Slight Return
I'm back. (But are you, dear readers?) Don't read too much into it. Every day I see something I could write about, but it's always been like that.
But there is one thing that confuses me, and I have some questions, and no answers. It's the constantly changing votes for Trump and Clinton, which I check regularly. (There are different places the check, but the easiest is the Wikipedia page on the election.)
As I write this, Clinton is ahead of Trump in the popular vote by more than 1.3 million. Every day she gets further ahead--she's gained over a million net votes since I started paying attention. So here are my questions:
Where are these votes coming from? How can there be so many uncounted votes? Why weren't we told about them? Why is it that these votes always seem to add more to the Democrat's numbers? (Are they all from the Pacific Time Zone--pro-Hillary spots like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle?)
How is it, considering how close some of the states were, that everyone was so confident of the results? (Though recall it took New Hampshire over a day to declare who won, and I'm not sure if Michigan has officially announced the winner yet--the election could have easily turned on these states, so imagine what things would have been like then? I guess I should be glad partisans aren't looking at chads right now in my hometown of Detroit.)
Will Hillary keep on increasing her lead? She's already more than one percentage point ahead of Trump. Will she end up with 1.5 million more votes than Trump? 2 million? As her lead gets bigger (assuming it does), does that make the argument against the Electoral College any better?
Weren't some people saying Trump got less votes than Romney? Maybe that was true on election night, but at present Trump is ahead of Romney's total by more than half a million.
Trump claims if the election was about votes, he would have campaigned differently and still won. Perhaps. But I wonder under such a system if the voters would have acted differently, regardless of the campaigning? For instance, would votes for Johnson and Stein have dried up? (In non-swing states, you can vote for a third-party candidate without fear that you'll make a difference. For that matter, some people vote strategically--"I know Hillary is going to win this state, so I'm voting for Trump just to make sure she doesn't get too cocky.")
See, what'd I tell you--questions, no answers.
posted by LAGuy @ 11:02 AM
6 Comments:
She's now ahead by 1.4 million votes.
In Washington State's 2004 gubernatorial election, I lost track of how many recounts they did, and how many times they discovered new ballots. Fortunately, the Wikipedia article reminds me of the details. The Republican candidate had initially won by 261 votes, and after a recount, by 42 votes. Then people started finding misplaced ballots, and ballots that had accidentally not been counted: 561 ballots discovered on December 13; a tray in a warehouse with 162 ballots discovered on December 17; 224 ballots found in Snohomish County in late December. By then the Democratic candidate was in the lead, and she was declared the victor.
By the way, your Hendrix reference was not unnoticed.
Ah, interesting. I had not noticed or at least remembered that election. So it followed the 2000 pattern, which of course no honest recount does. It's remarkable how consistent recounts tend to be.
When once Soros gets his Obama phone balloting (should it be Bush phone?), the conservative problem will be solved.
By the way, there are certainly legitimate reasons for ballots to be counted late.
(1) Traditionally, absentee ballots needed to arrive by election day. But in some states, absentee ballots must be postmarked by election day, and these are still trickling in a few days after the election.
(2) Some ballots are marked "provisional". For some reason, I was added to the "permanent vote-by-mail" list this year (something I never desired). So they mailed me both a vote-by-mail ballot and a sample ballot, separately. I marked my sample ballot as usual and showed up at the polls. But they said I was required to use a provisional ballot. Had I brought in my blank vote-by-mail ballot I they could have shredded it and let me vote normally, but they had no way of knowing if I had voted a second time, by mail, using the vbm ballot. So my physical ballot was put in a "provisional" envelope with my name and signature. They promised me that after election day, they would verify that my vote-by-mail ballot had never arrived, and at that point my provisional ballot would be counted.
That happened to me in Colorado 2 years ago. Everyone in Colorado is on vote by mail. The only people who vote in person are those who register to vote on election day, and their votes are probably listed as provisional too (I hope they are, but then how does WI go Blue and Colorado go Red in the same year?)
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