Random election-related items

 

Intro

I’ve spent most of the past few days doing my day job with lots of interruptions to Tweet and post on Facebook when interesting news comes in.  Because some of the longer things I write on FB don’t make it to Twitter, aren’t public, and are fairly ephemeral (or at least hard for me to re-find on FB), I thought I’d edit them and put them out here, for others. Key topics are Recounts, Counts take a long time, Military / Provisional ballots, Predictions, and Final map.  I don’t plan too many more emails, likely one next week with some findings / insights (how wrong were the polls? Can they be fixed?  What will happen in Georgia).  Please let me know if you want me to remove you from this list and feel free to point others to:

My blog: https://bit.ly/EGeNight

Twitter: @evangrossman

Facebook: EvanGrossman

Recounts

With GA, WI, PA and possibly others headed for a recount, how likely is it the vote will change? NBC News has a formal take on recounts…

Rarely do recounts move more than 2-300 votes, especially now that so much tabulating is done electronically and there are more checks and balances on fat-fingering / number swaps.

Recounts are the glimmer of hope that campaign managers offer to candidates not yet willing to face reality or concede; the false promise offered to loyal followers that everything will change because surely there must have been a mistake. Usually, by the time recounts need to be requested -- in some cases it takes a week or two for preliminary official results to be posted, and in many states 'challenges' (another word for recount) can't be started until then.

That time delay between election night and when challenges can be made often serves as a cooling-off period, a time for the candidate and followers to progress down the Kubler-Ross cycle from Denial->Anger->Bargaining->Depression->Acceptance. In some cases the race is still too close and should be challenged, in most others the hot heads from election night have cooled and the realities of math, statistics (and cost in some cases) have set in.

I don't see any reason to assume what normally happens will in this case, so my two predictions for today are:

1) There will be recounts in 2-3 states requested (and paid for depending on law) by Trump/RNC

2) The outcome will be unchanged.

      Here’s some data from NBC on impact of past recounts:

Counts take a long time (why)

A friend asked why Nevade was taking so long to count / report ballots (and I added AZ in my answer because it has similar challenges…

After my initial snarky response “normally all their best counters work at the casinos; I would have thought some would have been available given the pandemic, but clearly not.” I dug in a little more deeply.   

First, it’s important to understand difference between processed (opened, validated),  counted (run thru tabulator), and reported (numbers in a batch summarized, recorded and reported to state). In states with lots of counties that have meaningful vote numbers, new reports are coming in regularly. In NV & AZ it's just Clark & Maricopa that matter (and the smaller counties would find it onerous to have to batch-up and report counted ballots more often than 1-2x per day). So, the numbers only move meaningfully when those counties report.  Next, it’s important to understand that the counties have limited capacity in terms of how many they can count per day (I believe they have been doing 1-200k), and how much they can even do at the same time - A friend forwarded me a quote from Nevada’s Deputy Secretary of State: stating “the original plan was to delay results until Thursday because every time the state receives results from Clark County, it takes staff away from counting ballots.” The appropriate level of bureaucracy (chain of custody, verifying counts, 2 people signing off on most things) adds significant overhead to each “batch” as it moves from one step to the next.

And the steps are exceptionally manual, even with high speed slitting machines and vote tabulators -- opening envelopes, removing & flattening ballots, validating signatures, 2 people (D&R) review each ballot for issues, etc. before put in tabulating machine).

Below is a long post (it was public on FB) from a friend of a friend on what goes on inside an absentee ballot count:

By Anna Kirkland

I volunteered all day yesterday at the Absent Voter Counting Board in Romulus, Michigan (Wayne County). It was a fascinating experience.

Let me tell you how. long. it. takes. to. count. absentee. ballots. So. long.

We had no Republican challengers; just me and Tish Lee, a legal aid attorney with a lot of election monitoring experience. We were both challengers representing the Democratic Party. (We did not challenge any ballots.) Romulus is under the population for early envelope opening, so the counting board members had to open every ballot from 2 envelopes, tear off the top, flatten it, and feed it through the tabulator. I estimate they had 8,000 ballots in the room, and when I left at 8 pm they had processed maybe 6,000. There is a high speed opener that shears off the top of the envelope, but they need to be pulled out by hand from there. I timed the process from starting to pull one out to flattening it for the tabulator at about 40 seconds, passing through 4 people for privacy so that the same person does not do more than one part of the opening. That is 88 hours of human labor right there (shared among about 15-16 people, of which 2 were men). They also spent hours re-counting every precinct's absentee ballots (some several times if they were off by one ballot) to make sure not even one ballot was unaccounted for. At one point everyone was busy recounting with the count off by one ballot for over an hour. Some precincts had not even been opened yet when I left at 8 p.m. The board members estimated they would be there until 2 a.m. Feeding the ballots into the 2 types of machines (the envelope opener and the actual tabulator) takes very little time. But the human, physical labor and material interactions necessary to make a vote count (hand counting, sorting, binning, rubber-banding, flattening) are incredibly painstaking.

There was ONE rejected ballot in the red "rejected ballots" bin when I left, and it had been sent in completely blank. Every single other ballot I saw had been tabulated. I watched them all go through before I left. There were coffee stains, sticky stuff, bad-smelling ballots, and some that were pretty badly or incorrectly filled out (not filling the complete circle, voting in the write-in line but with no name written in). (The ballot with the incomplete circles was fully counted; the one vote with the blank write in could not be assigned to anyone, but the rest of that ballot was fine.) Each of these ballots got special individual scrutiny from at least 2 counting board members (a Democratic member and a Republican member), plus Tish, me, or both of us. The whole stack had to be re-fed into the tabulator. The overseas and military ballots were handled with extra special care.

This is what it was like at one well-run clerks's office in Michigan without any slow-downs from Republican challengers. I have heard that TCF Center, where absentee ballots are being counted in Detroit, has been full of Republican challengers all day and night. I can't even imagine what that has been like. (There are almost no valid legal challenges to absentee ballots under Michigan law at the counting point, when signatures have already been matched, etc.)

Democracy is real, painstaking, human work. Let them finish, free from baseless challenges and harassment.

 

Military / Provisional Ballots

Military ballots – I don’t know all the relevant law, but most states allow military ballots postmarked on election day to arrive a few days later (in Georgia, which I was focusing on, it is until Friday 11/6 at 5p).  The government has worked hard over the past few years to reduce voting barriers for out-of-state servicepeople and their families.  For example, every state is required to offer at least one electronic method for ballot request and submission, and many states allow faxing of ballots for military. The flip side of all of this improved ballot access is that many Military ballots arrive on or before election day.  In Georgia, 17k were already counted as of EOD Thursday, and the secretary of state said there were 9k that had not been returned and counted. It’s unclear how many of those were actually sent but not yet received, nor if some of were received but not yet counted.  We’ll know next week, but I’m guessing it was <3k, which would not be enough to swing the very narrow election – and A recent Military Times article noted a poll showing, for the first time in recent history, servicemembers were planning to vote for the Democrat (Biden).

Provisional Ballots - A lot of people have asked me about these and the rules and issues vary by state.  Essentially a provisional ballot is a ballot that is "held in escrow" until the voter (or board of elections) "cures" the problem with it.... For example, if a voter requested an absentee ballot and then shows up at the polling place, some states have them cast a provisional ballot and so they can make sure a mail-in ballot from the voter hadn't already been counted. Speaking to an organizer in Arizona, I learned of two types of provisionals -- one is where there is an ID issue because the signatures look different.  Those can typically be 'cured' over the phone by the voter contacting the board of elections, providing valid ID  info (SSN, driver's license number, etc.) and confirming it was their vote.  In other cases (Conditional, provisional) the voter showed up at the polling place without proper ID.  In AZ, these can only be cured by the voter going in person to the county office with a proper ID.  Across all of Arizona (3.1m ballots cast) there appear to be fewer than 3k provisionals currently.

Predictions

I’ve tried to make a few predictions each day.  Here are the ones I’ve made so far, and am happy to count how many come true:

Election Night: 10:18pm – Arizona will be first Trump ’16 sate to be called for Biden ’20 [this was accurate, Fox called it at 11:20p]

Wednesday 11/4:

1)   Crowd size at Biden’s inaugural will be smaller than Trump’s was;

2)   Biden will be proud of that.

Thursday 11/5

1)   Over $500m will be spent on the Jan. 5, 2021 Georgia special (two senate seats, and likely control of chamber at stake);

2)   Final Winning margin in each seat will be <50k votes out of >4.5m cast.

I’ll let other’s add commentary on how many voters would prefer that the likely $100 spent per vote cast be spent on something else

Friday 11/6:

1)   There will be recounts in 2-3 states requested (and paid for, if required by law) by Trump/RNC;

2)   The outcome will be unchanged

Final map

This changed very little from my Tuesday night analysis (other than darkening some blues and pinks).  North Carolina will not be known until all ballots are received by 11/12 and counted soon after.  My heart says Biden will eke out a victory, my brain says that is unlikely…

Moment of Zen

Finally, I’ll leave you with a photo tweet from one of my American in London friends as he watched the sky, and the electoral college map literally change colors from his vantage point on the Hampstead Heath…