POTUS election results thread

I’ve watched WW a couple of times through, but didn’t understand a lot of the political shorthand until I started reading the political threads here on the peas.
The current debacle couldn’t be further from the fiction of WW however 😫

You’ve paid more attention than I have. I’m in hiding, let me know when it’s over mode. So do I loose my American card?

from CNN live updates stream...


I can’t tell if the finished counts from Allegheny County have been added to the numbers that have been reported by the way this is written. Does anyone know?

Is there any truth to votes in Az being thrown out because of sharpies?

There are persons from both parties that look at ballots the machines don't read. A few friends who are Trumpsters are saying ballots aren't being reviewed and instead thrown out

A friend of mine in Arizona posted this afternoon regarding the sharpie lie. A friend of his wrote it:

This is 100% false, and I have personal experience working with ballot counting for this election IN Arizona and I have the personal experience to tell you why this is dangerously and 100% false.

For the past 10 days, I have been working in Maricopa county as a ballot adjudicator. As a registered Democrat I am paired up with a registered Republican, and we view every ballot that is flagged by the scanner. This includes any time someone voted for more than one candidate, voted for a write in candidate, or left a candidate field blank.

No changes are made to the ballot unless both the Democrat and the Republican agree. We are constantly observed by a registered independent as we review scanned ballots on a computer (while my partner is making handwritten notes of our changes, which at the end of the day we reconcile/audit to make sure everything was done properly and all our changes are the same), we are on camera all the time, and tremendous efforts are undertaken to make sure there can be no shenanigans.

I also want to add that the scanner does not recognize red ink on ballots, so no one in the office is allowed to bring in any blue or black pen. I did not handle physical ballots (mine were all scanned) , but there is tremendous security there as well: everyone is on camera, counted ballots get put in sealed and categorized in boxes and locked in a secure vault just in case there would be a need for a recount of the physical ballots. I mentioned the red ink and the ban on blue/black pens in the office to say that they take sincere care to make sure that nobody can do anything to mess with a ballot

Yes, some voters were using sharpies. But none of those ovals that bled through to the other side were being picked up by any of the scanners. I know this because I personally reviewed at least 4000 ballots. I saw with my own eyes that using a sharpie did not invalidate any vote by bleeding through.

To the extent a stray sharpie may have bled through to the other side for other people reviewing ballots, we are all trained to spot voter intent and by using common sense we are able to rescue ballots from being invalidated due to a large variety of human errors (to the extent that anybody fails to give us enough clear evidence of voter intent— sometimes we had to throw our hands up because the voter failed to crossout an over vote, or just didn’t fill in the bubble enough for it to be clear what they were trying to do.)

This sucks, but if the voter doesn’t give us enough evidence of what they wanted to do, we can’t do anything about it under Arizona law.

Also under Arizona law, it is illegal to look at the partisan nature of the ballot to determine whether someone intended to vote for a Democrat or Republican for a different office. That means that if somebody was not clear if they voted for Trump or Biden, we could not look at the partisan leans of the ballot to decide that the person meant to vote for Trump or Biden if the voter intent was ambiguous. It was heartbreaking no matter whose vote it was, but that’s the law.

Voters are complicated. I saw a decent number of Biden presidential votes followed by straight ticket Republican voting, and I saw my share of trump votes with a straight ticket democratic voting.

So to the extent that we worked on ballots, we have very strict rules for how to count every vote that was valid, and the ones that were missed by the machine we rescued a lot of votes that without humans would not have counted.

People are instructed to completely fill in a circle, but lots of voters would simply do checkmarks in the boxes. All of those votes counted because we personally reviewed them, and determined that was the clear voter intent. We also rescued votes if somebody was using a pen and accidentally made the oval so big it bled in to the oval below it. It is not up to a machine to reject a vote, it is up to human judgment and consensus between two people of different political affiliations.

And here’s the thing, during my entire work, the Republican I worked with and I only disagreed perhaps two or three times out of thousands of ballots (thereby needing an independent tie breaker), which means we were very good at agreeing on how to rescue votes, or which votes had to be thrown out because voter intent could not be determined. And none of the situations where the independent broke the tie I feel like they were wrong, I was persuaded that they were correct.

And when it comes to sharpies, even if somehow somebody made a mark that was a little bit too big and bled into the box below, we were able to rescue those votes because we with our own human eyes can see what the voter wanted to do, and we would grant them their intent when they left us enough evidence of intent.

I am so grateful for this job, because you can see that your vote will count because there are dedicated individuals who are rescuing lots of votes that would be thrown out if you only had a machine read it

But here’s something I can tell you: my work more often than not rescued Trump supporter votes than Biden supporter votes, because based on the samples I was seeing, Trump voters were more likely to make curable errors than Biden voters, but Biden votes were more likely to cause their presidential vote to be thrown out.

For example, there were many people who voted for Donald Trump and then wrote in Donald Trump in the same ballot. Under Arizona law, that requires special action for the vote to count because otherwise under Arizona law that counts as an over vote. More often than not, my efforts rescued Trump supporter votes for this area. There were Democrats who did this as well, but we follow the law precisely whenever these issues came up.

Also: I threw out a small but not insubstantial number of Biden votes when they voted for Biden and the Libertarian candidate, likely by accident, but because there was no clear intent those votes were thrown out. I also had to throw out votes where somebody voted for Trump and Biden, or Trump and the Libertarian candidate. But I would say Biden Jorgensen invalid votes (since the two were above/below each other) were the ballots I was throwing out by about a 3 to 1 margin.

Now to be fair, people who voted for two presidential candidates were a minority of the minority of ballots, but I can assure you that people getting confused with their ballots were more often likely Biden voters than Trump voters. So if anything, my work probably gave Trump more votes than my work re the possibility of correcting possible Biden overvotes (when the law showed clear intent, like by crossing out an overvote).

Anyhow, very soon I plan to put all of my thoughts down about this very enriching experience. But I am here to tell you from personal experience: the Trump campaign is lying about sharpies

Edit: I also wanna add something that the majority of people I told about my job were questioning me about: what happens if somebody makes a mistake on their ballot, does that invalidate the entire ballot? No. Every vote of which there is clear intent is a valid vote. Even if somebody overvotes an office for school board that does not invalidate your votes for President Senate Congress etc.

If the 60,000+ persons who voted for Jo in Georgia had put their votes to Biden, he would be ahead...

Bless his heart I think Trump is a tired little boy. He's gone nearly 14 hours without tweeting and just now must have got up from his nap and tweeted " STOP THE COUNT" 

Reminds me of a toddler!