Pennsylvania can’t count fast …
… although the voting results in Pennsylvania count very much.
I’m talking about this announcement:
Pennsylvanians won’t always know the final results of all races on election night. Any changes in results that occur as counties continue to count ballots are not evidence that an election is “rigged.” See the full explanation at https://t.co/viVtWSw4HL. pic.twitter.com/gbaDh8lJpX
— PA Department of State (@PAStateDept) August 8, 2024
Pre-emptive warning: don’t blame us, we can’t count fast!
From Ron DeSantis:
Florida elections have millions more votes cast than in PA elections, yet we count the votes and report the results on election night — and do so in an efficient and transparent manner.
There is no reason why this cannot be done in every state in America. https://t.co/Nnq9ZebcCi
— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) August 11, 2024
Ha.
Desantis says there is no reason the votes can’t be counted election night but on the contrary, there’s a perfectly obvious reason to anyone whose eyes are open: THE ELECTiON IS RIGGED!
Trump prepares to reject another loss
As one commenter here suggested – Trump will be back in 2028 if he’s loses again this time.
Karmi:
Fraud may happen, if the Democrats deem it necessary. That’s the reality, not just some Trumpian fantasy. I’ve explained many times why it’s reasonable to suspect fraud, although impossible to prove. I’m not wasting more time doing it again.
However, I do want to say that if Trump were to run in 2028 I very much doubt he would win the nomination that time. Two electoral losses would be enough.
But if the fraud machine is efficient enough, it won’t matter who the GOP nominates, especially if the Democrats manage to pass HR1 as is their goal, in order to destroy election security in all the states.
PA can count the votes just as fast as FL does. It just takes longer to manufacture enough votes to swing the election to Harris.
sdferr:
Obviously he means no valid reason.
Obviously. Which doesn’t make it any the less hilarious.
be a little more discerning
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/washington-post-attempts-to-justify-media-suppression-of-hunter-biden-laptop-story/
Neo:
I’d have to see it to believe that. Trump and his MAGA faithful would’ve destroyed the Republican party this time, and I highly suspect the next time also (if he loses this time)…if he runs.
I downloaded the voting in PA a few months after the 2020 election. The fraud was egregious. Trump was getting three votes for every Biden vote and crushing him. Then sometime around midnight, Trump all but stopped getting votes, they just arrived in a trickle for the next few days, until Biden won and they stopped the count and declared him the winner.
Shapiro was AG of PA at the time and declared a month before the election that Trump was not going to win the state. If I were a citizen of Butler PA I’d be organizing right now to stop the steal.
Trump has a path to victory without PA. He must win Michigan (and he can) and Harris understands that and her campaign is trying desperately to walk that narrow plank between the Hamas wing and the secular Jewish wing of her party.
Karmi, What happens in 2028 is irrelevant to 2024 and is just disinformation.
Democracy is not a viable choice in a Democratzi. Abort.
In 2020 I had Pennsylvania precinct voting downloaded on my tablet, it was quite overwhelmed. I saw numerous times subtraction on both candidates..
Also then as now we will have sewer vote depositing on street corners, any ballot dumped will get counted if you dump 1 or 1,000 in there.
I have no hope Trump beating the fraud. The vote counters are telling you that right out.
Neo, Pennsylvania election law stupidly says that mail in ballots that have accumulated during the pre-election-day mail in period cannot be counted until the morning of election day.
In 2020 the law and Department of State interpretations rushed mail in ballots under new rules, previously absentee ballot provisions were pretty restrictive. Democrats were enthusiastic to expand the voter pool beyond election day voting and used the pandemic as an opening for that change. Republicans in the legislature were reluctant to expand mail in voting and they refused to allow earlier counting of ballots as they came in.
Huge numbers of mail in votes occurred during the 2020 pandemic, and counting procedures took several days past the closing of the polls. Later attempts to change the election laws were again deadlocked on the issue of precounting mail in ballots.
So every rinky-dink precinct has to staff mostly older residents to monitor and assist election day votes, and have to evaluate and count numerous mail ballots, it is a very decentralized system. Allegheny and Philadelphia counties have the most votes, most mail in ballots, and the culture of cronyism and corruption in the election process. The understandable delays provide them much cover for mischief, unfortunately.
PA GOP is pathetic, Democrats control the Department of State and the courts, so sensible law and procedure changes to have a world class election system that performs its functions adequately and transparently, just remain out of reach.
Does PA use paper ballots? In NC, only paper ballots are allowed. We use optical scan tabulators. Election results are available and reliable by late evening on election day. In 2020, there were 5 million votes cast for the NC Supreme Court Chief Justice seat. The Republican won by 400 votes. That margin was unchanged by the all-state recount and by the hand recount in randomly selected precincts in every county.
The legislature passed, over the Dem Governor’s veto, a law requiring absentee ballots to be delivered to the Board of Elections before poll closing time on election day, so even that loophole is closed.
Dan D, in NC, as absentee ballots come in, they are evaluated by the information on the envelope as to their validity. The ones which are valid are then opened and run through the tabulators at election boards as soon as the polls close. Only the ones that came in that day would need evaluation before counting, a rather small number.
Yes we have paper ballots in Pa.
Some years ago now, we had electronic
Dan D:
Even with Pennsylvania’s election laws, they could finish rhe count quickly if they wished. In Europe, entire countries with more voters than PA and all paper ballots usually manage it in a day.
GOP needs an all out effort to stop election cheating in PA. Must have people watching the counting.
As Paul said, the vote totals in Pa ( wish had them still but eventually had to clean them out of tablet) would get added to totals by nice even numbers, continuing exactly, percentage of what Trump would get would get added to Sundowner. There were lot you could start playing with the numbers with if I had a better system to start with.
It’s not difficult to design a system which produces results on election night. You don’t need any digital technology, though for convenience you can make use of spreadsheets to track preliminary results. It’s just slatternly incompetence which prevents it. In the last 20 years, Democrats have discovered means of stuffing the ballot boxes, so there’s a vested interest in slatternly incompetence. Key elements:
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1. Have those who qualify to vote by post set up a standing order for a postal ballot, renewable quadrennially. Notify them by postcard when their standing order has lapsed, so they can send in a form to re-instate it. Those who qualify facially are (1) civilian government employees posted abroad and any spouse posted in-country with them; (2) servicemen and any spouse residing with them; (3) persons under 25 enrolled at a campus with residences; and (4) miscellaneous persons who are eligible but whose palpable residence is in institutional group quarters. Each of the foregoing will have a formal domicile distinct from their palpable residence. In category 1, 2, and 3, the voting address can be anywhere in the United States and its possessions. In case 4, it has to be in-state. Communications will be sent to the voter’s palpable residence unless they’re abroad (and it goes through the federal PX system) or they’re at a locus where the post office doesn’t deliver and they have to have a box. Others who can set up a standing order are those whose doctor has filled out a brief form attesting they are homebound and those whose work supervisor has attested in a brief form that their work takes them out of the county overnight > 50 days a year. In certain western states, you can allow those who live in excess of a certain distance from a voting station to set up a standing order for postal ballot. In an average precinct, about 13% should be voting by post.
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2. Have all ballot packs in the mail by 15 September. If you have a primary result being contested, you might allow an addendum mailing. For this, schedule primaries no later than 31 August.
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3. Have the Republican and Democratic commissioners of elections conduct each day a session examining the previous day’s returned packets and conducting signature verification on each. The agreement of both would be necessary to consider the signature verified. Rejected ballots would be locked away in a box with two locks – one for each commissioner. After the results are certified, these could be returned to sender, with a few referred to the sheriff. Approved ballots would be distributed among other lockboxes and sorted into pigeonholes each day. Again the boxes would have two locks. A middling county like Onondaga County, NY might have about 375 ballots to examine each workday, of which there would be six in a week in season. The last day on which these sessions would occur would be the day before the election. Ballot packs arriving later would be placed in a lockbox and eventually returned to sender.
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4. On the election day, move all the lockboxes with approved ballots in them to a gymnasium for tabulation. They’re already sorted into pigeonholes in their respective lockboxes. You have sets of tables for each county subdivision and piles on the tables for each precinct. You have one analog tabulator for x tables and you have a Republican and a Democratic clerk operating the machine and attesting to the tabulation. All the tabulation’s done before the polls close.
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5. If we did not live in clown world, we would have polls open on Friday evening, Saturday morning, and Saturday afternoon. Right now, we’re using the mid-19th century market day as our election day, rather than the day where only 12% of the population is regularly at work. This creates clots. We can clear some of the clots two ways: having polls open for four hours Monday evening and having a sufficient number of polling stations. New York once had (and I believe still has) one station for every 1,000 residents. Each station should have at least one inspector from each party on every shift. One technological innovation we can adopt is an online auction process to fill shifts, with the proviso that you have to be registered in the county in question to take the shift and that any back-to-back shift you’re awarded has to be at the same precinct. In a typical precinct in a typical general election, if you have polls open for 15 hours, you can expect 18 people to appear in a typical hour with perhaps 45 during the busiest hours.
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6. Again, have analogue tabulation machines at each shift, operated in tandem by a Republican inspector and a Democratic inspector who make a hard-copy attestation. You then e-mail the results to a contact person at the gymnasium who can then collate the precinct results with the postal results in a spreadsheet. You should have the results e-mailed in by about 8 o’clock in the evening. With some collating, you have at HQ all the data for any referendum and any first-past-the-post contest and the first round of tabulation on any ranked-choice contest. These can then be forwarded to the state board via e-mail for any multi-county contest. You have the hard copy attestations for the final canvas.
“Trump and his MAGA faithful would’ve destroyed the Republican party this time, and I highly suspect the next time also (if he loses this time)…if he runs.” Karmi
News flash! The GOP establishment destroyed the Republican party’s credibility among the majority of its former supporters long ago. Think back to the Tea Party movement, the precursor to the MAGA movement. All Trump did was tap into what existed long before 2016. If Trump is not elected in Nov. the third wave will be a political and societal tsunami.
“So much of left wing thought is… a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know… that fire is hot.” George Orwell
“It’s not difficult to design a system which produces results on election night. … It’s just slatternly incompetence which prevents it.” Art Deco
It is not slatternly incompetence but rather, intentional design. Only after they’ve counted a high enough percentage of the actual votes can they calculate the amount of ‘manufactured’ votes needed to ensure a plausible victory.
Did I really hear journalists on TV announcing on election night 2020 that election officials in some cities were stopping counting until Thursday? I have a clear memory of that (though I’m not sure which cities were involved). At this point, the internet is so clogged with spurious Big Media “fact checkers” that it’s hard to find out what the facts actually are.