Was waiting to Saturday, Nov 7 to call the election morally wrong?
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  Was waiting to Saturday, Nov 7 to call the election morally wrong?
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Author Topic: Was waiting to Saturday, Nov 7 to call the election morally wrong?  (Read 1683 times)
Motorcity
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« on: March 05, 2021, 10:33:38 AM »

Despite Biden leading in Nevada and Pennsylvania and the remaining vote coming from Democratic areas, news networks refused to call the election for Biden for 4 days. Despite the whole world knowing Biden had already won.

Well, most of us. The delay caused widespread of false information. While an election night call might have been impossible, I would have called it Wednesday morning.

Americans are used to knowing election results early. And there are always people who want to dispute and delegitimize the election results, but are silenced when their guy concedes or the news networks call it.

CNN, AP, and others did something morally wrong by waiting. Those four days created a very tense atmosphere and I think it directly led to the events of Jan 6.

But of course, the news networks liked having high ratings for a few days....
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ElectionsGuy
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« Reply #1 on: March 05, 2021, 10:44:07 AM »

I don't think the decision to wait to call was irresponsible given the circumstances.

What I do think is wrong and have thought so for a long time is states taking weeks to count all the votes. California and New York are the worst when it comes to this, but Pennsylvania was pretty bad this year too. It makes the US look like a banana Republic. The crucial midwestern states were obviously new to this huge number of mail-in ballots, and they need to improve their vote-counting in future elections. Every state should follow Florida's (and Texas's) lead when it comes to counting votes. They prove that you don't need weeks to count the vast majority of votes after an election. Only military, provisional, and other irregular ballots should take that long. It'll depress conspiracy theories of stolen elections and the country will be better off.
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YE
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« Reply #2 on: March 05, 2021, 10:47:01 AM »

Should have been called as soon as Biden took the lead in PA so yes.
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TML
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« Reply #3 on: March 05, 2021, 10:51:45 AM »

This has actually been the standard practice by networks to call races only after they are >99% confident of its expected outcome. I can cite numerous examples of races being called well after seasoned observers had a good general sense of its expected outcome - one such example is the Montana Senate race in 2020, where the AP called it almost four hours after polls had closed, even though (thanks to a certain poster's information on key county benchmarks) I had a good general sense of which candidate was on track to win as soon as the first few counties started reporting results.
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Motorcity
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« Reply #4 on: March 05, 2021, 11:06:21 AM »

This has actually been the standard practice by networks to call races only after they are >99% confident of its expected outcome. I can cite numerous examples of races being called well after seasoned observers had a good general sense of its expected outcome - one such example is the Montana Senate race in 2020, where the AP called it almost four hours after polls had closed, even though (thanks to a certain poster's information on key county benchmarks) I had a good general sense of which candidate was on track to win as soon as the first few counties started reporting results.
But I would argue four days is kinda extreme. And the networks knew about the danger of fake news, violence, and Trump trying to delegitimize the results. Since Americans are used to knowing on election night, the longer they waited the more people from certain segments weren't reliable to accept the results
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« Reply #5 on: March 05, 2021, 11:08:55 AM »

I don't think the decision to wait to call was irresponsible given the circumstances.

What I do think is wrong and have thought so for a long time is states taking weeks to count all the votes. California and New York are the worst when it comes to this, but Pennsylvania was pretty bad this year too. It makes the US look like a banana Republic. The crucial midwestern states were obviously new to this huge number of mail-in ballots, and they need to improve their vote-counting in future elections. Every state should follow Florida's (and Texas's) lead when it comes to counting votes. They prove that you don't need weeks to count the vast majority of votes after an election. Only military, provisional, and other irregular ballots should take that long. It'll depress conspiracy theories of stolen elections and the country will be better off.

Blame the PA GOP for demanding an amendment to the universal mail-in bill in 2019 stipulating counting of mail-in ballots couldn't begin until Election Day.
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ElectionsGuy
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« Reply #6 on: March 05, 2021, 11:12:33 AM »

I don't think the decision to wait to call was irresponsible given the circumstances.

What I do think is wrong and have thought so for a long time is states taking weeks to count all the votes. California and New York are the worst when it comes to this, but Pennsylvania was pretty bad this year too. It makes the US look like a banana Republic. The crucial midwestern states were obviously new to this huge number of mail-in ballots, and they need to improve their vote-counting in future elections. Every state should follow Florida's (and Texas's) lead when it comes to counting votes. They prove that you don't need weeks to count the vast majority of votes after an election. Only military, provisional, and other irregular ballots should take that long. It'll depress conspiracy theories of stolen elections and the country will be better off.

Blame the PA GOP for demanding an amendment to the universal mail-in bill in 2019 stipulating counting of mail-in ballots couldn't begin until Election Day.


I do.
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Motorcity
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« Reply #7 on: March 05, 2021, 11:16:40 AM »

I don't think the decision to wait to call was irresponsible given the circumstances.

What I do think is wrong and have thought so for a long time is states taking weeks to count all the votes. California and New York are the worst when it comes to this, but Pennsylvania was pretty bad this year too. It makes the US look like a banana Republic. The crucial midwestern states were obviously new to this huge number of mail-in ballots, and they need to improve their vote-counting in future elections. Every state should follow Florida's (and Texas's) lead when it comes to counting votes. They prove that you don't need weeks to count the vast majority of votes after an election. Only military, provisional, and other irregular ballots should take that long. It'll depress conspiracy theories of stolen elections and the country will be better off.
I agree, its very irresponsible for California and New York to allow all the time in the world for local offices to count votes. Of course elderly volunteers are going to take their time, if allowed. Hell, both states had extremely close house races that could have decided control of the house!

Since these states contribute heavily to the national raw vote total, they are important. The national popular vote was fairly close for about a week. Had it been obvious Biden was going to lead by 4.5 points/ 7 million, Trump's claims would get less traction.
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Roll Roons
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« Reply #8 on: March 05, 2021, 11:18:38 AM »

This has actually been the standard practice by networks to call races only after they are >99% confident of its expected outcome. I can cite numerous examples of races being called well after seasoned observers had a good general sense of its expected outcome - one such example is the Montana Senate race in 2020, where the AP called it almost four hours after polls had closed, even though (thanks to a certain poster's information on key county benchmarks) I had a good general sense of which candidate was on track to win as soon as the first few counties started reporting results.

In that case, AP shouldn't have called AZ or NJ-07 when they did. Although Biden and Malinowski both did end up winning, there was a reasonable chance based on ballots counted after election day that Trump could have taken AZ or Kean could have won NJ-07.
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Roll Roons
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« Reply #9 on: March 05, 2021, 11:29:36 AM »

I don't think the decision to wait to call was irresponsible given the circumstances.

What I do think is wrong and have thought so for a long time is states taking weeks to count all the votes. California and New York are the worst when it comes to this, but Pennsylvania was pretty bad this year too. It makes the US look like a banana Republic. The crucial midwestern states were obviously new to this huge number of mail-in ballots, and they need to improve their vote-counting in future elections. Every state should follow Florida's (and Texas's) lead when it comes to counting votes. They prove that you don't need weeks to count the vast majority of votes after an election. Only military, provisional, and other irregular ballots should take that long. It'll depress conspiracy theories of stolen elections and the country will be better off.
I agree, its very irresponsible for California and New York to allow all the time in the world for local offices to count votes. Of course elderly volunteers are going to take their time, if allowed. Hell, both states had extremely close house races that could have decided control of the house!

Since these states contribute heavily to the national raw vote total, they are important. The national popular vote was fairly close for about a week. Had it been obvious Biden was going to lead by 4.5 points/ 7 million, Trump's claims would get less traction.

I think HR 1 really should have included some sort of provision about timeliness of results. If you're going to expand mail-in voting, allow ballots to be counted ahead of time and require them to be received by poll closing. Florida does it really well.
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The Mikado
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« Reply #10 on: March 05, 2021, 01:38:18 PM »

NV definitely should have been called Friday morning at latest. They held out weirdly long on NV when Biden was up by more than 2%.
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Motorcity
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« Reply #11 on: March 05, 2021, 02:03:16 PM »

NV definitely should have been called Friday morning at latest. They held out weirdly long on NV when Biden was up by more than 2%.
Because AP and FOX called Arizona for Biden. Calling Nevada would put Biden at 270.

CNN didn't want to call Arizona. Nor did they want to call the election. But if they called Nevada than that would force AP to call Nevada. And thus the election. Which means CNN would have to call the election.

I feel like there was an unspoken agreement among media networks to call NV/PA and the overall election at the same time, when everyone felt safe.

But while CNN is my chosen source of news, they dragged things out. I hate FOX but I appreciate them being willing to end things. Same thing happened in 2018, they said Democrats would win the House long before the other networks did.
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beesley
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« Reply #12 on: March 05, 2021, 02:49:18 PM »

NV definitely should have been called Friday morning at latest. They held out weirdly long on NV when Biden was up by more than 2%.
Because AP and FOX called Arizona for Biden. Calling Nevada would put Biden at 270.

CNN didn't want to call Arizona. Nor did they want to call the election. But if they called Nevada than that would force AP to call Nevada. And thus the election. Which means CNN would have to call the election.

I feel like there was an unspoken agreement among media networks to call NV/PA and the overall election at the same time, when everyone felt safe.

But while CNN is my chosen source of news, they dragged things out. I hate FOX but I appreciate them being willing to end things. Same thing happened in 2018, they said Democrats would win the House long before the other networks did.

Similarly in 2016 all networks except FOX waited to call WI/PA at around the same time. FOX didn't but they waited to call AZ just as long as the others, I think.
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Oregon Eagle Politics
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« Reply #13 on: March 05, 2021, 02:55:38 PM »

The News Networks wanted to make the election last as long as possible because it makes them more money
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« Reply #14 on: March 05, 2021, 03:45:54 PM »
« Edited: March 05, 2021, 08:55:08 PM by emotional hardcore »

I heard the Biden campaign actually requested that they not call it until Biden led in over 270 EVs, but that still doesn't excuse not calling Nevada for as long as they did.
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Devils30
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« Reply #15 on: March 05, 2021, 08:10:56 PM »

I heard the Biden campaign actually requested that they not call it until Biden led in over 270 EVs, but that still doesn't excuse not calling for Nevada for as long as they did.

NV was  late because networks wanted to bailout FOX for their way premature Arizona call. It was good they got it right in the end but was way way too early and irresponsible.
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Hammy
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« Reply #16 on: March 05, 2021, 08:28:58 PM »

I doubt CNN or MSNBC calling it early would've made any difference as far as encouraging Trump or his supporters, if anything he would've been screaming about media bias.
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BlueSwan
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« Reply #17 on: March 06, 2021, 10:41:34 AM »

Should have been called as soon as Biden took the lead in PA so yes.
At the very latest, this yeah. But honestly, they should have called it as soon as it became obvious that Biden would win PA, which was way before he actually took the lead. It must have been thursday night american time, because I woke up friday morning European time, looked at the numbers and it was totally obvious at that point that Biden was winning PA. There simply was no way that he wasn't winning PA, unless the reported outstanding vote tallies were COMPLETELY off.
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Orser67
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« Reply #18 on: March 06, 2021, 10:49:04 AM »

It probably should've been called a day earlier, but overall I'm glad it happened the way it did, with pretty much all of the networks calling it at the same time, and Biden getting the chance to give a true victory speech.
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ExtremeRepublican
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« Reply #19 on: March 06, 2021, 03:37:15 PM »

NV definitely should have been called Friday morning at latest. They held out weirdly long on NV when Biden was up by more than 2%.
Because AP and FOX called Arizona for Biden. Calling Nevada would put Biden at 270.

CNN didn't want to call Arizona. Nor did they want to call the election. But if they called Nevada than that would force AP to call Nevada. And thus the election. Which means CNN would have to call the election.

I feel like there was an unspoken agreement among media networks to call NV/PA and the overall election at the same time, when everyone felt safe.

But while CNN is my chosen source of news, they dragged things out. I hate FOX but I appreciate them being willing to end things. Same thing happened in 2018, they said Democrats would win the House long before the other networks did.

Similarly in 2016 all networks except FOX waited to call WI/PA at around the same time. FOX didn't but they waited to call AZ just as long as the others, I think.
FOX had called Wisconsin for Trump sometime around midnight ET, and someone else had called Pennsylvania for Trump.  If you put them together, he had the votes to win, but no network was willing to call the election for a little while.

NV definitely should have been called Friday morning at latest. They held out weirdly long on NV when Biden was up by more than 2%.
Because AP and FOX called Arizona for Biden. Calling Nevada would put Biden at 270.

CNN didn't want to call Arizona. Nor did they want to call the election. But if they called Nevada than that would force AP to call Nevada. And thus the election. Which means CNN would have to call the election.

I feel like there was an unspoken agreement among media networks to call NV/PA and the overall election at the same time, when everyone felt safe.

But while CNN is my chosen source of news, they dragged things out. I hate FOX but I appreciate them being willing to end things. Same thing happened in 2018, they said Democrats would win the House long before the other networks did.

FOX uses a different exit polling system than the other networks do, which tends to lead it to have different calls sometimes.  The seemingly premature Arizona call was likely due to their exit poll overestimating Biden's margin there.
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« Reply #20 on: March 06, 2021, 03:44:21 PM »

I still maintain Fox did nothing wrong when calling Arizona.
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AlterEgo
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« Reply #21 on: March 08, 2021, 10:54:21 PM »

Despite Biden leading in Nevada and Pennsylvania and the remaining vote coming from Democratic areas, news networks refused to call the election for Biden for 4 days. Despite the whole world knowing Biden had already won.

Well, most of us. The delay caused widespread of false information. While an election night call might have been impossible, I would have called it Wednesday morning.

Americans are used to knowing election results early. And there are always people who want to dispute and delegitimize the election results, but are silenced when their guy concedes or the news networks call it.

CNN, AP, and others did something morally wrong by waiting. Those four days created a very tense atmosphere and I think it directly led to the events of Jan 6.

But of course, the news networks liked having high ratings for a few days....

The only reason that "Americans are used to knowing election results early" is that the vast majority of elections in our lifetimes haven't been very close. But, even if that weren't the case: Oh, well? Votes take as long as they take to count. No more, no less. I know we like to compare how some states take less time than others, which would matter if we had a national system all set up the same, all funded the same. But...we don't.

People want to get all over CA, but the reality is that 2 days later when people were ripping on CA's vote count, they actually had a way higher percentage of votes counted than MS. But, no one cares about MS. Vote counting happened in much the same way this election that it does in every other. Votes take a while to count. We just don't usually give a darn unless it's close.
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Obama-Biden Democrat
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« Reply #22 on: March 08, 2021, 11:44:48 PM »

Even though you knew that Biden was likely to win PA because the overwhelming amount of ballots left were in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, Trump was still ahead. It would look bad to call it for Biden if Trump was still ahead. They made the right move to call PA only after Biden took the lead.
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Pericles
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« Reply #23 on: March 09, 2021, 02:53:53 AM »

Calling it before the outcome was virtually certain would have undermined trust in the media and further inflamed the image of the 'biased liberal media', if that is even possible.
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DabbingSanta
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« Reply #24 on: March 09, 2021, 05:22:42 PM »

Yes, I think we all knew Biden had won by Thursday.  The Decision Desk declared Biden the winner early on Friday morning, nearly 30 hours before the other news networks.  The mainstream media's hesitation to call the election helped fuel the claims the election was "stolen" by giving Trump supporters a false hope that their candidate could win when there was no realistic path.
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