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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Going postal: Could a Democrat victory end up lost in the post
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Going postal: Could a Democrat victory end up lost in the post?
This is why Trump is trying to stop the US Postal Service from processing ballot papers:The partisan split in how Americans would like to vote is immense.– 17% who back Trump prefer to vote by mail– 58% who back Biden prefer the mail option. pic.twitter.com/notTbOjOVu
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***** Betting Post *****
After his great comeback to win last night, Ronnie O'Sullivan looks to have a great chance of winning SPOTY this year (assuming the annual award ceremony goes ahead after all the sporting disruption), especially at Wm. Hill's incredible stand-out odds of 8/1, which I very much doubt will last beyond breakfast in a couple of hours time!
This price is fully 60% better than the next best odds available of 5/1 and more than double BetVictor's 7/2, whilst on the Betfair Exchange he's on offer at 3.8/1 net.
DYOR, but be quick if you want to get on at this price.
ETA 9/1 with Ladbrokes
Limitations on the number of polling stations is far more serious from a democratic perspective. There is no reasonable argument that can be made as to why that might be acceptable.
Not great cleaning up dog vomit first thing, but nice to see that tip.
The new Trump-appointed USPS boss is actively reducing capacity. That's the problem.
Fortunately for pb I am too busy with the racing and @peter_from_putney's RoS SPotY tip to rehash Cameron & Osborne's (now partly abandoned) gerrymandering scheme around boundary reviews on purged registers.
They're organised, so they routinely have a postal vote available, in case voting on the day proves tricky. They're comfortably off, so they're more likely to be up the Amazon, or on the ski slopes, on polling day. They're older, so less likely to want to be out. And, though living longer, they're sicklier - so may well be housebound on the day.
The huge difference between the UK and US over all this, though, is that:
- America's preposterously small number of polling stations makes physical voting very difficult for people doing several jobs to make ends meet: they very probably won't have hours on the day to stand in a queue. So the Dems' core have a really strong argument for postal voting
- USPS has shown stellar incompetence (and criminal underfunding)for decades.
As it happens I doubt those registration changes made much difference, but Cameron clearly thought it would help him.
Of course, once the UK government curtails judicial review, we will embark upon the same course over here.
As ever with Trump, it's really hard to tell whether it's audacious low cunning or a confused old man hitting buttons at random.
On the one hand maybe it's some cunning bit of low politics where he has a plan to attack in-person voting with Portland-style federal goons, and/or he wants to get Dem votes counted separately so that he can claim he was robbed and fight the election in the courts or in the streets.
On the other hand, maybe he just saw something about Dems wanting postal voting on Fox News and reflexively turned against it, and he's inadvertently disfranchized his own elderly supporters who despite his best efforts are going to stay at home for fear of the rona.
My mother and her sister, who lived with us, had been 'flapper' voters who remembered getting the right to vote and both regarded it as a duty to not only vote but to be seen to do so. Possibly the latter because they were the daughters of one of bigger farmers in the area where they lived.
In November voters will be electing not just the President but a member of Congress, one third will be electing Senators, there will be State versions of the same, country or city level politicians and also a variety of other elected officials such as judges and sheriffs. The act of voting thus takes much longer and it also helps explain why the counting takes so long if all these are on a single ballot paper.
Despite its many pitfalls you can understand why some Americans like electronic voting as a way of speeding the whole thing up.
Reduce polling station frequency in Dem wards, and restricting postal voting that could offset the first issue is heading down the Belarusian road.
Ignore counting votes cast in Dem areas and we have a full house.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxj3XE5lELc
If he wins again (and has control of Congress) he’s going have a reasonable shout of making the balance 7-2, given Clinton’s two appointees are 82 and 87.
This alone should be enough to make the Bernie Bros turn out for Biden but whether they’re paying attention is another question.
And you insouciant attitude towards postal voting isn’t exactly democratic.
Labelling attempts to retain the ability to vote by post as partisan in the same way as attempts too sabotage that ability is otiose.
If the election is anywhere near close, there is a very strong chance of Trump trying to steal it, and he has a cynical and hyper partisan Attorney General to assist in that.
https://dfemedia.blog.gov.uk/2020/08/14/misleading-a-level-claims-debunked/
Our daughter`s GCSE results arrive next week and I think we are more anxious than she is. Can`t wait for next week to be over.
This year special circumstances though, I admit. Tricky.
The day after the NY-27 election the GOP candidate had 68.7% and the Dem candidate 28.7%
Once all the votes were counted (which took a long time due to the huge number of postal votes) the final result was
GOP: 51.8%
Dem: 45.5%
And the vibe of the polling station tend to pall after the first couple of hours standing in a queue.
Meanwhile our government, which has its own taste for skulduggery, is moving through the gears from shambolic to a down right bone fide basket case. How anyone can support it is quite beyond me at the moment. Again, Labour has a ton of work to do to pull itself out of the abyss it dug itself into and being in a position to win.
Bad times.
Well I'm not such a big fan of Biden anyway, best to stay away.
As with voting machines and hanging chads the US seem to delight in making their electoral systems as complicated as possible. Why are postal votes accepted after the date of the election for example?
1. The economy is less dependent on external factors, so we don't need the whole EU economy to pick up in the same way as Germany or the Netherlands, for example.
2. The UK economy is generally a bit more dynamic and reactive because of the labour market, efficient allocation of resources means that the UK generally picks up steam and gets into a virtuous growth/jobs cycle more easily than in Europe. This is one area that is being hurt by furlough schemes being extended, why will companies bother with new business models when the government is happy subsidising the old one that no longer works.
3. We are far, far less dependent on tourism income than France, Spain and Italy.
4. Because of point 4, British people are sitting on a wall of cash which will get spent at some point that would otherwise have been spent in Spain, Greece, Turkey, France etc...
5. Smart schemes like the eat out to help out will give the nation confidence to go out and spend money.
6. Being an island nation we have a lower chance of seeing a huge second wave than the mainland. What we lose in travel and tourism with quarantine is made up 100x by not having a second wave which would destroy confidence for good.
There are a few more reasons but this covers mostly why the UK is better placed to recover than most of our European allies.
Can anyone shed any light? The only thing I can think of is that would dissuade me from voting for Biden with relish is the "taking the knee" stuff and a general concern about a wokey direction - but I`m less concerned about that than I would be if it wasn`t Biden.
Trump has to go. It`s crucial.
https://twitter.com/nbeaudrot/status/1294228297811779585
As for the article it's almost too depressing to comment. I remember feeling very shocked but heartened to see so many African Americans queuing for what seemed like hours to vote in 2004. It made the result doubly disappointing.
Britain does this efficiently for the same reason Royal Mail works and USPS doesn't. Our culture encourages us to grumble about government incompetence to make someone do something about it. The US culture (in a trait followed mindlessly by a distressing number of PB contributors) encourages Americans to grumble about government incompetence to prove attempts at reform are doomed to failure. This lunacy afflicts both parties
USPS is being asked to get fewer ballot papers out and back by November 3 than the number of Xmas cards they routinely deliver by December 25. In any other walk of US life, it'd be intolerable for an organisation to assume failure on this scale three months in advance.
If USPS can't cope, wouldn't you expect safeish Dem states like CA and NY to be subcontracting ballot paper delivery to Amazon right now (as even plonkers like Grayling would be doing here)? Why aren't they? Because it suits the Dems to scream "voter suppression".
Why is no "liberal" US medium demanding a delivery Plan B? Why isn't a publicity obsessive like Bezos or the head honcho of Fedex publicly offering to step in?
Because the inevitability of government failure is brainwashed into ALL Americans.
https://twitter.com/JRehling/status/1293953957824360448
Well for a start Amazon relies on the USPS, and these guys, who have said they can’t do it:
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/512146-ups-fedex-shut-down-calls-to-handle-mail-in-ballots-warn-of-significant
There’s the legal requirement for a postmark on the ballot, too.
And of course the fact the the governors of many of the key swing states are Republicans.
But I’ll grant that California, the wealthiest state in the nation, really ought properly to finance the running of its elections.
https://twitter.com/pmdfoster/status/1294550180956643328
* The USPS was already broke, ever since somebody tried to make them set aside extra funds for their pensions, Trump didn't do that
* They were without a quorum for their board of governors for years, right through the Obama administration, because Bernie Sanders blocked Obama's appointees
* The rona gave them another hammering
* They've been removing some machines in Dem strongholds, but Dem strongholds is another way of saying "cities", and a lot of them are in non-swing states. It's not really clear that this is to do with the election, as their business is in decline anyhow
* The states' ballot deadlines are already needlessly tight (see earlier tweet), that's not Trump's fault
You miss some cases, but it's safer than a quarantine which you don't bother to enforce.
Has anyone mentioned his diplomatic triumph of the Israel-UAE deal ?
I'm curious as to whether any PBers are big enough to admit Trump has done well in this case.
Because it was a town council election and a safe seat, opponents were only midly outraged, and even amused at the effrontery. We teased the LDs about it for years, though. That sort of thing at the level of the US Presidency is less entertaining.
I don't know enough about the USPS to say, but if you take a complex, underfunded organization like this and start looking for things that look like sabotage, I'm sure you can find some even if they're not really there.
I don't know if you've ever worked in the public sector but generally speaking, routine management and deliberate sabotage are pretty much indistinguishable.
His recent appointee’s actions as head of the USPS don’t suggest otherwise.
And there are, of course, his own comments on the matter.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/14/us-election-november-votes-ballots-democracy
Many opponents of Trump seem to ascribe to him an unusually high degree of competence and foresight when it comes to acts of malevolence, that is not consistent with all reports of how he operates.
That said, we have in his own words the statement that he opposes bailing out the USPS so that he can stop his political opponents from voting by mail. You don't have to imagine conspiracy when he states the case against himself right there, out in the open.
As a more extreme example, I can't understand the appeal of the Taliban either, but they are not designed to appeal to me.
1) no more Neocon wars
2) he failed to repeal Obamacare
3) lower taxes for rich people
4) anti-China; not anti-Russia
The case against Biden:
1) he's past it
2) Dems want to sieze the people's guns and shoot babies
1) Straight lies
2) Saying things they think people want to hear irrespective of whether its true
3) Making some stuff up because they don't want to say "I don't know"
This brings us to the meta-conspiracy-theory, that Trump wants to stop people postal-voting by making them think he's going to screw with it...
This would be a better system than testing on arrival, I'd also allow for people to pay for a test privately after day 5 (gives enough time for the virus to incubate properly if it is present), I think the going rate is currently £70 for a PCR test.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/08/14/test-people-arriving-red-list-countries-end-quarantine-roulette/
"MPs and industry figures called for a testing regime for those returning from abroad to end the chaos – but it emerged that the Government was told by scientists two months ago that testing travellers could help avoid a blanket quarantine. Minutes from the Sage scientific advisory group show that it asked Public Health England (PHE) to consider a double-testing policy that would involve travellers being checked at the border and again five to eight days later. The plan would have allowed people to finish quarantine within one week, but although the Government indicated to The Telegraph that it was considering reducing quarantine to 10 days, no action on testing had been taken. Heathrow Airport said tourists were being forced to play "quarantine roulette". "Testing could provide an opportunity to safely reduce the length of quarantine in certain circumstances, protecting both the health and wealth of the nation," a spokesman said. "The UK needs a more sustainable long-term plan for the resumption of travel than quarantine roulette." The former Brexit secretary David Davis said: "Sage's advice is woefully inconsistent with the claim from ministers that testing only detects a minority of cases. "If they were advised this in June then this is what they should have done in June, rather than take this ineffective blanket approach.""
Trump doesn't work like that. He doesn't mind being caught lying, and his supporters seem to like it when he lies to own the libs.
His strategy reminds me of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1aq6sJEuVU
And then, as I've warned in the past, a long queue of people waiting to vote is an obvious physical target for the heavily-armed extremists that Trump is busy convincing they have to defend the election from being stolen. The sorts of people who have already gone out to shoot at, or drive vehicles into, Black Matters Lives protests.
I think there's a lot of denial about how bad the situation already is, and how much worse it is going to become. And the worse thing is that I can see lots of comfortable people explaining it away after the event by talking about motivation, etc, so that they wouldn't have to face the terrifying reality - that Trump stole the election of the Presidency in the great democracy of the United States, and that all our democratic comforts are at risk.
Domestically apart from being more protectionist than free trade he has not done much different from the average Republican President and the US still has gay marriage and legal abortion.
Trump may be a caricature in rhetoric but in policy terms it is more his cultural anti immigration and anti PC language that annoys the left and liberals
The Guardian doesn’t think much of it though:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/14/the-israel-uae-deal-will-make-a-one-state-solution-even-more-unlikely