2020 Absentee/Early Voting thread

[Tender Branson]

WARNING:

This thread will show significantly higher absentee requests and people will go like "Wow, they are so HUGE compared to 2016, Biden is favoured !"

But in fact, no conclusion whatsoever can be drawn from those requests, because all the Trump voters will vote on election day.

And this will make up for all the increases in postal vote requests ...

[Tender Branson]

WARNING:

This thread will show significantly higher absentee requests and people will go like "Wow, they are so HUGE compared to 2016, Biden is favoured !"

But in fact, no conclusion whatsoever can be drawn from those requests, because all the Trump voters will vote on election day.

And this will make up for all the increases in postal vote requests ...

Could you please not ruin this? Jk.

People can and should of course post the absentee request numbers here.

But I'm just warning that people should not get a boner because those requests are 20-times the number from 2016 at any given day and then draw some conclusions out of it.

Like in 2016, when Dems had a big early voting/absentee request lead and people were saying Hillary for sure must win NC by 3% or more ...

[Tender Branson]

Here are two maps I've made of the mail vote requests in North Carolina through yesterday:

Partisan breakdown of requests by county:


Requests as a % of total turnout in 2016:

How is the bottom map supposed to be read?

The darker the shade, the closer that county is to reaching the amount of votes it cast in 2016 in ballot requests.

I get that, but what are the percentages we are working with here?

If 5 Mio. votes were cast in NC in 2016 and there are now 0.6 Mio. requests, it’s ca. 10% in each county.

Maybe more like 15-20% in the urban counties and below 10% in the rural ones.

[Tender Branson]

If this is true, then mail delays shouldn't really be a problem ... assuming they don't screw over just the mail ballots and deliver everything else:

[Tender Branson]

https://twitter.com/WinWithJMC/status/1303339620827123716

Maybe a postal worker accidentally ripped a batch, maybe it rained on them and they are kinda useless as a result. Maybe the NCBE registers them as "spoiled" if they arrive without a signature on them ? Old people with no prior experience or even young people often forget to sign and the ballot is ruled invalid.

[Tender Branson]

A ballot postmarked on election day and received after election day is not a good idea, because  it might be cast after polls close.

On the other hand, is the US postal service even emptying boxes and postmarking ballots after 6-9pm on election day ? Or does it depend on the region ? I guess some post offices are open until 7pm or so, while polls close at 6pm in some areas ?

[Tender Branson]

At what point can we start extrapolating anything from this?  All I can say at this point is that Democrats are more engaged on actual voting while Trumpers are more engaged in going to rallies and posting on Facebook.

Please read my WARNING post on page 1.

You cannot extrapolate anything from those numbers, because Trump voters are voting on election day and make up for every postal/early voter.

[Tender Branson]

I suspect that all these numbers will really end up telling us over the next couple of months is "wow, this is going to be a really really high turnout election," which should have already been everyone's expectation after the midterms.

Not necessarily.

Could also be just 140 million votes.

[Tender Branson]

This doesn't surprise me.

The same thing happening today in VA can be seen in Vienna for the state election there on Oct. 11

People are voting early there to avoid more crowded precincts on election day.



In the US, the postal sabotage by Trump is also adding to it.

Still, you cannot necessarily say that there will be higher turnout because of it - because there could simply be a rush of early voters and then it drops off in the next weeks.

[Tender Branson]

38 votes cast thus far in Georgia.

White 21
Black 13
Other 3

Male 21
Female 14

Voted in 2016: 21
Didn't Vote: 16


For ballot requests, here are the altered racial figures (that attempt to account for & redistribute the large "other" contingency) for those who voted in '16 and those who did not.

Race	2016 Voters	Non-16 Voters	Total VBM
White	62%	51%	59%
Black	32%	37%	33%
Lat/Asn	6%	12%	8%

This might be the main reason why ballots of minority voters got rejected much more than ballots from white voters so far in NC.

New voters.

Most of them probably young and minorities, who are politically uneducated and forgot to sign their envelopes.

[Tender Branson]

it is done

Interesting.

Is Biden ranked 1st because Hilldog won the county in 2016 ?

And assuming Howie Hawkins is not on the ballot, it means his lawsuit in Indiana has failed.

[Tender Branson]

Austria’s absentee balloting is exactly the same as PAs „secrecy“ ballot thing.

You fill out your ballot, put it into a secret envelope and put that envelope into the absentee envelope (which you sign).

If you forget to put the ballot into the inner envelope, your vote is invalid.

Ballot -> Brown secrecy envelope with the number of your regional election district on -> postal ballot envelope:

[Tender Branson]

Tender: Alright let’s be reasonable, these early votes will obviously skew Biden due to the unique circumstances compared to 2016, let’s not draw conclusions from the early vote.

Atlas: Okay.

Atlas a week later: Oh wow look at all the ENTHUSIASM! The suburbs are going to bring this in for Biden!!!

Yeah, this.

There will be hordes of Trump voters on Election Day.

[Tender Branson]

Incredible how people are trying to read anything out of those early numbers ...

That’s like trying to predict how the winter will go based on the first snowfall of the season.

[Tender Branson]

The people that are voting now and so early are the ones who are most determined and who made their choice already 4 years ago when Trump got elected.

This doesn’t mean anything about the larger bulk of voters later on, for turnout or if Trump wins or not ...

[Tender Branson]

The people that are voting now and so early are the ones who are most determined and who made their choice already 4 years ago when Trump got elected.

This doesn’t mean anything about the larger bulk of voters later on, for turnout or if Trump wins or not ...

How many times are you going to say the same thing here?

Those are service posts, so people (also first-time voters and new to the process of elections) get the context.

[Tender Branson]

WaPo: Early surge of Democratic mail voting sparks worry inside GOP

Why would this worry the Rs ?

It was clear all along that Ds would vote mostly by mail ...

[Tender Branson]

We (wife, son, and I) just filled out our ballots and took them to the dropbox.  That's three votes for Biden, Ossoff, and Warnock.

[img]Drop Box[img]

Good.

GA needs to go 3x blue.

Ossoff and Warnock would make great new Senators, along with Harrison from SC.

[Tender Branson]

NC early vote has only 15% of AA vote (2016 AA vote was 20%) and white vote is up since 2016 - does this sound concerning? given biden's shift to white voters this might still net out to trump + 3 atm but does this raise any red flags?

Probably not concerning.

Blacks are more the early-in-person voting folks, not the early postal voting crowd.

[Tender Branson]

We (wife, son, and I) just filled out our ballots and took them to the dropbox.  That's three votes for Biden, Ossoff, and Warnock.

[img]Drop Box[img]

Good.

GA needs to go 3x blue.

Ossoff and Warnock would make great new Senators, along with Harrison from SC.

Lol Harrison is not flipping the seat.
I have a feeling SC is going to be the 2018 TN of this race.

I think it’s going to be more like TN 2006 ... when do you think Lindsay is out with a „call me“ ad against Harrison ?

If Graham wins by 10+, you can call me Tender Brarrison ...

[Tender Branson]

102-year-old woman who cast her ballot in PPE says to would-be voters, 'Nobody should have an excuse'

Bea Lumpkin cast her first ballot in the 1940 presidential election.



https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Living/102-year-woman-casts-mail-ballot-ppe-voters/story?id=73389675

FF.

[Tender Branson]

Horrible to see such long lines for early voting in OH and elsewhere.

Well, not horrible that they want to vote, but horrible that it seems there’s only one precinct for tens of thousands of early voters.

Many counties in the US have virtually ZERO infrastructure in place to conduct elections properly.

Horrific.

How many people are standing in line for hours before they are discouraged and leave ?

[Tender Branson]

Will any state reach more than 100% of 2016 turnout before election day?

Only the vote by mail states can achieve such a thing.

And even they have a huge junk of their returns coming in on Election Day itself or later, so no.

[Tender Branson]

There’s either going to be an unprecedented, massive partisan gap in person mail in voting or there’s going to be an unprecedented, massive democratic wave

The first.

Polls show that Biden wins mail-voters 80-20.

Trump wins Election Day voters 70-30.

In person early voters are more of a mixed crowd.

[Tender Branson]

Completely idiotic that there are such long lines.

3 minutes should be the max. vote time, not 6 hours !

And not even the poll books are working in GA, because they are provided by a Republican company ...