Early & Absentee Voting Megathread - Build the Freiwal

[Adam Griffin]

While everyone was freaking out about the "Dems in disarray" in Nevada because they're not leading by enough, Democrats gained a couple hundred votes thanks to absentees in Clark. Statewide lead is 3.4K. We'll see if they get to 15K statewide, but the way Independents have been voting this year, I'm not sure they'll need to.

Maybe I'm the idiot and am missing something incredibly obvious here, but as you said, I don't see why Dems need a ridiculously gaudy vote margin otherwise the Unbeatable Titan is inevitable. They ended up needing it in 2016, but that was because independents broke heavily for Trump. The idea that they'd need it again seems to be predicated upon the assumption that they will also break heavily for Heller, which...is certainly not a safe one.

You're not - eight pages later and people are still freaking out about NV.

Trump won independents by 13 points. NV Dems this cycle can easily win indies by 15-20. Democrats could have a measly 2-point party ID advantage in the total vote and still pull a 7-10 point win with a 20-point lead among indies.

[Adam Griffin]

Can the mods please ban any further discussion about NV in this thread thanks

[Adam Griffin]

Wow, are people in this thread still worrying about Democrats losing Nevada?

[Adam Griffin]

It'll be fine

https://twitter.com/RalstonReports/status/1057858196256174080

[Adam Griffin]

Oklahoma early in-person voting begins today. Here is the composition of mailed and returned ballots as of this morning:

OK-Mailed:
GOP: 49.01%
DEM: 39.54%
OTH: 11.45%

OK-Returned:
GOP: 51.74%
DEM: 39.60%
OTH: 8.66%

[Adam Griffin]

This seems... not that bad, for Democrats

Keep in mind that OK had a Democratic registration advantage until just a few years ago, Democrats were 47% of the Oklahoma primary electorate this year, etc.

[Adam Griffin]

https://twitter.com/ElectProject/status/1058570834678374400

https://twitter.com/gtryan/status/1058569608440016898

[Adam Griffin]

Does anybody know the exact moment the Nevada Senate race was decided? I do!

[Adam Griffin]

An Atlanta EV location 2.5 hours after the polls closed last night:

https://twitter.com/TIAreports/status/1058532344099942402

2 things I don't get:

* why are there lines in the first place ? There should be enough early voting precincts and voters should be assigned to their precinct, so that there's a cap of 500-1000 voters per precinct. Which would mean there are no lines.

* why are these people waiting 5, 6 or 7 hours in a line to vote early ? If they could do so in 5 minutes on election day ? Or by postal ballot ?

At least in Georgia, early voting is not done at the local precinct.  My county (Forsyth) had early voting at the central elections office for the last two weeks, and at three satellite locations for last week only.  Any county voter can use any of these early locations.  This is a county with 230K people and 145K registered voters, and I think it's a bit more generous than the average county.  For Election Day, there are 16 precincts distributed across the county; on Election Day, you can only vote in your home precinct.

Stuff like this is always a recipe for disaster ...

For early voting, there should be the same precinct infrastructure in place as for election day.

Otherwise, you will always have these massive lines where people have to wait for hours and are likely to give up, go back home and not vote again. Which would be bad.

Election officials should be able to find enough (retired) poll workers to keep all the precincts open for a certain period (the week or so before election day).

It comes down to sheer cost. For the most part, Georgia tends to have one early vote location for every 50-75k people (my county, with over 100k, only has 1 location; this is why EV lines have consistently been 30 minutes to 1 hour for the past 2 elections).

In my county, Election Day voting costs about $30,000 to host. You need dozens of paid employees (who are not on any public payroll full-time, and many would not agree to do the work for 3 weeks straight when it only pays $10/hour and they already have full-time jobs) to staff precincts for 16 days.

Suddenly, you're talking about spending a half-million dollars for each of the potentially 4 elections every year (primary, primary runoff, general, general runoff). That's $2,000,000 or more per election cycle for a county with a general government budget of like $25,000,000. It's just too cost-exorbitant.

Early voting at centralized locations, in contrast, is much, much cheaper - in large part because you can use already-existing Board of Elections employees and have them run the show out of their workplaces.

[Adam Griffin]

Also, LOL: 47K Democratic firewall in Nevada.

You guys done panicking about NV yet?

[Adam Griffin]

The truth is that - unlike in NV - nobody knows what is going to happen in FL, and reading EV data by party from FL is probably less useful than just about any other state*. My personal belief is that both Nelson and Gillum pull off victories (Nelson by more than Gillum), but there's no way to look at EV and make any reasonable conclusion one way or another in such a perpetually close state with volatile tendencies among NPAs.

*That doesn't have voter rolls filled with Dixiecrats or Rockefeller Republicans

[Adam Griffin]

Any chance the GOP narrows the Dem's EV lead by a meaningful amount via extended voting in these Panhandle counties? I know some of them still have artificially high Dem registrations, but I don't think that's the case in places like Bay.