PA Vote Tidbits For Wednesday Night 11/4/20

[modrepub]

Just pulling the PA State Department election returns for a quick summary before I turn in.

Trump up by about 209k as of 8:24 PM

The following counties have not recorded any mail in ballots in their totals: Blair, Columbia, Crawford, Greene, Juniata, Tioga, Venango and York (generally Republican and small except for York and maybe Blair)

Most counties have finished their counts leaving only the more populated counties with some outstanding votes from Tuesday. Mail ins will continue to come in until Friday and be counted.

I'll list a couple of observations on the bigger counties.

Philadelphia: about 130k mail in ballots outstanding
Allegheny: about 40k mail in ballots outstanding
Montgomery: about 15k mail in ballots outstanding
Delaware: less than 10k mail in ballots outstanding

There are about 573k votes counted in Philadelphia with 1.13M registered voters so there may still be some election day ballots to count (total vote from 2016 was a shade under 700k).

In Allegheny County there are about 650k votes counted. There are 943k registered voters in the county but it's less skewed Democratic than Philadelphia. In 2016 Allegheny County's total votes were about 625k. Last I heard the Steelers were sending dinner to the vote counters so there may still be votes to tally there but maybe not as many as Philly.

Trump still has an even chance of carrying PA but they're still counting and let's hope Philly will be unmolested to finish. There's a good chance all votes from Tuesday will be tallied tomorrow. Keep in mind there are still votes coming in that could be counted if they are postmarked on or before the 3rd. Hang on and good night.

[idziak4ever1234]

1. That doesn't seem like good news at all. Especially with AZ tightening.

[Thekaspervote]

3. Biden has a sizable lead in AZ with outstanding ballots coming from heavily dem maricopa co

[Drunken Irishman]

5. If Trump wins at the same % he did with this last dump, he'll be on pace to win Arizona.

Now whether he does or not is the question.

If Arizona flips, and Biden loses Pennsylvania, he'll need Georgia + Nevada to win.

[qazplm135]

8. unless it was a perfectly representative sample of the remaining vote

mathematically it's going to be more or less overall.

I'm guessing it's not, so basically, we don't know.

Could be 75 percent remainder, could be 30, could be 50.

If someone knows exactly where these votes came from, I suppose you could estimate where the remainder is from and make an educated guess, but we don't have that information...maybe Team Trump or Biden does.

[qazplm135]

4. there's still a lot of little vote out there so the number remaining is a lot more than the 200K

or so he's listing in the big counties...and Biden is winning absentee vote everywhere by 80-20 or so.

It would be pretty surprising if he doesn't make up the gap when all is said and done plus 100K

[idziak4ever1234]

7. OK, thanks! I was having trouble falling asleep thinking about this.

[modrepub]

11. In Philly

It's not clear if they've counted all of the in person voting in their totals. Taking the remaining mail in and adding them to the already counted (in person) voting totals around 700k, which is equal to the total count in 2016. I suspect that voter turnout in Philly this year was higher than in 2016 so there could be another 100k+ of in person votes they haven't counted.

PA is still obligated to count mail in votes that come in through Friday. Those are generally Democratic votes so that will also add onto the tally (and be fought over by Trump and the Republicans).

I think all of the mail-in and left over in person votes from Tuesday will be completely counted sometime today. Hopefully those votes will put Biden in the lead so the mail ins after Tuesday won't matter as much (unless those go overwhelmingly for Trump, which I doubt).

[Thekaspervote]

2. Here's this

Link to tweet

?s=21

[David__77]

6. You freaked me out.

The site presently says that there are 763,311 uncounted mail ballots statewide.

https://www.votespa.com/About-Elections/Pages/Counting-Dashboard.aspx

After seeing, that I feel much better!

[qazplm135]

9. even if we were sitting at only 400K left...

with Biden winning absentee votes basically 75-25, he would still net 200K thousand which would be a narrow win.

With the remaining 363K you are adding another roughly 150K which explains why Dems in PA are telling Team Biden that they should end up winning by 100K+ give or take.

The only way this falls apart is if:

a. They just stop counting. (not happening)
b. There's some gross error and there is less than 400K votes left. (seems highly unlikely)
c. Biden's percentage drop from about 50 points it's been to less than about 22 points in the remaining vote. (also seems highly unlikely)

A similar situation in GA just with much smaller numbers:

a.

[FakeNoose]

10. Is anyone else as mad as I am about how messed up this is?

I'm so embarrassed that PA is this friggin' mess. We look like pikers! No other state is dragging this vote count out the way we are. The procedures for counting and for handling mailed ballots MUST be revised before the next election.

It's not the Governor's fault, I understand that. Why does he have to fight the Legislature single-handedly? Doesn't anybody in Harrisburg give a shit?

[modrepub]

12. Lot of Factors

PA mandated new machines be put in place to create a paper trail for fraud purposes. Those machines were installed several election cycles ago in my county. Some counties, however, may have waited until this year to put these new machines in so add more time because people won't be familiar with them during a heave vote Presidential election.

They are neat little machines. You punch in your vote, it prints out your ballot, you look at it to verify your vote then you take it to a machine that scans it in and shows you your vote then you verify its correct and you're done. Well, my first thought after I voted was this is going to cause chaos in places like Philly and Pittsburgh where you have lots and lots of voters to process. It takes much more time to vote than the machines we had. There's also more opportunities for malfunctions to snarl the whole process. All I could think of is long lines in high population areas, which tend to be Democratic, and people getting fed up waiting in line and just not voting. You won't have that problem in rural (Republican leaning) areas of the state because they don't have to process half a million voters like Philly and it's surrounding counties and Allegheny County. This still could happen when this pandemic is over and more people vote in person.

Also remember there are like a half a dozen counties in PA with voter rolls over half a million people that had hundreds of thousands of mail in votes to process. That means verifying signatures, opening envelopes, checking for the ballot envelop (naked ballots), unfolding the ballot, putting it through a machine and handling any machine malfunctions. Hats off to the folks who pulled off this monumental task.

Wolfe and many counties pleaded with the Republican legislature to allow them to start preparing the ballots before Tuesday. The Legislature wouldn't budge so none of the mail ins were processed until 7 am on Tuesday. Not a problem for most of the rural counties that have a couple thousand mail in votes to process versus Philly, which had over 350k to go through.

And which is more egregious in your mind, that Philly is still counting its votes 2 days after the polls closed or Juniata County not processing its mail in votes two days after it closed its polls? For comparison, total votes in Philly were +700k versus Juniata that had less than 10k in person votes on Tuesday.

Peace

[FakeNoose]

13. The point I was making is

... the Election Boards in every county started receiving ballots in early/mid October. I'm in Allegheny County, one of the high population areas, and we had a lot of mailed ballots. They could have started processing them sooner than November 3rd, and that's certainly what most other states have done.

The mailing of ballots should have taken a lot of stress off the in-person voting that was happening on Election Day. Scanning those mailed ballots earlier would have created no more cases of fraud or error than scanning them later, after the polls are closed. Somehow other states were able to figure that out.

[modrepub]

14. I Agree

But they need permission from Pennsylvania's Republican led legislature to do anything more than put them in storage. The legislature did nothing so counties like Philadelphia, Allegheny, Delaware and some others couldn't touch them until Tuesday morning.

The whole delay was Republican generated to allow them and their President to try and create a "crisis" of their own doing. So much of what Republicans have done for decades is to try and create a mirage of Democratic wrongdoing or unethical ness (see Clinton investigations). In the end it's the narrative they want to control; provide the "smoke" and claim there's a fire.

At some point I want to go though the PA election results to see what actually happened. I wanted to do that in 2016 but it was just too difficult to do a post mortem after that debacle. There's something going on in PA where Democratic voter registration advantages aren't translating to legislature or state-wide office control. I suspect there's a lot of rural Democratic voter defections. The difference between rural and urban/suburban Democratic voters may be much more substantial than the differences between rural/suburban and urban Republican voters.