combined they have fewer outstanding votes then Maricopa.

https://results.arizona.vote/#/featured/18/0 --> click view more then by county.

So getting a lead is going to be difficult.

In the end it probably does not matter. Even if Trump takes AZ and NC and GA he sill lost.

-Dave

Biden's lead in Arizona has been further reduced to 11,034. Only 16,040 ballots remain to be counted and therefore we can safely assume that it will be impossible for Trump to win Arizona. And I am not sure whether there will be a recount. Because in Arizona the recount rules are very tough, and the losing candidate can request one only in case the margin is less than 200 votes.

Actually if you look at the sites I posted above:

From here as of the time of this post, Biden is up by 11,434:
https://results.arizona.vote/#/featured/18/0

And from here: https://arizona.vote/ballot-progress.html there are 10,315 left to count. So no way to win at this point.

So AZ went blue.

And yeah, it's tough to get a recount in AZ. And they have been doing large amount of mail in ballots for years. Not to the extent of this election, but a very large percentage even in a normal election.

-Dave

Apparently some Trump supporters in Georgia are upset enough to boycott the Senate runoffs:

https://www.newsweek.com/georgia-trump-supporters-destroy-gop-boycott-senate-runoffs-1549245

That can't be real, can it?

It's real, I'm sure.

I've seen this sort of temper tantrum among conservative circles that won't get over him losing. I don't think he should have lost, but at some point getting the fuck over it is the best move.

Trump underperformed the down-ballot candidates almost everywhere. If the election stands, voters will have voted against Trump, rather than for Biden.

Loeffler should handily win as her opponent is especially radical in a Red state. Loeffler and Collins received a total of ~56% of votes, while her opponent only received ~32.9% of the vote.

I take a bit of a different take on things. I think that they voted for Trumps policies, though they voted against Trump the personality. Trumps policies have been pretty rightward and have been embraced by the Republican wing of the party, they've liked what they've gotten over these years.

The personality has been something that people have had to swallow as their best shot at getting conservative policies, as he is the King of the Republican party at this point.

I do think we will get another Trump soon, though he won't be as much of Trump the personality. He'll still have it there, though he'll be a lot more reigned in by advisors and less abrasive. That's going to be a bit of the new normal in politics for sometime.

This sums up the whole post-election nonsense quite well:

There will be a show of force of fake votes, as they figure that after Joe and Hoe take office nobody will come after them and their vote fraud.

I suspect it'll be pretty much right out in the open.

That is inaccurate. Trump did better than down ballot candidates in states such as Arizona. However in states such as Maine and Michigan, he performed worse than the GOP candidates for senate/house. But looking at the percentages can be misleading. A lot of people who participated in the POTUS election abstained from the senate elections.

For example, John James outperformed Trump in Michigan (48.22% vs 47.85%, a difference of 0.37%). But if you look at the number of votes, then it can be seen that Trump received more votes when compared to James (2,649,852 vs 2,642,833).

Trump, rather than hurting the down ballot candidates, helped them in a big way by ensuring a huge turnout among the GOP supporters.

What if the fraud actually helped Trump and Biden really won by more?

That is not what the forensic analysis by The Kraken shows.

I mean in the real world.  You know the Kraken isn't real, right?  It's a myth.

The fuck is the Kraken anyway? -- The news outlet(?), not the myth.

But in any case, state after state is currently certifying the results for Biden and the race is over. That's the end of it for Trump and there is pretty much no way to move forward with the whole -- convince the state electors to not certify the results, or something along those lines. We're at the point of no return. Donald Trump will leave the WH in January and that'll be that.

Guy will totally still be active in politics, will totally buy a media outlet or start his own and then build it up. Will be a force in the GOP as well as down the ballot Republicans know that he is the reason for the base support.

Qanon conspiracy theory that is so stupid Trump had to pretend like the lawyer that pushed it in public never worked for him.

I won't delete this because it's been replied to and explained but come on... stop krakening unrelated threads. You have your own. This is not the place for it.

---

Trump angry at Republican governors certifying the results:

If voter fraud is uncovered after Biden takes office, I would agree that it will not be investigated.

There are issues in PA such as not allowing GOP poll watchers to watch the counting of the ballots, however, I am not aware of evidence of sufficiently substantial and widespread voter fraud that would change the outcome of the election.

There are real issues with mail-in voting, however, the Republican opposition to widespread mail-in voting likely disenfranchised their own voters. The amount of effort put into voting for Biden per vote was less than the effort each voter put into voting for Trump.

Republicans picked up about a dozen house seats, maybe more. The Biden administration will not be able to hire people serving in the house because the Democrat majority is so small.

This is probably better suited for its own thread, or even its own sub... I don't think Trump was well prepared to win the Presidency in 2016. His early administration was not well organized, which probably resulted in much of his first term being stymied

The Democrats had been repeatedly and loudly saying they wanted to "count every vote." The Republicans had countered with "count every legal vote."

Seems that argument is still going on.

In my opinion though, I don't think it should take THAT LONG to find out that voter fraud happened. Like, Donald Trump has the full force of his legal team, his DOJ, and the rest of Republican state governors

Plus like, if it was uncovered by prosecutors within the DOJ then wouldn't it take a lot to hide all of this from the American people? There are career members of the DOJ who are Republicans, not all of them are Dems who are beholden to Biden or anything along those lines.

Yeah the early admin of the Trump administration is something that we REALLY should start a thread about. Way too much disfunction which stopped anything from really happening.

Well, you'd be trying to make it happen faster, and your adversaries would be trying to slow it down.

You'd legally request the voting machines be impounded for forensic examination. Your adversaries would fight that.

Imagine if that voter fraud commission Trump put together to find the 3 million illegal votes that cost him the popular vote in 2016 had actually found anything...

But they didn't.  Too bad, would have been a great talking point for you right about now.  Not as great as actual evidence that Biden only won because of fraud, but still better than nothing...which is what you have right now.

Yup, that commission found nothing. As there was nothing to actually find.

Even as of now, with explosive claims from Trump and his lawyers, there is nothing to back any of these claims. Not even small amounts of evidence that could maybe be building up to get to something that is real. Nothing, NADA, ZERO evidence at all to support these crazy claims that dead people are voting and all of this.

Where's the evidence? No where to be found right now.

Oh, now you are making some interesting claims. Keep in mind to simply ignore reality, and keep repeating the claim. This will make it become true. Just like the Russia Collusion story became true because it kept getting repeated.

Well maybe that one didn't work out as planned.

heres the reality you and millions of trump culters simply ignore and just keep repeating hoax instead

- trump campaign chair made millions of dollars getting putins preferred candidate elected president of ukraine
- russian intelligence officer flew around the world to have a 2 hour secret  meeting with trump campaign chair few months before election
- trump advisors said email dump was going to happen before it did
- don jr. and jared took meeting from russians who were offering dirt on clinton
- after gop nomination trump said he had no buisness in russia, trump tower moscow was still being negotiated
- mueller report was clear that no determination was made because olc said you have to wait till hes not president anymore to indict him
- mueller established that trump obstructed the investigation and "the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts"
- trump went on to lose the 2020 election to joe biden in trumps own definition of a land slide

Not exactly sure where the evidence is that I am 'ignoring reality'.

At this point there is ZERO credible evidence to back the fact the voter fraud claims. Trump continues to repost things on his twitter that aren't true, and aren't holding up in a court of law. It doesn't really matter if you spread tons of BS on your twitter or random conspiracy theory blog sites, these claims do have to be proved in court where real evidence is needed.

Just a quick reminder where we stand with the presidential election:

• Biden already has 270+ electors (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/biden-electoral-college-majority-certified-states/) from states that certified their results.
• This essentially takes care of the "safe harbour" deadline (December 8) - date by which states must complete all recounts etc and certify the results. None of the attempts to derail this process have succeeded.
• EC meetings are scheduled for December 14. Faithless electors and other nonsense is very unlikely due to extreme partisanship.
• The only recent Supreme Court action on election-related matters is a deadline set for PA officials to respond to a mail ballot case... set for December 9, i.e. after the certification deadline, so it won't affect the PA electoral vote.
• There is nothing else on the SC doorstep that could change anything before the 8th.

Well, this is exactly the strategy our soon to be former impotus is using.
Real judges  (many appointed by republicans and Trump himself)
aren't on board with the farce, and it's not exactly working out how he (impotus) had planned.
....Second thought, maybe it is, he's filling his PAC coffers with funds from his gullible minions
who think their donations are going to legal costs to overturn the "fraudulent election".

Ah, nice compilation of this entire thing.

Faithless electors were something that I've seen a ton of people talking about on Facebook and such. I guess the new thing is talking about how Trump can convince tons of faithless electors to vote for him or convince the SC to side with him. BOTH of these are totally undemocratic processes but I guess no one really cares about overturning the results of their election when the god emperor wants it for himself.

Conservatives complained about the courts for the longest time as well and now want them to involve themselves in deciding an election just to give it to their guy with no evidence? You'd understand if there was real evidence here, but there is NOT.

This shit is just fucking sad now.

I agree, everything you say, this thread says, and other socialist and propagandists say is not relevant.

But maybe...just maybe if you keep insisting, more and more stridently, it will become truey?

Are you telling me that if I keep insisting that evidence is needed in court then evidence will be needed in court? Crazy. That's how our country works and that's a GOOD thing.

I'm not exactly sure what you're complaining about here now, doesn't really make a lot of sense to me. Is there something in particular you want to point to or something like that?

How about the judges presiding over Trumps lawsuits?  Is what they say relevant?


“Contestants did not prove under any standard of proof that any illegal votes were cast and counted, or legal votes were not counted at all, for any other improper or illegal reason, nor in an amount equal to or greater than 33,596, or otherwise in an amount sufficient to raise reasonable doubt as to the outcome of the election,” Russell wrote in the order. “Reasonable doubt is one based on reason, not mere possibility.” <==Trump appointee

"Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here," <==Trump appointee


https://i.gyazo.com/01184411b404263f4e09bd2451a12757.png

I think at this stage, it's the Trump supporters who are desperate for their fantasy to become real.  It'll take time, but eventually you'll come to terms with the fact that he lost.

After Democrats spent four years harassing Trump and claiming his election was illegitimate, don't hold your breath. What comes around goes around. You've got 74 million against you, and they are not docile little sheeple that will get into line.

On top of those 74 million votes (would have been much more, if the opinion polls were honest), Democrats have to deal with a wafer-thin majority in the House (222-213), and a GOP majority in the senate. SCOTUS is having a conservative majority of 5-4, and GOP is on course to a House majority by 2022. Radical measures from Biden/Kamala may not get clearance from the Congress.

Those are not just numerical numbers. Because the "Republicans", or whatever you want to call the Trumpers, are really, really mad now.

The last part of the 2020 election has spilled over into 2021 - Senate runoffs in Georgia next Tuesday, January 5:

David Perdue (R) vs Jon Ossoff (D)
Kelly Loeffler (R) vs Raphael Warnock (D)

Early turnout is high, polls tilt towards Democrats, who would control the Senate if they win both seats. What should the Republicans do? Not sure, but one thing they shouldn't do is try to depress their own turnout but of course they are doing exactly that:

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/532348-trump-claims-georgia-senate-runoff-is-both-illegal-and-invalid-in-new-years

I don't know much about Ossoff but I listened to a pretty long interview (https://www.stitcher.com/show/stay-tuned-with-preet/episode/the-fight-for-the-senate-with-jon-ossoff-80045752) with him recently and was super impressed, especially considering he's only 33.  Kind of reminds me of a more aggressive Pete Buttigieg.

I'm curious as to how accurate the polling will be considering how bad they were with some of the senate races in November.  Susan Collin's polling data was atrocious, don't think she was leading in a single poll yet she won the race by near double digits. It's all about who shows up on election day to vote.

That being said, I'm going to take a shot in the dark and say that both dem's are going to win and this will largely be Trump's fault. He's creating too much doubt on his election that will undoubtedly keep republicans home. Democrats are energized, and obviously hate Trump so they would love nothing more than to give Joe Biden full congressional control.

I didn't research much about the candidates because I don't care enough, but Kelly Loeffler sticks out as this elitist rich girl persona who probably couldn't recite a line from the constitution if she tried. I saw a 10 second clip from the debate with her and Warnock and she reminded me of a Republican Hillary Clinton, but significantly dumber with no understanding of government or conservatism. Rather shocked that she was the best candidate Republicans in GA came up with.

Poor candidates, no help from Trump, and a high number of mail in's mean this thing is probably a wrap.

If Democrats take the Senate, I would blame Congressman Collins' selfishness in staying in the race even though it was clear he wasn't going to win. If Collins had dropped out, Loeffler would have won handily.

I would agree that Trump's unwillingness to accept the election outcome and/or inability to clearly present a coherent message explaining how the results were illegitimate is going to harm both Perdue and Loffler at the ballot box.

Both Democrat candidates are radical, and Georgia is a red state, even if it went for Biden in November. Biden is moderate, and he outperformed both Democrat Senate candidates in November. I would assume the polling is incorrect, just as they were in November.

Not long after early voting started, there were 50,000 absentee ballots requested from people who did not vote in the general election, which is very suspicious. As of yesterday, about 115k people have cast ballots who did not vote in the general. Democrats tend to vote early and by mail, while Republicans tend to vote on election day in person.

Chuck Schumer has said while campaigning in GA, that he will change the world and America if Democrats win both Senate seats. I don't think the people of GA are comfortable with that.

What are the chances that one democrat wins and one Republican wins?

I get that people will go down to the polls and just vote down party lines, meaning in pairs of Republicans or in pairs of democrats, but I wonder if Warnock brings any intersectional advantage to the table that would drive people towards him and just him.

Just food for thought.

Listened to a 538 podcast recently and they addressed this - it's more likely than you would think, mostly because of the "I don't vote for women or black guys" crowd. 

Side note: There's been a huge lack of polling due to the holidays and many pollsters not seeing any upside to going to Georgia in the current climate (pussys), but Warnock (d) is a pretty big favorite and the other race is basically a toss up - kind of a surprise for me, but again, very little data is available and there's nothing normal about tomorrow.

https://i.gyazo.com/6c6a6e3a45fcb9bfa70ea6760e47ea99.png

Both Democrat candidates have their own unique baggage that voters might not want to vote for (in addition to being extremists).

I think it is more likely that some voters will decide they are unwilling to vote for an anti semite or a wifebeater than uncontrollable features that TwitchySeal describes above.

IMO, it is most likely the GOP will sweep both Senate seats, but the next most likely outcome is a split. A Democrat sweep would result in the market/economy crashing on Wednessday.

Back in December I was expecting the GOP candidates to win the two senate election runoffs in Georgia, but the momentum seems to have shifted during the last couple of weeks. If the Democrats win both these seats, it is going to be disastrous for the GOP. It will mean that the senate remains tied on 50-50, and with Lisa Murkowski ready to jump to the Democrat side, it will soon become 49-51.

The turnout will matter a lot. Once the figures are available, I will be comparing the turnout from these counties, with respect to the turnout from the November elections: DeKalb, Fulton, Clayton and Rockdale. Other counties in the Metropolitan Atlanta region do have large sections of GOP voters, so it would be difficult to infer anything from the turnout.

 

Talking out my ass here, but I think Perdue & Loeffler both hurt themselves with the stimulus game. With the going around with $600 / $2000 / no money they really managed to alienate a lot of voters. Ossoff / Warnock could say whatever they wanted, but in the end they could not vote so it was just talking points. Perdue & Loeffler could and did vote . But... 1st they were against any money, then slowly agreed to the $600 and then jumped on the $2k when Trump wanted it. And then they backed Mitch in his plan to bury the $2k.

So now everyone who had any feelings about it, is now annoyed with them.
Annoyed enough to stay home or vote against them? Tune in tomorrow for the next episode to find out.

-Dave

Tune in next week more likely... I doubt this will be counted faster than the November election :)

There will be a little effect from that, and one-of-each could happen, but I think that the average person is incorrectly reasoning about this in the opposite direction. I've seen a lot of people thinking basically, "Each candidate has about a 50% chance of winning, so the chance that the Democrats win both is 50%*50% = 25%." The results of both elections will be extremely highly correlated, though, so that line of thinking is totally wrong, and it's giving a whole lot of people the wrong intuition.

I have no idea who's going to win. If the Democrats win, it will be the Republicans' own fault in many different ways. I don't worry about it too much, since their control of both the Senate and the House will be too narrow to do anything too shocking, though I do think that it'd be much better for the Republicans to maintain control and for us to get 2+ years of total gridlock.

I have to say, the sheer idiocy of so many Republicans has been making me root for the Democrats a bit, even though from an ideological/utilitarian perspective I think gridlock is better than Republican control which is better than Democrat control. Any person or institution that is this incompetent, irrational, and unwilling to even privately believe uncomfortable truths deserves to fail utterly and be replaced by people who actually have working brains. (There's plenty of irrationality and living in bubbles on the Democratic side as well, and in humanity as a whole, but it's really gotten insane in the Republican party.)

---

Turning to the electoral vote counting tomorrow: Probably it will be basically like normal but with 2 hours of pointless and predictable extra speeches from both sides, with many Republicans basically just putting on a show to be able to say "hey, I tried." But I was thinking today about how it could possibly go off the rails:

First, there will be a large number of pro-Trump armed protesters there. I suppose I could imagine them storming the capital, overwhelming the fairly weak police forces in and around D.C., and Trump intentionally not using his resources to stop them, so that they are able to actually disrupt the vote count. This could last for a few days, maybe, before the government apparatus including the military work together to arrest Trump for treason or whatever. Trump would eventually totally fail, but it would be a huge shock to the American psyche.

Second, it seems to me that the law allows Republicans to filibuster the counting process. They could just endlessly submit objections, and if Pence goes along with it, then each objection results in 2 hours of debate. They could extend it all the way to Jan 20 if they want. Now, this would be extremely stupid, since there is no end-game. The whole process would grind on and on, with almost everyone across the country and in Congress growing to despise this process and Trump. Kind of like the impeachment, but in the opposite direction and much worse. It'd be a good thing to do if Republicans want to try getting Trump's approval down to 5%. And then on Jan 20, Pelosi would by law become President, so what have you gained? Maybe a competent President with tons of support among both the bureaucracy and the people could use the uncertainty surrounding this whole unprecedented succession issue to successfully stay in power, but Trump is nowhere near being able to pull that off. However, several Republicans seem to be thinking about nothing except what their base supporters will say on Twitter over the next 6 hours rather than doing any sort of sane planning, and if enough of them are like that, this mess could maybe occur. (I do think that Pence has to go along with it, though.)

But if enough Republicans are sane, they will try to get this over with as soon as possible, sticking their necks out as little as possible. Nobody should've committed themselves to signing onto these objections in the first place (just politically, not even thinking about ideology), but that ship has probably sailed.

(Note that the winners of the Georgia race will not be certified in time for it to have any impact here unless maybe if things do go way off the rails.)

I think most people would assume that both seats would go to the same party almost certainly.  At least that's been my assumption.  If they're very tight races, it very well could be the anti black/female voters that make it a split decision. Although they're more likely to stay home I suppose.

Isn't it 2 hours per state? I remember reading something about objections for each state being "disposed of" with a 2-hour debate and vote, which to me sounded like no matter how many objections there are it's all resolved at once. And they wouldn't object to red state votes, would they. Granted Pence could choose to interpret it differently and there is probably not much that could be done about it but I just don't see him being politically suicidal like that. He's probably eyeing 2024 too.

There was a nonpartisan expert on C-SPAN's Washington Journal recently who said that it's 2 hours per objection, and that there can be more than one objection per state. In the past, multiple objections were combined, but only via unanimous consent in the joint session. Reading the law (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/3/15) myself, it doesn't seem crystal clear to me that 2 hours per objection isn't allowed or intended, though a ridiculous filibuster probably wasn't envisioned.


I think so too; he seems to be of the "put on a good show and slowly ease into being able to put Trump's madness behind us" mindset. But he's difficult to read, and maybe he could somehow be pressured into it.

I like the NYT "needles" where they forecast the election chances in real time.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/05/us/elections/forecast-georgia-senate-runoff.html

Brings me back to Georgia on November 3rd though. They had Trump with a 70-80% chance to win and on the same night they flipped the odds in Joe Biden's favor. And of course, we all knew how close Georgia came in. Isn't always accurate but still something to pay attention to.

It depends on how they count it. In November I think they counted election day ballots first and mail-ins later so blue shift was more likely. And it heavily depends on which counties report first. NYT is trying to adjust for all these factors but I don't think they can do much this early on. When it's 50%+ counted then it might be worth looking at those needles.

Edit: I checked a couple dozen counties that reported nearly all of their votes and there seems to be a consistent shift towards Democrats compared to November results. It's not quite clear if it will be enough for them to win, particularly for Ossoff who was trailing Perdue in November and is about half a percentage point behind Warnock today.

Edit2: With 80% counted and remaining votes being mostly in metro Atlanta counties, it would take a major miracle for Republicans to win, even though they're narrowly leading at this point in time. It looks like Trump succeeded in his anti-election fight.

Guess this election is over, already. Dem's take both seats. Democrats outperformed in almost all the counties that I looked at and Atlanta still hasn't reported which will, at minimum, split like 80/20 democrat. Looked all over the map and couldn't find any areas in which GOP were outperforming.

According to the NYT election needle, Warnock is expected to win with a margin of +1.8%, while Ossoff may win with a margin of +0.9%. It looks as if the Republican turnout was quite low for this election, probably disappointed by the outcome of the November elections. So it means a 51-49 majority for Democrats in the select (if we add Murkowski in the Democrat column).

I wouldn’t count the chickens before the eggs hatch.

Republicans are underperforming in many rural countries, but not by a lot.

I think both races will come down to DeKalb county, which is apparently taking a long time to count ballots. Only about 40% of voting locations reporting.

I am surprised that Warnock is outperforming Ossoff considering that Warnock is apparently a wife beater.

DeKalb dropped in a big batch of results just now, pretty much in line with NYT estimates. There doesn't seem to be any reason to doubt the estimates of the remaining ~5% percent of the votes.

On paper right now it's really close, but it seems like the most likely outcome is Dems sweeping when considering which ballots have yet to be counted.
Decision desk already called Warnock:
https://i.gyazo.com/3dcba32fbd5206ca195063ca9447ed10.png

---

Check out Loefflers scandals and the police report about Warnock's ex wifes foot.

Well, this is disappointing. It would've been surprising a month ago, but after the Republicans' many recent failures, I'm not surprised. Looking forward:

I think that Democrats will be able to increase taxes a little, though not as much as what Biden proposed. Maybe corporate rates will go from 21% to 25%, and the top individual rate will go up a few points to Obama levels. I'd guess no changes to capital gains, or something fairly small if anything. Personally, I don't care too much about tax increases or big one-time spending projects (eg. a green infrastructure program); I'm much more concerned with lasting changes to law and precedent. Free speech is likely to be attacked through attacks on "hate speech" and substantially changing section 230. Minor gun control measures are likely. Further privacy violations are likely, especially in finance: all BTC holdings may be required to reported in the same way as foreign accounts, for example. Various harmful regulations are likely. Foreign involvement will increase, and while the administration may seem less bellicose compared to Trump, there will be probably be one or more Libya-style interventions. The administrative state will become larger, more powerful, and more entrenched. The best I can hope for is that Democrats are not very efficient or unified, they waste a lot of time not getting much lasting lawmaking done, and Republicans retake the House or Senate in 2 years. (A unified Republican government would do some of the same bad things I listed above, BTW, maybe just 20% less bad overall.)

I've been thinking that after a few quarters of above-average growth due to a partial recovery from COVID, the economy is headed for 5+ years of very low growth and moderate inflation due to scarring from the economic damage that's been done, a lot of accumulated malinvestment, and the unprecedented levels of spending and money-printing. This election result probably won't have a huge effect on the economic outlook one way or another, though the economic situation may put Democrats on the back foot politically going forward. This economic environment is good for BTC, but there is a very high probability of harmful regulations, so this election result makes me more bearish for Bitcoin over the next few years.

Some silver linings:

First, if Republicans had won, it'd be 2 years of boring stonewalling from McConnell, whereas the current situation will be a much more interesting display of infighting and intense political maneuvering. Democrats have several deep divides which they'll have to deal with. Republicans will be trying to play of a game of simultaneously trying to build back their base, stopping Democrats from enacting their major policy goals or getting wins, and negotiating-with/pressuring Democrats to bring them further right. It'll be fun to watch.

Second, maybe this will knock some sense into Republicans, and they'll move away from their current strategy of mostly abandoning two-thirds of their supporters in favor of pandering extra strongly to the most braindead segment of Republican voters. I want to see halfway-decent Republicans like Rand Paul and Mike Lee learn from Trump's past successes, but forcefully reject Trump's insanity. They need to stop saying, "Well, maybe it's OK to be a little bit completely insane." (Not because I care about American institutions, but because insanity leads to failure, and I don't want to see 20 years of Democratic control of government.)

Third, as part of winning, Democrats chose to form a coalition with many quite economically conservative groups of voters. There's no way they're going to even attempt something like Medicare for All anytime soon; Biden himself would veto it. Today's Democratic party is firmly a neoliberal party, basically an extension of the Business Roundtable. This is definitely bad, but it's 95% status quo: "Nothing will fundamentally change," as Biden famously said.

This is part sarcasm and part (sadly) the truth. There are a lot of voters out there in that state that don't care because the do it too.
Not saying that the other side looks the other way for things that they do, just that to some it's a bunch of meh.


After the 1st few months yes, but:
Years ago, I don't remember when I saw a movie that had the wonderful quote "Fuck you, you fuckity fuck" And since all of us in the office are originally from Brooklyn / Queens / Da Bronx it just became a wildly inappropriate thing to say around the office when someone pissed us off. I see that happening for a bit.

Probably not in any way that matters in the long run. i.e. lower emissions standards / higher MPG requirements. They are changing no matter what, you can kick and scream all you want but when 75% of the word adopts a standard you are either going to join them or not sell to that 75%. The auto makers can do all the posturing they want, but as they fought CA they also were planning more efficient vehicles.

And I see every open Judge's seat being appointed as fast as they can get them in.

Just to say FU to the R's

Things that people on both sides wanted I can see being pushed through but leaning a bit more left.

But free college / Medicare for all / I don't see it.

-Dave

How Lauda would have put the quote:

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/43/f8/dd/43f8ddac11b3ef967c7de56f789a2e86.jpg

LMAOOOOOOO

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1346900434540240897

I literally had this in my bingo card that Trump would throw his own Vice President down the stairs because he didn't get his way. Grade A narcissist with an incredibly fragile ego. Meanwhile, the US capitol building is being sieged by a bunch of Trump rioters forcing evacuation on the senate floor. This is completely on Trump, and I think this last month of his Presidency will define his entire administration as a dumpster fire.

Republican party is going to be in shambles. "Trumpism" isn't going away and Republicans are going to be forced to embrace it. This is identical to democrats embracing progressive radicals in their party. Seems like it is now a two way street.

Stock market seems to like Ossoff's and Warnock's wins, except Nasdaq for some reason. Perhaps a clamp down on Big Tech is expected.

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/major-us-stock-indexes-fared-wednesday-75095771


Bitcoin up 10%+ too.

That's weird. I listened to the full Trump phone call with the Georgia Secretary of State the other day and he said the markets would be devastated if that happened.

Pretty sure they’re expecting a bipartisan assault on bigtech, which is probably to be expected given the fact that both sides are cool with regulating tech — either through removing something like section 230 (which is only really wanted by the right) - or breaking up monopolies, which is something that the left wants.

They’ll find some common ground between those extreme points, not sure where they’ll be at. But maybe we’ll see some sort of laws relating to data (GDPR in the EU) or about how companies should treat data surrounding data breaches.

Who the hell knows now, but big tech is going to be regulated more under a Biden admin.

Market is happy cause stimulus and trade deals will be more stable.

With Ted Cruz making a fool of himself (in his defense, hilariously unlucky timing having to go from his speech to hiding under his desk) and so many Republicans finally conceding Trump is a psycho I expect a whole bunch of people working for Trump to resign very soon if they have any reputation left to salvage. 

Expecting a TON of people in the WH to resign over the next few days. Only way to ensure that they’ll have a job in the next Republican administration, as this is the last straw for Trumpism in the party — or at least for the future of the party.

I’ve seen reports of staffers of McCarthys (House minority leader - GOP) saying that they may resign in protest over him helping to start this fire. Many reports of WH staffers and aides and such within the executive branch.

Axios is reporting that some cabinet members are discussing invoking the 25th amendment. No word from Pence though - https://www.axios.com/republicans-trump-removal-25th-amendment-a91c9dc4-b01f-4a50-ae41-aea971388d57.html

National manufacturing lobbying group came out and is backing the call as well. We’ll see where that goes and what Trump does on his twitter as a response.

There have been a handful of Press/communications related resignations today. I wouldn't think much of this until 'real' staffers start to resign, such as those who have actual influence on police.


There is a discussion here --> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5307383.0


Trump is actually banned on Twitter. Expect to see a thread by RealDonaldTrump2 trying to appeal the ban in meta. There are a lot of business leaders condemning the violence (its too bad they didn't do the same this summer).

After the last four years - or maybe I was always that cynical - I don't believe that this dissent will last. Some Republicans will say the correct words, some will quietly wait it out, but when the next round of primaries starts they will all be pandering to Trump's base again, which will see this attack on the Capitol as real patriots doing the right thing. Fox News is already weaving a narrative to that effect. I'm sure Newsmax and OAN are way ahead.

I don’t know about that, I truly think this may be the straw that breaks the camels back.

Pandering to Trumps base is one thing, though I highly doubt the 40% of Americans (his base, probably a smaller number then this though) support what happened in the Capitol today.

I can only imagine what is going on at OAN, Newsmax, and Fox — though I do think a lot of people saw this for what it is today without having their narrative fed by someone else. Like just seeing the pictures and videos on social media / newspaper / whatever medium you use is enough to show that what happened today WENT WAY TOO FAR.

Depends on the amount of pressure the next few days have though, that’s where we see what we’ll make of all of this. I still do think that the Trump rule of the party is tainted, and will probably be leaning towards an end here. Gives GOP a lot of wiggle room to run away from him now.

Well, even if that's the case, there is another angle that could work - this was a false flag attack to push Biden's certification through. They will adopt whatever narrative plays best with the base and I doubt it would be "Trump incited violence at the Capitol". Keep in mind that none of the "election fraud" fantasy is going away and that is the foundation of this whole conflict.

Tash has you covered: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5307332.msg56041284#msg56041284

BADecker will fill us in on the details later today I'm sure.

I’ve been seeing this angle pop up more and more on social media - Lin Wood (lawyer for Trump at somepoint, may even be now) - is sharing pictures of a few people that were at BOTH AT BLM PROTESTS AND WERE AT THE WHITE HOUSE WHICH MEANS THAT THEY’RE OBVIOUSLY PAID ACTORS

Pretty interesting mental gymnastics to convince yourself that at first there was nothing wrong with this event, but then at a certain point far left extremists got in with the intention of making yall look bad by agitating(?)


Sigh.

Such tough decisions... stay for two weeks until losing their jobs anyway or pretend to have a spine.

They want to get a head start on finding good lawyers to defend them.
Get in line early before all the good ones are taken.

I think one really good thing that Trump did was energize a lot of people about the way a lot of people in government violate the law and get away with it.
It has always been done, on both sides, and with some administrations more then others.
Now I see after decades of this people pissed enough to do something.

Devos, Mnuchin, Chao, Mulvaney all did it so publicly and flagrantly that it has many people on both sides wanting them nailed to the wall.
Was listening to a legal show the other day and some prosecutors were talking, some from "deep red" states and some from "deep blue" states about how since mid November they had been working together to draft something against some of these people. Will it go anywhere? Who knows, but even if it fizzles they are going to be spending a large amount of their next few years getting to testify about their actions.

Due to the current economic situation Mnuchin might make it out without getting hit. But the others, even if it's just at the state level, yeah they are getting subpoenas to testify about their actions.

-Dave

Did any of them actually condemn Trump's coup attempt? Because if they left with "it was an honor to work for you sir" then they're just trying to avoid making the decision regarding 25th, and not willing to burn bridges with the base.

It's Trumps penultimate Friday as President (or possibly his final Friday) - a good time for him to do things he doesn't want to get as much coverage by the media. Pardonpalooza in a couple hours?

Does he still have anyone around to prepare the paperwork? Not sure if pardon via tweet would hold up in court.

This probably deserves it's own thread but I'm posting this here because I think some of the things I talk about pertains to key issues that people voted on in the 2020 election. Feel free to delete if it's not on topic and I'll post it somewhere else.

Anyways - Orange man was suspended from twitter!

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump

https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1347684877634838528


So aside from this being dangerous I think it's important to talk about the implications of banning the current sitting President, soon to be ex-President.

I'm a firm believer that tech regulations, tech censorship, ect. were on the ballot in the 2020 election and that if Republicans were to win, they would work to take away "publisher" status away from big tech companies -- probably messing around with section 230. I think this would have been disastrous and don't believe that Republicans would have been successful in their effort because many conservatives realize you can't go around dictating how private companies handle their user policy and content regulation. So basically you would have had the status quo if Republicans were to win -- nothing changes, life goes on.

Now that democrats won and contain full control, I think we see the consequence playing out in real time. Trump was banned from Facebook and Twitter obviously followed through and banned Trump too. I'm thinking that big tech companies are jumping ahead of the gun and are removing Trump because it will successfully limit Republican reach on social media platforms which means democrats control the political discussion online. Meaning, I think Facebook and Twitter banned Trump so they can avoid scrutiny by democrats who would undoubtedly push cumbersome regulations on big tech companies to if they don't adhere to de-platforming individuals they don't like. It's no secret that democrats have floated the idea of banning Trump from social media due to "inciting violence" before. Twitter also pulled the trigger and banned Sydney Powell, Michael Flynn, and a few other Q-tards.

So where does this leave us? Probably down a dark road. If someone disagrees with me, I won't fight for them to be banned. I might call them retarded, but that's another discussion.

He can go to Parler if he doesn't want to be on Twitter. He broke Twitter rules, repeatedly, and Twitter was giving him a lot of slack until they didn't. Would you argue that he shouldn't be banned if he came here and started spamming off topic nonsense all over the forum?

No he can't because Google have already taken it down from their playstore and Apple will most likely follow suit. Next step will be ISPs banning the host most likely if left wing voices still consider it a threat to their views.

Hardly a good comparison if he would join BitcoinTalk and spam threads. No one on this forum is (presumably) an elected president.

If words were ever that dangerous why is social media allowed to exist?

The guy that started Facebook started his social media career with a site stealing women's photos from a university index and allowing people to rate them.

To pretend such people somehow have the moral high ground is utter moronic.

How does being an elected something or other make you immune to the rules of a website?


Exactly. Facebook sucks. Why people insist on using it is beyond me.

The reason twitter gave for the ban was along the lines of "Trump said he wouldn't go to the inauguration, therefore he's inciting violence because of the broader context." I kid you not.

If he was actually breaking the rules, I'd call for his ban too. They've let people on the left who call for death against the right stay up. Pretty sure the Iranian and Chinese accounts are still up too lol

That's the thing, Twitter can decide what they think is the context of tweets.

Like I said, if their platform is THAT dangerous if they didn't ban people why allow the platform to exist?

I think things are about to get bad..

The way the media spun this trying to make this protest out to be worse than what BLM have been doing all summer in their “peaceful” protests, calling this white supremacy, they are starting a civil war..

The Trump protesters didn’t burn blocks to the ground, they went straight to the congressional buildings and TOOK them.. Didn’t even burn them..

They are scared and made a very faulty decision emotionally..
They made a big mistake not giving this protest any respect at all after giving every excuse in the book for BLM..

These patriot protesters are MUCH more powerful and MUCH more intelligent than BLM protesters..
I’m not sure they know what they are doing pissing them off this badly..

By the way, when it comes down to it, resisting oppression and tyranny matters a whole fucking lot more than a million black lives, plus another million white lives, and a few million more lives of any kind..
Principles matter more than lives..

Lives don’t mean fuck all compared to what is happening to us people these days, which is just getting worse and worse..
They are using a damn cold as an excuse to shut us down, tell us what to do, and slowly step by step control every point of our lives, basically enslaving us..
Things are bad.. Lives will likely be traded soon..

Not to mention they VERY likely just got away with rigging a presidential election..

Their is no proof, but I believe probably 70% chance this election was rigged..

I saw MY own vote changed with MY own eyes 100% fucking fact, through dominion software..
Their excuses flew and they changed the vote reports AFTER getting caught, but I don’t trust them one Satoshi with their excuse and for all I know they were paid off but got too greedy with the change %s and got themselves caught..

The problem I see is that the Democrats are doing nothing other than pouring petrol on fires that have been lit for a very long time.

The storming of Capitol Hill is wrong (although there are conflicting reports of police facilitating some it) and sadly resulted in death. But at the end of the day normal proceedings could resume a few hours later.
Chuck Schumer: This was just like Pearl Harbour.

If Trump supposedly belongs in a straight jacket Chuck Schumer should have been wearing one years ago.

Always with blaming the media.  The first hand videos that came out today show it was even worse than I thought while watching it happen live.

They literally broke the doors down of the Capital with guns in their face while the Senate (including the VP) and House were in session with the intent to take elected officials hostage or worse.

They beat the shit out of and stole from journalists who's credentials were from any of the outlets Trump deemed 'enemy of the people'.

They ransacked and stole stuff (laptops, cameras, likely with classified information) out of personal offices belonging to members of congress, including the Speaker of the House.

They built a gallow while chanting about hanging the Vice President while others 'hunted him down'.

If BLM were responsible for all of the above, it would by far be their defining moment and the thing you mentioned first when talking about how bad they are.


PS: The vast majority of BLM protest have been peaceful.  The violent ones weren't called peaceful.  So no need for the quotes in "peaceful".

These are private platforms, and legally-speaking they should be able to do what they want. If the government says that they have to allow X, or must ban Y, then you're giving the government a dangerous level of control over speech. If section 230 is repealed, then you're giving these companies a huge incentive to delete anything even remotely controversial, since they could be held liable otherwise. In either case, you're discouraging competition to the huge companies because you're creating a situation of regulatory capture: big companies are better-able to handle burdensome legal regimes. For example, a few years ago Congress carved out an exception in section 230 for certain sex crimes. As a result, Craigslist had to shut down their dating sections because they didn't have the resources to moderate them strictly enough. Later, Facebook created a dating service, since they have much more resources, and they can deal with the 230 carve-out. Regulations lead to centralization at the top.

If you don't like how these companies do business, then use a different site. There are ways that this is bad/uncomfortable, but the alternative ways of possibly handling it are much worse.

As for the decision to ban this stuff itself: I can see how honest, well-meaning actors at these companies might justify their recent actions. Many of the people who participated in the capitol riot thought that they were doing the right thing, and maybe didn't even realize how much danger they were putting themselves in, but yet a few of them are dead and many of them are going to prison for a long time. People at these companies might reason that too many people are just too susceptible to being manipulated, and at least the top platforms should try to protect them from themselves. The most persistent believers will go elsewhere, and they should have the freedom to do so, but by having the most popular platforms cultivate their communities more, they might actually succeed in reducing the future growth of some of these crazy thought-bubbles.

There is a big risk, however, that this just creates more division. These people can go to Parler, and if Parler is gone from Google Play then they can create their separate app store. It leads down a road of basically splitting the Internet in two, and then we're going to have two almost completely separate cultures of people living amongst each other, which is a dangerous situation. Also, I think you're right in that a big part of their motivation is in appeasing the incoming administration, and these companies do have a history of being very biased. The recent decision by Twitter was clearly them just jumping onto a bandwagon, not a principled decision. IMO they'd be better-off trying to completely redesign the structure of their sites with the goals of 1) making manipulation more difficult and 2) not even giving themselves the opportunity to let their bias affect moderation. It's a difficult problem, though.

Or, they took a look at how much advertising revenue the Trump side was generating and how much advertising revenue the anti-Trump side was generating and made a business decision that they could throw a reason over.

Kind of like Nike with the Colin Kaepernick Just Do It campaign.
Nike did research, found a substantial majority of the people who buy their products were for Colin. And that most of the rest were ambivalent. The few that were Nike consumers that would leave because of the advertising were deemed an acceptable business loss vs the potential gain.
Looking at their stock price and sales it was a good call.

If you don't think it's all about the money you are deluding yourself.
But telling a lot of people you are worth more to us in advertising dollars and as a revenue stream then those other people over there just drives everyone away.

-Dave

As a society, we should consider if it is acceptable for a company to influence society via the way they moderate their content while being largely unaccountable to citizens.

I don't think 'start a new platform' is sufficient to address the above. Major social media platforms serve as an effective town square and speech at a real town square is protected by the first amendment.

Parler for example is a customer of AWS and Google. There are a very small number of apps that are banned for political reasons and are probably insufficient to get most people except the people with the strongest political ideology to use alternative platforms that are open to these apps.

Changing 230 with regard to what content is removed should be fairly simple. Currently, social media companies can remove content they deem 'objectionable'. The term 'objectionable' is specifically up to individual social media companies. The definition of 'objectionable' could be more narrowly defined to include only a subset of content. Social media companies could also mark content with various labels that individual users can decide to either view or not view. Changing 230 with regard to who gets banned is much more difficult.

BTW, I don't think Craigslist's "dating" subs were really for dating. I think it is more likely that most of the ads were for sex work. Facebook did open their competing dating site, but they also have many competitors that don't have 1% of the resources that Facebook has.

That's not what's happening though.  Society is holding them accountable, especially since Trump took office.

You just don't like that they fact checked and banned Trump.  Imagine for a second it was someone like Hillary Clinton that got banned from Twitter for inciting a violent mob to storm the Capital to stop congress from certifying Trump as president.  Would you be upset when Twitter banned her?  Of course not.  That's what makes your argument in bad faith.  Step back and look at what you're really saying without Trump in the equation.  It's ridiculous.

If anybody fact-checked Trump and found him wrong, why won't they simply let him present his evidence before Congress? Looks more to me like they found Trump right, and are trying to silence him because... because the truth would be their downfall if it ever came out into the open.

8)

Are we just pretending dozens of judges heard his boatload of lawsuits and threw them in the garbage due to lack of evidence and/or logic?

You can answer your own question. What are you pretending?

I'm not in any special contact with Trump, his people, Congress or judges. Are you?

If you have been listening to the standard media, and that is where you get your ideas and info, you've been played.

8)

Judges tend to make their decisions known quite eloquently so you don't need to be in any special contact with them.

BADecker, you already have a bunch of threads for this BS. Please leave this one.

They didn't even fact check him lol

They banned him because he refused to attend Biden's inauguration. I posted a link to @TwitterSafety earlier where they openly admitted this. Trump did not tell people to go out and be violent, if he did, he deserves the ban.

If we're playing by your rules, should Bernie Sanders be banned from twitter after demonizing Republicans causing some sick fuck to go out and try and execute the minority whip? There's no way anyone should be defending Trump's ban. Twitter is a private company and can do what it pleases, but I'm not going to pretend like this isn't completely bizarre and deranged. It's also what leftists were begging for over the last 4 years.

First it's Trump, then who?

Context matters. Sure he didn't tell them "go and kill a cop at the Capitol" but he did tell them to go there and disrupt the proceedings and it resulted in violence. It's disingenuous to deny that Trump's rhetoric is inciting violence. And he is not backing down from the underlying false claims of election fraud, which is what encourages his supporters to be violent.

I'm not defending Twitter in any way - I think their whole system is thoroughly fucked since it's basically a trolling platform - but Trump doesn't have any plausible argument in this dispute. If he's too obnoxious even for Twitter that's entirely his problem.

Yes, they did - over and over.  Mostly when he was spreading misinformation about the election process and outcome.



You should click on the link and read the article.  If you already did, it would seem like you're intentionally taking it out of cont



Are you really going to play the 'he didn't explicitly say to go be violent'?  That's so lame.

He was responsible for the "Save America/Stop the Steal Rally", scheduled to coincide with congress counting votes.

Then he hyped the event tweeting things like "it will be wild", "the country needs you to fight"

And here's what he told them right before they marched over and stormed the capital:

"And after this, we're going to walk down and I'll be there with you. We're going to walk down--

We're going to walk down. Anyone you want, but I think right here, we're going to walk down to the Capitol--

And we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women and we're probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.

Because you'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong."



Bernie didn't incite violence.  Trump did.  Many times. So, no, I don't think Bernie should be banned from Twitter.  But if Twitter wants to ban Bernie, I think it should be the response of their users they have to worry about, not the government.

And they aren't my rules.  It's basic ethics. Dorsey built twitter and is the current CEO - if someone is using twitter to do something horrible, it's his responsibility to stop them from using twitter.



Trump wasn't first, they ban tons of people for violating their terms every day.  They already explained that he would've been banned a while ago if it weren't for the fact that he was president.  Personally I wish they would've held him to the same standards as everyone else.

Having supported Donald Trump till the election day on 3rd November, I have to say with a lot of pain that he is looking like a buffoon now. The left setout a trap for him, and he was stupid enough to fall for it. Even before the elections, there was widespread propaganda in the mainstream media that Trump would resort to violence, if the results go the other way. And now his actions have given justification to those predictions.

Whether there was electoral fraud or not is an entirely different thing. Even before the elections, it was well known that the postal ballot system is not really free from fraudulent practises. Trump should have taken the necessary steps before the elections, rather than whining about it after the elections. Afterall, the SCOTUS had a 5-4 conservative majority and he had a golden opportunity to make sure that voter fraud doesn't happen in the inner city areas. He refused to act before the elections.

And when he lost the elections, he tried to harm his own party. The GOP did exceptionally well in the house elections (gaing at least 15 seats from the Dems) and did somewhat better than expected during the senate elections (by winning senate seats in hotly contested states such as Iowa, Maine, North Carolina and Texas). But then Trump's refusal to help them cost the two senate seats from Georgia.

A peaceful handover would have been the best thing to do, and it could have resulted in GOP getting House/Senate majority by 2022. Trump, as a result of his ego refused to do that and now Democrats have the trifecta power.

No it wasn't.    citation needed

That was something repeated and retweeted, by impotus ad infinitum with zero evidence, until all his idiot minions accepted it as fact.
Because they heard it on their twatter, farcebook, instagram feeds, so it must be true.

He's responsible for being inflammatory. Absolutely agree on that. There is a fine line of incitement and reckless political rhetoric. Trump has engaged in reckless political rhetoric similar to when Bernie Sanders demonized Republicans causing a staunch supporter of his to go shoot up a baseball field. Lot of people like to wear rose colored glasses when they look back upon Steve Scalise being shot because Bernie Sanders reminds everyone of a grandpa that means well, but taking a quick glance at his Twitter feed - it's clear he is as divisive as it gets. Politics tends to be a zero sum game and it's all about smearing shit on the wall for short term victories. Trump tends to take a bulldozer to the wall most times though so you have a point.

Trump is responsible for raising the temperature and creating tension, but he can't be held responsible unless he was a direct cause of the violence -- meaning he didn't tell people go out and riot, be violent.


Well they sure sound like a publisher when they fact check him over and over again. Regardless, that wasn't the primary reason of the ban. And sure, Trump did spread a lot of unhinged conspiracies that were wildly inappropriate. People do here as well. Doesn't mean I personally think they should be banned. But that is Twitter's choice.


No no no. Their reasoning was complete utter shit and I am taking absolutely nothing out of context.


Twitter's reasoning for the ban:

"We assessed the two Tweets referenced above under our Glorification of Violence policy, which aims to prevent the glorification of violence that could inspire others to replicate violent acts and determined that they were highly likely to encourage and inspire people to replicate the criminal acts that took place at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021."

The cited tweet was Trump saying that he would not attend the inauguration. That is reaching at straws. With how lose the interpretation is, you could tie literally any tweet from a politician as a call for violence. When democrats were whining about the election in 2016 and delegitimizing Trump's victory, I'm sure I could find some tweets that could very loosely encourage violence by bending over backwards in logic the way Twitter is.




Bernie didn't incite violence, just talked about how evil Republicans were and how they wanted to kill your grandmother through social security and Medicare cuts.

Setting that all side -- the US is beyond the point of repair and you are not looking at the bigger picture here. Twitter is not doing this because Trump tweets stupid shit. They're doing this because they know democrats control the government and will pressure them into removing Republican presence on social media sites. It's a whole lot easier to win elections when you control forms of online media.

And on this point, silencing people who I disagree with is generally an awful take and it is incredibly decisive. 74+ million voted for Trump, and it's clear Joe Biden/Kamala Harris will not be the unifiers. For some reason, I don't see many people condemning Kamala Harris for when she posted a bailout fund for Minneapolis rioters that were arrested. From what I see, every Republican condemned the violence that occurred this past Wednesday.

Give me a break, read the first two sentences of the post again and then see if you still want to argue that whether or not he planned to attend the inauguration has literally anything to do with why he was banned.  https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension.html

He used twitter to organize the event that ended up being a violent attack.  They banned him to reduce the chances of another one happening.

"He refused to act before the elections. "

Are you sure that he even had the clout to intervene in how states conduct their elections? Because I believe he doesn't.
He whined plenty of times before the election about the mail in ballot changes.

I think a mass change in election system should definitely have had more debate / scrutiny than it did despite the supposed dangers of voting during a pandemic.

The media seemed to brush over all that as if it was nothing.
You can bet that the Democrats will want to keep the mail in voting, it suits them nicely I reckon. To still compare "turnout" to previous elections seems a bit bizarre when you can just vote whilst scratching your bare ass at home. "Turnout" for what exactly?

Trump made a big mistake encouraging his voters to only go out on election day. Although at the same time I can fully appreciate the "conservative way" to vote is indeed on election day and not just hand your vote to a mailman.

The mayoral election of London (albeit nowhere near as important) has been postponed to this year rather than changing the election system itself.

You can't reasonably postpone the presidential election since the term ends on Jan 20 and that's hardcoded in the constitution. Postponing the election to e.g. mid-December wouldn't have solved any pandemic-related issues.

Some states have been voting exclusively by mail for years. Mail voting wasn't an issue until Trump decided to blame it for his loss.

So it turns out when you deleted a post on Parler they did not remove the content. Just marked it as deleted.

https://cybernews.com/news/70tb-of-parler-users-messages-videos-and-posts-leaked-by-security-researchers/
https://imgur.com/gallery/oFMaMAI

So now all their users have all their info out in public. That's bad for the users. But if you post anything on the internet expect it to be public and there forever. If you think it's not you are an idiot.

But...I figure the owners / operators are about to get the mother of all lawsuits for privacy violations.
Not to mention the GDPR violations that they are about to spend the rest of their life dealing with.

Sucks to be them.

-Dave

It also looks like they KYCed some users and kept the dox online.

OTOH it's ridiculous to call the kids who stole the data "security researchers". They hacked the site just like Equifax or CapitalOne "researchers" did, and they should get a hefty book thrown at them for this vigilante nonsense.

Yep.

https://lifehacker.com/parler-wasnt-hacked-but-that-doesnt-mean-its-safe-to-u-1845757409

They require you to upload a SSN number to get a verified status LOL.

Yeah, I'm just going to download some shady app that probably data mines every input and then give it my SSN so I get a checkmark to my name! Now the app's offline and the SSN's are probably stored in China somewhere.

WAIT WHAT THE FUCK?

THEY REQUIRE YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER TO GET VERIFIED STATUS? This isn’t a god damn bank with regulatory standards they must adhere to, this is a social media website that could easily weed through ‘real’ and ‘fake’ people.

While I wouldn’t want to provide any information like this, I’d rather send a picture of my ID or something like that. Handing over my SSN is an easy way to lose everything once someone hacks parler and opens up a million credit lines in my name.

Someone should be sounding an alarm right now to not use this app.