This is why it's so important to count all the votes swiftly overnight.
UK and India manage it. No excuses for USA.
No way that can be achieved. For example, in WA State ballots are good if postmarked by EDay, and received afterwards.
What matters in vote counting is ACCURACY, not speed.
The faster the better - but speed secondary to correctly counting ALL valid votes.
Yes way, if states change their rules so all postals must be received by election day. Which is what we do. And it compromises neither accuracy nor speed. You don't post later than five working days before EDay, and otherwise you hand the ballot into a polling station on the day.
(PS. dial back the Daily Mail random capitals please too mate - it's an annoying habit of all your posts)
Tbf they're not really random caps are they? I took them as an alternative to the html b /b shenanigans
This is why it's so important to count all the votes swiftly overnight.
UK and India manage it. No excuses for USA.
I take th epoint often made on here about there being lots of other votes on the ballots to complicate and delay things, but I really don't see why, given the importance of the presidential vote (even with the formal EC vote some way off) that they couldn't separate things out so they can prioritise the presidential.
Red ballot for President, white ballot for Senate, blue ballot for House, yellow ballot for State, green ballot for propositions, pink ballot for county.
It's not hard.
NOTE that vast majority of ballots in US elections are tallied by machines (increasingly machines that produce a hard-copy record the voter can see) so that the results for ALL races are tallied simultaneously. Using multiple ballots would SLOW down the count, not speed it up.
"It's not hard."
Just out of curiosity, have you ever observed, in person, the actual tabulation of official election ballots, anywhere in the United States, or anywhere else?
FPT - many people seem to think Trump is some evil genius, like Blofeld, rather than a paranoid egotistical big mouth who shouts his gob off whenever he can, with a constituency of fans who hang on his every word.
The Trump Corporation doesn't have its tentacles extended into every part of the GOP, let alone the whole constitution of the USA. Yes, he has a few people personally loyal to (and dependent) on him but he has a lot of others who keep their mouths shut and heads down whilst he's ahead but hold no love for him (if you don't believe me just look at how quickly his ex-employees speak out).
I don't think the votes will be fixed or the counts. Almost all the legal challenges will fail. There are a lot of decent people in American (just as here) most of whom even if Republican or GOP will do the honourable thing.
He might try (very loudly) to declare victory on election night off the back of some early half-baked results.
He will simply be ignored.
The problem is he won't be ignored. Enough excitable Trump fans armed with automatic weapons will take the spurious notion that they had their election stolen very badly indeed.
Yes, there might be some disorder. There's been plenty over George Floyd this year too.
Riot police and federal agents will deal with it. It won't affect the election.
FPT - many people seem to think Trump is some evil genius, like Blofeld, rather than a paranoid egotistical big mouth who shouts his gob off whenever he can, with a constituency of fans who hang on his every word.
The Trump Corporation doesn't have its tentacles extended into every part of the GOP, let alone the whole constitution of the USA. Yes, he has a few people personally loyal to (and dependent) on him but he has a lot of others who keep their mouths shut and heads down whilst he's ahead but hold no love for him (if you don't believe me just look at how quickly his ex-employees speak out).
I don't think the votes will be fixed or the counts. Almost all the legal challenges will fail. There are a lot of decent people in American (just as here) most of whom even if Republican or GOP will do the honourable thing.
He might try (very loudly) to declare victory on election night off the back of some early half-baked results.
He will simply be ignored.
The problem is he won't be ignored. Enough excitable Trump fans armed with automatic weapons will take the spurious notion that they had their election stolen very badly indeed.
Yes, there might be some disorder. There's been plenty over George Floyd this year too.
Riot police and federal agents will deal with it. It won't affect the election.
Well the disorder never ended in Portland & we have seen flare ups in a number of cities over the past week or so. I think whoever wins we will see some, how much and how severe, US is a very voiltile place at the moment.
On topic (and hi folks hope everyone is safe and well)
TSE is talking rubbish about the EU and Scottish Independence referendums. The voting system had nothing to do with it. The problem with Parliamentary elections is no matter who you vote for the Government always wins. There is bugger all difference between the parties on many issues people really care about when it actually comes to doing something about them. So they generally think why bother? Back when people really did think there was a chance to change things or to prevent change - in the 92 and 97 elections - turnout was much higher. Indeed the 92 election saw turnout 5 points higher than the EU referendum.
In both the EU and Scottish referendums people knew that their vote would mean something, not because of the voting system but because the votes themselves were about a meaningful change - or not. Not just refilling the Commons with the same old faces once again.
I think the AV system is actually pretty good but to try and claim that the lack of turnout in the Parliamentary elections here is anything to do with the voting system is just garbage.
This is why it's so important to count all the votes swiftly overnight.
UK and India manage it. No excuses for USA.
No way that can be achieved. For example, in WA State ballots are good if postmarked by EDay, and received afterwards.
What matters in vote counting is ACCURACY, not speed.
The faster the better - but speed secondary to correctly counting ALL valid votes.
Yes way, if states change their rules so all postals must be received by election day. Which is what we do. And it compromises neither accuracy nor speed. You don't post later than five working days before EDay, and otherwise you hand the ballot into a polling station on the day.
(PS. dial back the Daily Mail random capitals please too mate - it's an annoying habit of all your posts)
Tbf they're not really random caps are they? I took them as an alternative to the html b /b shenanigans
FPT - many people seem to think Trump is some evil genius, like Blofeld, rather than a paranoid egotistical big mouth who shouts his gob off whenever he can, with a constituency of fans who hang on his every word.
The Trump Corporation doesn't have its tentacles extended into every part of the GOP, let alone the whole constitution of the USA. Yes, he has a few people personally loyal to (and dependent) on him but he has a lot of others who keep their mouths shut and heads down whilst he's ahead but hold no love for him (if you don't believe me just look at how quickly his ex-employees speak out).
I don't think the votes will be fixed or the counts. Almost all the legal challenges will fail. There are a lot of decent people in American (just as here) most of whom even if Republican or GOP will do the honourable thing.
He might try (very loudly) to declare victory on election night off the back of some early half-baked results.
He will simply be ignored.
The problem is he won't be ignored. Enough excitable Trump fans armed with automatic weapons will take the spurious notion that they had their election stolen very badly indeed.
Yes, there might be some disorder. There's been plenty over George Floyd this year too.
Riot police and federal agents will deal with it. It won't affect the election.
Your second paragraph is either very casual or you underestimate the potential brutality that Trump will incite. Trump's angry brigade won't just be a rebellious rabble, they are a supremely well armed series of militias. If Trump goes down the road that he seems to want to tread, things will quickly become very bad.
PB wrecked again on the iPhone thanks to people posting big images and endless retweets.
It’s like talking to a brick wall.
If you have a browser that works with the uBlock Origin add-on then installing that and configuring it to block platform.twitter.com will stop all tweets automatically loading and this site then works well. This is how mine is configured...
It’s fine on my laptop. It’s accessing through the phone that is problematic.
On my phone I use specifically use the Chrome browser for this site, because it enables me to disable Javascript for this site alone. With other mobile browsers I again use uBlock Origin to disable Javascript completely, but it works less well.
I agree that this site needs fixing, particularly given how bust it will become next week.
This is why it's so important to count all the votes swiftly overnight.
UK and India manage it. No excuses for USA.
Multiple counties in PA have committed to counting postal votes the next day. Due to the GOP fuckery they can't even verify the postal until after polls close. Given staffing levels in some counties it will take days to simply open and check signatures on the votes never mind actually count them. Given the huge preponderance of Dem votes in the postals (see my post above/below) this is going to have a massive red shift effect on election night.
It’s a mixed picture in the state. It seems Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are going to start processing the ballots from 7am and are going to be counting them 24/7 . Many of the counties waiting till the next day are ironically red leaning areas .
It's truly crazy that the 2.3m mail ballots already returned in PA cannot be counted or at least processed ready for feeding through counting machines ahead of Tuesday.
This is why it's so important to count all the votes swiftly overnight.
UK and India manage it. No excuses for USA.
No way that can be achieved. For example, in WA State ballots are good if postmarked by EDay, and received afterwards.
What matters in vote counting is ACCURACY, not speed.
The faster the better - but speed secondary to correctly counting ALL valid votes.
Yes way, if states change their rules so all postals must be received by election day. Which is what we do. And it compromises neither accuracy nor speed. You don't post later than five working days before EDay, and otherwise you hand the ballot into a polling station on the day.
(PS. dial back the Daily Mail random capitals please too mate - it's an annoying habit of all your posts)
So in order to satisfy desire of media, activists AND bettors for speed!, speed!, speed! we would be required to impose another barrier to voting - just want the Republicans keep doing and doing and doing.
This is why it's so important to count all the votes swiftly overnight.
UK and India manage it. No excuses for USA.
No way that can be achieved. For example, in WA State ballots are good if postmarked by EDay, and received afterwards.
What matters in vote counting is ACCURACY, not speed.
The faster the better - but speed secondary to correctly counting ALL valid votes.
Yes way, if states change their rules so all postals must be received by election day. Which is what we do. And it compromises neither accuracy nor speed. You don't post later than five working days before EDay, and otherwise you hand the ballot into a polling station on the day.
(PS. dial back the Daily Mail random capitals please too mate - it's an annoying habit of all your posts)
Tbf they're not really random caps are they? I took them as an alternative to the html b /b shenanigans
cORrECT. tHiS IS wHat rANdOm lOokS LIKE.
Fair, but using capitals for emphasis (which is almost always unnecessary) makes the post more tiring to read, looks and feels like shouting, and takes away from the argument rather than adding to it.
FPT - many people seem to think Trump is some evil genius, like Blofeld, rather than a paranoid egotistical big mouth who shouts his gob off whenever he can, with a constituency of fans who hang on his every word.
The Trump Corporation doesn't have its tentacles extended into every part of the GOP, let alone the whole constitution of the USA. Yes, he has a few people personally loyal to (and dependent) on him but he has a lot of others who keep their mouths shut and heads down whilst he's ahead but hold no love for him (if you don't believe me just look at how quickly his ex-employees speak out).
I don't think the votes will be fixed or the counts. Almost all the legal challenges will fail. There are a lot of decent people in American (just as here) most of whom even if Republican or GOP will do the honourable thing.
He might try (very loudly) to declare victory on election night off the back of some early half-baked results.
He will simply be ignored.
The problem is he won't be ignored. Enough excitable Trump fans armed with automatic weapons will take the spurious notion that they had their election stolen very badly indeed.
Yes, there might be some disorder. There's been plenty over George Floyd this year too.
Riot police and federal agents will deal with it. It won't affect the election.
Your second paragraph is either very casual or you underestimate the potential brutality that Trump will incite. Trump's angry brigade won't just be a rebellious rabble, they are a supremely well armed series of militias. If Trump goes down the road that he seems to want to tread, things will quickly become very bad.
I think you're being a little dramatic.
The vast majority of the votes will be in within a few days (with some long tails) and the results very clear.
Lots of Republican and Democrat statesman and politicians, including some hitherto loyal to Trump, will then start to make their voices heard.
FPT - many people seem to think Trump is some evil genius, like Blofeld, rather than a paranoid egotistical big mouth who shouts his gob off whenever he can, with a constituency of fans who hang on his every word.
The Trump Corporation doesn't have its tentacles extended into every part of the GOP, let alone the whole constitution of the USA. Yes, he has a few people personally loyal to (and dependent) on him but he has a lot of others who keep their mouths shut and heads down whilst he's ahead but hold no love for him (if you don't believe me just look at how quickly his ex-employees speak out).
I don't think the votes will be fixed or the counts. Almost all the legal challenges will fail. There are a lot of decent people in American (just as here) most of whom even if Republican or GOP will do the honourable thing.
He might try (very loudly) to declare victory on election night off the back of some early half-baked results.
He will simply be ignored.
The problem is he won't be ignored. Enough excitable Trump fans armed with automatic weapons will take the spurious notion that they had their election stolen very badly indeed.
Yes, there might be some disorder. There's been plenty over George Floyd this year too.
Riot police and federal agents will deal with it. It won't affect the election.
"Federal agents" - you mean Trumpsky's unconstitutional goon squad, as used to stoke things up in Portland?
I was going to respond to @Black_Rook 's mega post FPT. But others already have. My take on all this is to point to the elephant in the room - students.
In 6 or 7 weeks all these students are going home for Christmas. Shagger will lift the lockdown over Christmas knowing people will not stick to it anyway. So the students leave their palaces of pox to go home and give it to their parents, their siblings, their grandparents.
This is why it's so important to count all the votes swiftly overnight.
UK and India manage it. No excuses for USA.
No way that can be achieved. For example, in WA State ballots are good if postmarked by EDay, and received afterwards.
What matters in vote counting is ACCURACY, not speed.
The faster the better - but speed secondary to correctly counting ALL valid votes.
Yes way, if states change their rules so all postals must be received by election day. Which is what we do. And it compromises neither accuracy nor speed. You don't post later than five working days before EDay, and otherwise you hand the ballot into a polling station on the day.
(PS. dial back the Daily Mail random capitals please too mate - it's an annoying habit of all your posts)
So in order to satisfy desire of media, activists AND bettors for speed!, speed!, speed! we would be required to impose another barrier to voting - just want the Republicans keep doing and doing and doing.
Thanks - but no thanks.
It's not a barrier to voting mate. It's what we do in the UK and we get better turnouts and overnight results - 100%.
I think the issue the US seems to have is not funding polling stations and counting agents properly.
PB wrecked again on the iPhone thanks to people posting big images and endless retweets.
It’s like talking to a brick wall.
If you have a browser that works with the uBlock Origin add-on then installing that and configuring it to block platform.twitter.com will stop all tweets automatically loading and this site then works well. This is how mine is configured...
It’s fine on my laptop. It’s accessing through the phone that is problematic.
On my phone I use specifically use the Chrome browser for this site, because it enables me to disable Javascript for this site alone. With other mobile browsers I again use uBlock Origin to disable Javascript completely, but it works less well.
I agree that this site needs fixing, particularly given how bust it will become next week.
Rly? I tried that on chrome on android and got a message on the site saying You wanna see the comments, fat boy? So enable the javascript already. (Roughly).
This is why it's so important to count all the votes swiftly overnight.
UK and India manage it. No excuses for USA.
I take th epoint often made on here about there being lots of other votes on the ballots to complicate and delay things, but I really don't see why, given the importance of the presidential vote (even with the formal EC vote some way off) that they couldn't separate things out so they can prioritise the presidential.
Red ballot for President, white ballot for Senate, blue ballot for House, yellow ballot for State, green ballot for propositions, pink ballot for county.
It's not hard.
NOTE that vast majority of ballots in US elections are tallied by machines (increasingly machines that produce a hard-copy record the voter can see) so that the results for ALL races are tallied simultaneously. Using multiple ballots would SLOW down the count, not speed it up.
"It's not hard."
Just out of curiosity, have you ever observed, in person, the actual tabulation of official election ballots, anywhere in the United States, or anywhere else?
I, too, called this weeks ago and discussed it with HYUFD. This only works for me if non-uk boats have zero quota until the details are agreed. Otherwise the EU have won this. There will be Leaver uproar incoming.
If lockdown-lite (i.e. lockdown but with education open) doesn't work then keeping it going until the Christmas holidays start will make it full-fat lockdown by default. And we know that that works, as long as we have the same level of compliance as last time.
1. *IF* there's the same level of compliance 2. *IF* it continues all the way until the Summer (because when you stop you go into another cycle of panic about rising cases after approximately seven minutes) 3. *IF* a large fraction of the population doesn't starve to death in the meantime, because so many people are out of work and destitute that the state can no longer afford to stuff all their mouths with food anymore. The fact that the Treasury won't so much as cave to the Marcus Rashford school meals campaign anymore is telling
Apart from that, lockdown is a fantastic solution.
That is a particularly stupid post.
- We had about 10 weeks of lockdown followed by a period of 17 weeks (not 7 minutes) of no lockdown; lockdown will not continue all the way to summer, even under the mismanagement of this inpet government. - No one is starving. - The state can continue to borrow cheap money and/or print money for the foreseeable. - The economic consequences of no lock-down are likely to be worse given the case numbers, hospital overload and deaths would continue to rise.
To the extent that lockdown measures worked (temporarily) earlier this year, then it's almost certainly because of high levels of terror/emotional blackmail driven compliance, which also involved large numbers of terrified people dying at home instead of seeking medical attention, and because it ran very conveniently into one of the warmest Springs on record. This time people are variously despondent, sceptical and sick to death of the whole thing and we have shitty Winter to deal with.
No one is starving yet, because we've not had the tsunami wave of unemployment which is bound to be caused by months and months of continuous or cyclical lockdowns. Large swathes of the economy are already critically weakened, and business confidence will be absolutely zero in sectors like hospitality because nobody knows how long they will be shuttered for or when future restrictions will be reimposed yet again. Do you trust the Government to lift restrictions by December 2nd? Does anyone? If they do then will they be lifted fully, or partially, or everywhere, or only in certain places? And when will the third, fourth and fifth lockdowns occur?
We have to seriously question how many hundreds of billions of pounds of debt the Government can continue to rack up - and we could easily be talking another half-a-trillion if it tries to prop all the affected sectors and workers right through until Summer - before the markets stop lending, and the fact that it all then has to be borrowed through QE makes it obvious that the state is effectively being financed directly through the printing press. And what then?
The lunatic forecasts of the trajectory of this disease are probably incorrect - the infamous Vallance graph was total bollocks; the North-East council leaders were begging not to be put into Tier 3 before this all went to shit because they believed Tier 2 to be working, and so forth. There is no particular reason to believe that the doomsday scenarios which have sent the Government into panic mode are right. And in any event, quite how we are meant to sustain a functioning healthcare system against a background of massive unemployment is quite beyond me. Slightly less than half the total population was in any kind of work even before this all kicked off, the remainder being kids, students, the retired, the unemployed and the economically inactive (the severely disabled, stay-at-home mummies and so on.) Move an extra six or seven million from the working column into the dependent on handouts column and we've had it.
This is why it's so important to count all the votes swiftly overnight.
UK and India manage it. No excuses for USA.
No way that can be achieved. For example, in WA State ballots are good if postmarked by EDay, and received afterwards.
What matters in vote counting is ACCURACY, not speed.
The faster the better - but speed secondary to correctly counting ALL valid votes.
Yes way, if states change their rules so all postals must be received by election day. Which is what we do. And it compromises neither accuracy nor speed. You don't post later than five working days before EDay, and otherwise you hand the ballot into a polling station on the day.
(PS. dial back the Daily Mail random capitals please too mate - it's an annoying habit of all your posts)
So in order to satisfy desire of media, activists AND bettors for speed!, speed!, speed! we would be required to impose another barrier to voting - just want the Republicans keep doing and doing and doing.
Thanks - but no thanks.
It's not a barrier to voting mate. It's what we do in the UK and we get better turnouts and overnight results - 100%.
I think the issue the US seems to have is not funding polling stations and counting agents properly.
I believe you are wrong, in part because you do not have a practical (non-betting) understanding of the actual mechanics of elections in the USA.
I was going to respond to @Black_Rook 's mega post FPT. But others already have. My take on all this is to point to the elephant in the room - students.
In 6 or 7 weeks all these students are going home for Christmas. Shagger will lift the lockdown over Christmas knowing people will not stick to it anyway. So the students leave their palaces of pox to go home and give it to their parents, their siblings, their grandparents.
January is going to be brutal.
And people are going to party like it's 1999, and/or Eid al-Fitr, on December 2, setting up a wave of new hospitalisations just in time for Christmas. The govt will realise this and cancel the Dec 2 lifting, but it will be too late; it will be ingrained as party time by that stage and it will happen anyway. Full on Walking Dead situation by the shortest day.
This is why it's so important to count all the votes swiftly overnight.
UK and India manage it. No excuses for USA.
No way that can be achieved. For example, in WA State ballots are good if postmarked by EDay, and received afterwards.
What matters in vote counting is ACCURACY, not speed.
The faster the better - but speed secondary to correctly counting ALL valid votes.
Yes way, if states change their rules so all postals must be received by election day. Which is what we do. And it compromises neither accuracy nor speed. You don't post later than five working days before EDay, and otherwise you hand the ballot into a polling station on the day.
(PS. dial back the Daily Mail random capitals please too mate - it's an annoying habit of all your posts)
So in order to satisfy desire of media, activists AND bettors for speed!, speed!, speed! we would be required to impose another barrier to voting - just want the Republicans keep doing and doing and doing.
Thanks - but no thanks.
What you can't do of course, is to change the rules while the election is underway...
Wait. I thought Brexit was the solution to all our travails? Now we have to Reform as well? Couldn't we have done the reform first and then seen if we had to Brexit? Apparently not.
On the question of lockdowns, it is interesting how both the politicians and, I assume, the scientific advisors so completely fail to take into account human behaviour when making these decisions.
So they are going to shut all the pubs and bars. Both inside and outside.
Pubs are full of beer which, in a month, will be completely useless and will have to be dumped (actually it will have to be dumped long before that to prevent it contaminating lines)
So the pubs are all announcing they are going to be selling off the beer cheap before the lockdown. At the same time all the drinkers are facing a month without the pub.
So we have a finite time to drink up at a much reduced cost. The pubs are advertising this all over social media to make sure they can sell as much as possible before Thursday. This means far more people will be exposed than would otherwise have been the case if they had just kept the pubs and bars open for open air service only.
I, too, called this weeks ago and discussed it with HYUFD. This only works for me if non-uk boats have zero quota until the details are agreed. Otherwise the EU have won this. There will be Leaver uproar incoming.
Many of the non-UK boats bought their rights to fish in English waters because the English sold them. Hard Brexit dipshits seem to think that Brexit means no foreigners. Which was always laughable.
PB wrecked again on the iPhone thanks to people posting big images and endless retweets.
It’s like talking to a brick wall.
If you have a browser that works with the uBlock Origin add-on then installing that and configuring it to block platform.twitter.com will stop all tweets automatically loading and this site then works well. This is how mine is configured...
It’s fine on my laptop. It’s accessing through the phone that is problematic.
On my phone I use specifically use the Chrome browser for this site, because it enables me to disable Javascript for this site alone. With other mobile browsers I again use uBlock Origin to disable Javascript completely, but it works less well.
I agree that this site needs fixing, particularly given how bust it will become next week.
Rly? I tried that on chrome on android and got a message on the site saying You wanna see the comments, fat boy? So enable the javascript already. (Roughly).
Only works on chrome on my Android phone and then intermittently. That's why(you'll be pleased to know) I rarely post.
If the Corbynites form their own party and take a similar chunk out of Labour’s support we could end up going in short order from two party politics to Dutch-style fragmentation.
This is why it's so important to count all the votes swiftly overnight.
UK and India manage it. No excuses for USA.
No way that can be achieved. For example, in WA State ballots are good if postmarked by EDay, and received afterwards.
What matters in vote counting is ACCURACY, not speed.
The faster the better - but speed secondary to correctly counting ALL valid votes.
Yes way, if states change their rules so all postals must be received by election day. Which is what we do. And it compromises neither accuracy nor speed. You don't post later than five working days before EDay, and otherwise you hand the ballot into a polling station on the day.
(PS. dial back the Daily Mail random capitals please too mate - it's an annoying habit of all your posts)
So in order to satisfy desire of media, activists AND bettors for speed!, speed!, speed! we would be required to impose another barrier to voting - just want the Republicans keep doing and doing and doing.
Thanks - but no thanks.
It's not a barrier to voting mate. It's what we do in the UK and we get better turnouts and overnight results - 100%.
I think the issue the US seems to have is not funding polling stations and counting agents properly.
Another thing, there is a good deal of trust in the UK process. Zero in the US right now
If lockdown-lite (i.e. lockdown but with education open) doesn't work then keeping it going until the Christmas holidays start will make it full-fat lockdown by default. And we know that that works, as long as we have the same level of compliance as last time.
1. *IF* there's the same level of compliance 2. *IF* it continues all the way until the Summer (because when you stop you go into another cycle of panic about rising cases after approximately seven minutes) 3. *IF* a large fraction of the population doesn't starve to death in the meantime, because so many people are out of work and destitute that the state can no longer afford to stuff all their mouths with food anymore. The fact that the Treasury won't so much as cave to the Marcus Rashford school meals campaign anymore is telling
Apart from that, lockdown is a fantastic solution.
That is a particularly stupid post.
- We had about 10 weeks of lockdown followed by a period of 17 weeks (not 7 minutes) of no lockdown; lockdown will not continue all the way to summer, even under the mismanagement of this inpet government. - No one is starving. - The state can continue to borrow cheap money and/or print money for the foreseeable. - The economic consequences of no lock-down are likely to be worse given the case numbers, hospital overload and deaths would continue to rise.
To the extent that lockdown measures worked (temporarily) earlier this year, then it's almost certainly because of high levels of terror/emotional blackmail driven compliance, which also involved large numbers of terrified people dying at home instead of seeking medical attention, and because it ran very conveniently into one of the warmest Springs on record. This time people are variously despondent, sceptical and sick to death of the whole thing and we have shitty Winter to deal with.
No one is starving yet, because we've not had the tsunami wave of unemployment which is bound to be caused by months and months of continuous or cyclical lockdowns. Large swathes of the economy are already critically weakened, and business confidence will be absolutely zero in sectors like hospitality because nobody knows how long they will be shuttered for or when future restrictions will be reimposed yet again. Do you trust the Government to lift restrictions by December 2nd? Does anyone? If they do then will they be lifted fully, or partially, or everywhere, or only in certain places? And when will the third, fourth and fifth lockdowns occur?
We have to seriously question how many hundreds of billions of pounds of debt the Government can continue to rack up - and we could easily be talking another half-a-trillion if it tries to prop all the affected sectors and workers right through until Summer - before the markets stop lending, and the fact that it all then has to be borrowed through QE makes it obvious that the state is effectively being financed directly through the printing press. And what then?
The lunatic forecasts of the trajectory of this disease are probably incorrect - the infamous Vallance graph was total bollocks; the North-East council leaders were begging not to be put into Tier 3 before this all went to shit because they believed Tier 2 to be working, and so forth. There is no particular reason to believe that the doomsday scenarios which have sent the Government into panic mode are right. And in any event, quite how we are meant to sustain a functioning healthcare system against a background of massive unemployment is quite beyond me. Slightly less than half the total population was in any kind of work even before this all kicked off, the remainder being kids, students, the retired, the unemployed and the economically inactive (the severely disabled, stay-at-home mummies and so on.) Move an extra six or seven million from the working column into the dependent on handouts column and we've had it.
Vallance was predicting 50K cases a week by mid October and according to the ONS he probably wasn't far off that even with the Tier system.
@Flatlander Part of a video from a ROH performance of Siegfeid on Youtube had the scene between Wotan (John Tomlinson) and Mine (Heil dir, weiser Schmied) clambering over the remains of a WW2 bomber.
Almost 40 years ago, I saw Götz Friedrich's setting of The Ring cycle at The ROH, the tickets were heavily discounted, only because the performances were widely apart over 4 weeks. Was amused to see that unknown players had noted the times for each act in past performances.
Haven't forgotten the mesmerising sound of the Wagner tubas opening Das Rheingold.
This is why it's so important to count all the votes swiftly overnight.
UK and India manage it. No excuses for USA.
I take th epoint often made on here about there being lots of other votes on the ballots to complicate and delay things, but I really don't see why, given the importance of the presidential vote (even with the formal EC vote some way off) that they couldn't separate things out so they can prioritise the presidential.
Red ballot for President, white ballot for Senate, blue ballot for House, yellow ballot for State, green ballot for propositions, pink ballot for county.
It's not hard.
NOTE that vast majority of ballots in US elections are tallied by machines (increasingly machines that produce a hard-copy record the voter can see) so that the results for ALL races are tallied simultaneously. Using multiple ballots would SLOW down the count, not speed it up.
"It's not hard."
Just out of curiosity, have you ever observed, in person, the actual tabulation of official election ballots, anywhere in the United States, or anywhere else?
I have. Hand counting is very quick here.
How many things were voters voting on when you watched hand counting? And how many total ballot counted at that (or those) location(s)?
While I think you misunderstand our situation on this side of the Atlantic (and Pacific) very much respect your face-time experience re: vote counting, and am interested in more details.
Back in 1992 yours truly observed vote counting for that year's Irish general election, for Dublin Center constituency, which was conducted (along with number of other counts) at the Royal Dublin Society (RDS).
The count for this STV election took place the day after Polling Day. The speed of counting the first preferences (in this STV election) was impressive, as was number of workers employed for the task. BTW, in addition to Dail election, there were two constitutional referenda, each with separate ballot paper; counting on these was deferred until after the Dail votes were tallied (as you suggested for US.)
I, too, called this weeks ago and discussed it with HYUFD. This only works for me if non-uk boats have zero quota until the details are agreed. Otherwise the EU have won this. There will be Leaver uproar incoming.
Really ironic that nearly all the UK quotas are owned by foreign companies. I live quite near Milford Haven. All the fishing boats there are Belgian.The argument over fishing rights is such a charade
FPT - many people seem to think Trump is some evil genius, like Blofeld, rather than a paranoid egotistical big mouth who shouts his gob off whenever he can, with a constituency of fans who hang on his every word.
The Trump Corporation doesn't have its tentacles extended into every part of the GOP, let alone the whole constitution of the USA. Yes, he has a few people personally loyal to (and dependent) on him but he has a lot of others who keep their mouths shut and heads down whilst he's ahead but hold no love for him (if you don't believe me just look at how quickly his ex-employees speak out).
I don't think the votes will be fixed or the counts. Almost all the legal challenges will fail. There are a lot of decent people in American (just as here) most of whom even if Republican or GOP will do the honourable thing.
He might try (very loudly) to declare victory on election night off the back of some early half-baked results.
He will simply be ignored.
The problem is he won't be ignored. Enough excitable Trump fans armed with automatic weapons will take the spurious notion that they had their election stolen very badly indeed.
Yes, there might be some disorder. There's been plenty over George Floyd this year too.
Riot police and federal agents will deal with it. It won't affect the election.
Your second paragraph is either very casual or you underestimate the potential brutality that Trump will incite. Trump's angry brigade won't just be a rebellious rabble, they are a supremely well armed series of militias. If Trump goes down the road that he seems to want to tread, things will quickly become very bad.
Have there been many serious large scale gunfights between the military/FBI/ATF vs random informal second amendmenters, and what tends to be the outcome? Waco is all I can think of.
If lockdown-lite (i.e. lockdown but with education open) doesn't work then keeping it going until the Christmas holidays start will make it full-fat lockdown by default. And we know that that works, as long as we have the same level of compliance as last time.
1. *IF* there's the same level of compliance 2. *IF* it continues all the way until the Summer (because when you stop you go into another cycle of panic about rising cases after approximately seven minutes) 3. *IF* a large fraction of the population doesn't starve to death in the meantime, because so many people are out of work and destitute that the state can no longer afford to stuff all their mouths with food anymore. The fact that the Treasury won't so much as cave to the Marcus Rashford school meals campaign anymore is telling
Apart from that, lockdown is a fantastic solution.
That is a particularly stupid post.
- We had about 10 weeks of lockdown followed by a period of 17 weeks (not 7 minutes) of no lockdown; lockdown will not continue all the way to summer, even under the mismanagement of this inpet government. - No one is starving. - The state can continue to borrow cheap money and/or print money for the foreseeable. - The economic consequences of no lock-down are likely to be worse given the case numbers, hospital overload and deaths would continue to rise.
To the extent that lockdown measures worked (temporarily) earlier this year, then it's almost certainly because of high levels of terror/emotional blackmail driven compliance, which also involved large numbers of terrified people dying at home instead of seeking medical attention, and because it ran very conveniently into one of the warmest Springs on record. This time people are variously despondent, sceptical and sick to death of the whole thing and we have shitty Winter to deal with.
No one is starving yet, because we've not had the tsunami wave of unemployment which is bound to be caused by months and months of continuous or cyclical lockdowns. Large swathes of the economy are already critically weakened, and business confidence will be absolutely zero in sectors like hospitality because nobody knows how long they will be shuttered for or when future restrictions will be reimposed yet again. Do you trust the Government to lift restrictions by December 2nd? Does anyone? If they do then will they be lifted fully, or partially, or everywhere, or only in certain places? And when will the third, fourth and fifth lockdowns occur?
We have to seriously question how many hundreds of billions of pounds of debt the Government can continue to rack up - and we could easily be talking another half-a-trillion if it tries to prop all the affected sectors and workers right through until Summer - before the markets stop lending, and the fact that it all then has to be borrowed through QE makes it obvious that the state is effectively being financed directly through the printing press. And what then?
The lunatic forecasts of the trajectory of this disease are probably incorrect - the infamous Vallance graph was total bollocks; the North-East council leaders were begging not to be put into Tier 3 before this all went to shit because they believed Tier 2 to be working, and so forth. There is no particular reason to believe that the doomsday scenarios which have sent the Government into panic mode are right. And in any event, quite how we are meant to sustain a functioning healthcare system against a background of massive unemployment is quite beyond me. Slightly less than half the total population was in any kind of work even before this all kicked off, the remainder being kids, students, the retired, the unemployed and the economically inactive (the severely disabled, stay-at-home mummies and so on.) Move an extra six or seven million from the working column into the dependent on handouts column and we've had it.
Vallance was predicting 50K cases a week by mid October and according to the ONS he probably wasn't far off that even with the Tier system.
Weren't they also predicting 200+ deaths a day by mid-November? And here we pretty much are.
This is why it's so important to count all the votes swiftly overnight.
UK and India manage it. No excuses for USA.
I take th epoint often made on here about there being lots of other votes on the ballots to complicate and delay things, but I really don't see why, given the importance of the presidential vote (even with the formal EC vote some way off) that they couldn't separate things out so they can prioritise the presidential.
Red ballot for President, white ballot for Senate, blue ballot for House, yellow ballot for State, green ballot for propositions, pink ballot for county.
It's not hard.
NOTE that vast majority of ballots in US elections are tallied by machines (increasingly machines that produce a hard-copy record the voter can see) so that the results for ALL races are tallied simultaneously. Using multiple ballots would SLOW down the count, not speed it up.
"It's not hard."
Just out of curiosity, have you ever observed, in person, the actual tabulation of official election ballots, anywhere in the United States, or anywhere else?
I've been at the count for a UK Westminster general election.
If lockdown-lite (i.e. lockdown but with education open) doesn't work then keeping it going until the Christmas holidays start will make it full-fat lockdown by default. And we know that that works, as long as we have the same level of compliance as last time.
1. *IF* there's the same level of compliance 2. *IF* it continues all the way until the Summer (because when you stop you go into another cycle of panic about rising cases after approximately seven minutes) 3. *IF* a large fraction of the population doesn't starve to death in the meantime, because so many people are out of work and destitute that the state can no longer afford to stuff all their mouths with food anymore. The fact that the Treasury won't so much as cave to the Marcus Rashford school meals campaign anymore is telling
Apart from that, lockdown is a fantastic solution.
That is a particularly stupid post.
- We had about 10 weeks of lockdown followed by a period of 17 weeks (not 7 minutes) of no lockdown; lockdown will not continue all the way to summer, even under the mismanagement of this inpet government. - No one is starving. - The state can continue to borrow cheap money and/or print money for the foreseeable. - The economic consequences of no lock-down are likely to be worse given the case numbers, hospital overload and deaths would continue to rise.
To the extent that lockdown measures worked (temporarily) earlier this year, then it's almost certainly because of high levels of terror/emotional blackmail driven compliance, which also involved large numbers of terrified people dying at home instead of seeking medical attention, and because it ran very conveniently into one of the warmest Springs on record. This time people are variously despondent, sceptical and sick to death of the whole thing and we have shitty Winter to deal with.
No one is starving yet, because we've not had the tsunami wave of unemployment which is bound to be caused by months and months of continuous or cyclical lockdowns. Large swathes of the economy are already critically weakened, and business confidence will be absolutely zero in sectors like hospitality because nobody knows how long they will be shuttered for or when future restrictions will be reimposed yet again. Do you trust the Government to lift restrictions by December 2nd? Does anyone? If they do then will they be lifted fully, or partially, or everywhere, or only in certain places? And when will the third, fourth and fifth lockdowns occur?
We have to seriously question how many hundreds of billions of pounds of debt the Government can continue to rack up - and we could easily be talking another half-a-trillion if it tries to prop all the affected sectors and workers right through until Summer - before the markets stop lending, and the fact that it all then has to be borrowed through QE makes it obvious that the state is effectively being financed directly through the printing press. And what then?
The lunatic forecasts of the trajectory of this disease are probably incorrect - the infamous Vallance graph was total bollocks; the North-East council leaders were begging not to be put into Tier 3 before this all went to shit because they believed Tier 2 to be working, and so forth. There is no particular reason to believe that the doomsday scenarios which have sent the Government into panic mode are right. And in any event, quite how we are meant to sustain a functioning healthcare system against a background of massive unemployment is quite beyond me. Slightly less than half the total population was in any kind of work even before this all kicked off, the remainder being kids, students, the retired, the unemployed and the economically inactive (the severely disabled, stay-at-home mummies and so on.) Move an extra six or seven million from the working column into the dependent on handouts column and we've had it.
Vallance was predicting 50K cases a week by mid October and according to the ONS he probably wasn't far off that even with the Tier system.
Weren't they also predicting 200+ deaths a day by mid-November? And here we pretty much are.
Aye. I did notice that all those who were scorning the predictions in papers like the Telegraph are pretty much silent about that particular fact now. They have moved on to rubbishing the next set of predictions without actually referencing that they were wrong about the last lot.
If lockdown-lite (i.e. lockdown but with education open) doesn't work then keeping it going until the Christmas holidays start will make it full-fat lockdown by default. And we know that that works, as long as we have the same level of compliance as last time.
1. *IF* there's the same level of compliance 2. *IF* it continues all the way until the Summer (because when you stop you go into another cycle of panic about rising cases after approximately seven minutes) 3. *IF* a large fraction of the population doesn't starve to death in the meantime, because so many people are out of work and destitute that the state can no longer afford to stuff all their mouths with food anymore. The fact that the Treasury won't so much as cave to the Marcus Rashford school meals campaign anymore is telling
Apart from that, lockdown is a fantastic solution.
That is a particularly stupid post.
- We had about 10 weeks of lockdown followed by a period of 17 weeks (not 7 minutes) of no lockdown; lockdown will not continue all the way to summer, even under the mismanagement of this inpet government. - No one is starving. - The state can continue to borrow cheap money and/or print money for the foreseeable. - The economic consequences of no lock-down are likely to be worse given the case numbers, hospital overload and deaths would continue to rise.
To the extent that lockdown measures worked (temporarily) earlier this year, then it's almost certainly because of high levels of terror/emotional blackmail driven compliance, which also involved large numbers of terrified people dying at home instead of seeking medical attention, and because it ran very conveniently into one of the warmest Springs on record. This time people are variously despondent, sceptical and sick to death of the whole thing and we have shitty Winter to deal with.
No one is starving yet, because we've not had the tsunami wave of unemployment which is bound to be caused by months and months of continuous or cyclical lockdowns. Large swathes of the economy are already critically weakened, and business confidence will be absolutely zero in sectors like hospitality because nobody knows how long they will be shuttered for or when future restrictions will be reimposed yet again. Do you trust the Government to lift restrictions by December 2nd? Does anyone? If they do then will they be lifted fully, or partially, or everywhere, or only in certain places? And when will the third, fourth and fifth lockdowns occur?
We have to seriously question how many hundreds of billions of pounds of debt the Government can continue to rack up - and we could easily be talking another half-a-trillion if it tries to prop all the affected sectors and workers right through until Summer - before the markets stop lending, and the fact that it all then has to be borrowed through QE makes it obvious that the state is effectively being financed directly through the printing press. And what then?
The lunatic forecasts of the trajectory of this disease are probably incorrect - the infamous Vallance graph was total bollocks; the North-East council leaders were begging not to be put into Tier 3 before this all went to shit because they believed Tier 2 to be working, and so forth. There is no particular reason to believe that the doomsday scenarios which have sent the Government into panic mode are right. And in any event, quite how we are meant to sustain a functioning healthcare system against a background of massive unemployment is quite beyond me. Slightly less than half the total population was in any kind of work even before this all kicked off, the remainder being kids, students, the retired, the unemployed and the economically inactive (the severely disabled, stay-at-home mummies and so on.) Move an extra six or seven million from the working column into the dependent on handouts column and we've had it.
Vallance was predicting 50K cases a week by mid October and according to the ONS he probably wasn't far off that even with the Tier system.
No prediction and the infamous chart was seeded by the then current positive test numbers with case doubling rate at 7 days.
If the Corbynites form their own party and take a similar chunk out of Labour’s support we could end up going in short order from two party politics to Dutch-style fragmentation.
And trouble in Labour tonight as the unions reject Starmers demand for schools to stay open
2,404k mail ballots returned out of 3,097k requested.
Overall return rate = 77.6%
Democrat return rate = 81.7%
Republican return rate = 70.2%
OK, the Dems requested far more ballots in the first place, so there are still 120k more Dem ballots outstanding than Rep ballots - but even so those numbers surely overall look very good for the Dems.
The numbers also don't suggest any significant problem with the postal service.
Not sure why it matters where an announcement is made these days.
Esther McVey is clearly a top-class parliamentarian, announcing which way she is going to vote before she has even listened to the debate. Maybe she should countenance the possibility that her tiny mind could be swayed by the arguments put forward?
Lol. They all have a good idea of when they stand a reasonable chance of being called to speak. They turn up in an empty chamber (or log in via zoom) and join a short queue of those waiting to speak. Their speech is heard only by a handful of others in the same queue, the official stenographers, and if they are lucky they might get a sentence or two into the local paper via a press release put out by their back office minions.
The idea that they all sit there listening to each other’s pre prepared points is very sweet. Maybe those who are particularly interested in the subject might tune in for the opening and closing speeches, and perhaps the one from LOTO. That’s it.
Rather assuming that Reform UK will still be a thing in 3 years, aren't you?
Certainly there could be a short term hit, so some big Labour leads, but Brexit Party didn't stop a Tory landslide, so it really is the height of hubris to assume its successor will definitely having staying power and also not tactically stand like BP did.
AstraZeneca Plc said on Sunday Britain's health regulator had started an accelerated review of its potential coronavirus vaccine.
"We confirm the MHRA's (Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency) rolling review of our potential COVID-19 vaccine," an AstraZeneca spokesman said.
With respect to US voting process, note that it is within the power of Congress to enact legislation (subject to Presidential veto) to regulate the conditions for FEDERAL elections.
Which already impacts most even-year state presidential and regular primaries, as well as even-year general elections, because of the presence of presidential and/or congressional races.
However, the scope of existing federal election legislation is pretty limited, especially with respect to the mechanics and details of voter registration, ballot access, voting procedures and vote tallying.
SO it is within the power of Congress to impose more specific regulations, including in line with suggestions on PB. Some of which I would personally agree with, and others I would not.
But THAT would be up to, not me, not, you, not PB, but Congress.
An un-named Senior Tory predicted yesterday that BoZo would be gone by the locals
That process has accelerated tonight
The obvious series of events is Brexit deal and a vaccine and then Boris says he never fully recovered from COVID and exits stage right leaving somebody else to deal with the shitshow ahead.
PB wrecked again on the iPhone thanks to people posting big images and endless retweets.
It’s like talking to a brick wall.
If you have a browser that works with the uBlock Origin add-on then installing that and configuring it to block platform.twitter.com will stop all tweets automatically loading and this site then works well. This is how mine is configured...
It’s fine on my laptop. It’s accessing through the phone that is problematic.
On my phone I use specifically use the Chrome browser for this site, because it enables me to disable Javascript for this site alone. With other mobile browsers I again use uBlock Origin to disable Javascript completely, but it works less well.
I agree that this site needs fixing, particularly given how bust it will become next week.
Rly? I tried that on chrome on android and got a message on the site saying You wanna see the comments, fat boy? So enable the javascript already. (Roughly).
Yep, it works. With Android/Chrome under Settings, Site Settings, Javascript I have politicalbetting.com and vf.politicalbetting.com blocked. Both work, but the latter is much faster to load. The only issue is that I get to see all nested comments in replies, but it stops the embedded tweets loading, which is the main problem.
uBlock Origin blocking platform.twitter.com with Windows/Firefox on my PC works perfectly for blocking embedded tweets and site reloads take one second (see above. The same fix doesn't work in Android/Firefox for some reason.
Decent chance the Tories drop to 35% or lower with Farage's new party.
You mean only 1% less than when they won 2 GEs in a row (albeit only 1 with a majority)?
Ok, I don't think anyone expects Labour to drop back down to the low 30s, but the 40s that both have managed in the last few years is a bit unusual since 21st century.
I was going to respond to @Black_Rook 's mega post FPT. But others already have. My take on all this is to point to the elephant in the room - students.
In 6 or 7 weeks all these students are going home for Christmas. Shagger will lift the lockdown over Christmas knowing people will not stick to it anyway. So the students leave their palaces of pox to go home and give it to their parents, their siblings, their grandparents.
January is going to be brutal.
?
Cambridge University is testing all students every week.
So, out of a total of 23 000 students, how many students tested positive for COVID in the week 19-25th October?
The answer is 156.
That is 0.7 per cent of the student population ...
So, a plan be might be test all students final week, let the 99.3 per cent of the population that are free of COVID go home, keep the 0.7 per cent infected for another week, and then let them return.
Likewise the limitations on basically safe social contact in outdoor spaces. If you put extreme limits on the ability to make social contact (to the extent that you ban safe activities) then people will seek illegal, but basically unenforceable/undetectable ways to do it. ie. meeting in private homes. Therefore making any problems worse.
Specifically on the point of meeting in homes, that's the most basic flaw of all in the application of lockdown. Household transmission (not shopping, or going to the gym, or dining out, or getting your nails done) is the main driver of this unholy disaster - and, although I freely admit I'm guessing here, there has to be a reasonable supposition that it could continue unchecked this time.
As you say, the prohibition on households mixing is all but impossible to police (the coppers are only going to catch the most egregious violations, typically very stupid people holding large, loud and obvious house parties,) and this shitshow has now been dragging on for such a very long time that a large fraction of the population is liable to ignore the rules. The reasons: the novelty, along with the fear, has worn off for many; they can't bear to be socially isolated for months and months and months again (because who believes a single word the Government has to say about this only lasting through November); they've seen lockdown fail already and view it is a pointless measure; consequently, they think the authorities haven't a bloody clue what they're doing; or some combination of all of those things.
Of course, if lockdown fails this time then it will continue indefinitely anyway. Both the politicians and the government scientists have burned through all of their capital now. The sunk costs of this endeavour, and the credibility staked on the thing (i.e. all of it) are so vast that there is no room in which to perform a u-turn.
Hence my prediction earlier. If lockdown shows any signs of working then we won't be let out of it for more than a couple of weeks, before there's blind panic caused by more made-up computer projections and another cycle is entered. If lockdown doesn't work then there is no political room in which to make that admission, so the blame will be pinned on the public for not following the rules and it will continue anyway. Regardless, we are stuck with this situation until next Summer.
You’re missing the point. Schools, universities and family households are likely the principal routes of transmission right now. It’s all the other less likely transmission routes that are being shut down.
Rather assuming that Reform UK will still be a thing in 3 years, aren't you?
Certainly there could be a short term hit, so some big Labour leads, but Brexit Party didn't stop a Tory landslide, so it really is the height of hubris to assume its successor will definitely having staying power and also not tactically stand like BP did.
We will see what happens, I think it will have the largest impact on the Tories though and Farage knows it. He had no qualms standing against them for years prior to Brexit.
I was going to respond to @Black_Rook 's mega post FPT. But others already have. My take on all this is to point to the elephant in the room - students.
In 6 or 7 weeks all these students are going home for Christmas. Shagger will lift the lockdown over Christmas knowing people will not stick to it anyway. So the students leave their palaces of pox to go home and give it to their parents, their siblings, their grandparents.
January is going to be brutal.
?
Cambridge University is testing all students every week.
So, out of a total of 23 000 students, how many students tested positive for COVID in the week 19-25th October?
The answer is 156.
That is 0.7 per cent of the student population ...
So, a plan be might be test all students final week, let the 99.3 per cent of the population that are free of COVID go home, keep the 0.7 per cent infected for another week, and then let them return.
No real problem.
The worrying thing is that the government should be announcing now what the confirmed plan is...instead nothing....what the betting they get to end of November, then some panicked plan.
2,404k mail ballots returned out of 3,097k requested.
Overall return rate = 77.6%
Democrat return rate = 81.7%
Republican return rate = 70.2%
OK, the Dems requested far more ballots in the first place, so there are still 120k more Dem ballots outstanding than Rep ballots - but even so those numbers surely overall look very good for the Dems.
The numbers also don't suggest any significant problem with the postal service.
Agreed, and the Emerson poll just now for PA (from a pollster who tends to be on the lower end of Dem leads) suggests the same
Decent chance the Tories drop to 35% or lower with Farage's new party.
You mean only 1% less than when they won 2 GEs in a row (albeit only 1 with a majority)?
Ok, I don't think anyone expects Labour to drop back down to the low 30s, but the 40s that both have managed in the last few years is a bit unusual since 21st century.
Exactly. Only if Labour stays in the 40s will they be headed for a landslide, otherwise back to slim Tory majorities or Hung Parliaments.
This is why it's so important to count all the votes swiftly overnight.
UK and India manage it. No excuses for USA.
I take th epoint often made on here about there being lots of other votes on the ballots to complicate and delay things, but I really don't see why, given the importance of the presidential vote (even with the formal EC vote some way off) that they couldn't separate things out so they can prioritise the presidential.
Red ballot for President, white ballot for Senate, blue ballot for House, yellow ballot for State, green ballot for propositions, pink ballot for county.
It's not hard.
NOTE that vast majority of ballots in US elections are tallied by machines (increasingly machines that produce a hard-copy record the voter can see) so that the results for ALL races are tallied simultaneously. Using multiple ballots would SLOW down the count, not speed it up.
"It's not hard."
Just out of curiosity, have you ever observed, in person, the actual tabulation of official election ballots, anywhere in the United States, or anywhere else?
I've been at the count for a UK Westminster general election.
What was were your impressions?
In Ireland was impressed by the best of the party observers. Who back in 1992 were considered by just about everyone to the "tallymen" for Fianna Fail. Team of them would carefully watch the opening and stacking of ballot papers to calculate 1st preferences - they would come up with a very good estimate hours before the official announcement.
Now Brexit is delivered, Farage won't hesitate to stand against the Tories, thanks!
Except its youngsters who don't like lockdowns, not exactly natural Tory territory.
That's just its catalyst. UKIP and BP were always a convenient temporary home for dissatisfied Tories (not just Tories, but definitely home for some of them), and a bunch of MPs basically acted as though they were part of it without even needing to leave the Tories, thus influencing them from within. Plus it doesn't take much to turn a slight win to a loss or a loss to a big loss, depending how Farage plays it.
He's always know he can mess them about, and clearly likes that more than anything else.
AstraZeneca Plc said on Sunday Britain's health regulator had started an accelerated review of its potential coronavirus vaccine.
"We confirm the MHRA's (Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency) rolling review of our potential COVID-19 vaccine," an AstraZeneca spokesman said.
With respect to US voting process, note that it is within the power of Congress to enact legislation (subject to Presidential veto) to regulate the conditions for FEDERAL elections.
Which already impacts most even-year state presidential and regular primaries, as well as even-year general elections, because of the presence of presidential and/or congressional races.
However, the scope of existing federal election legislation is pretty limited, especially with respect to the mechanics and details of voter registration, ballot access, voting procedures and vote tallying.
SO it is within the power of Congress to impose more specific regulations, including in line with suggestions on PB. Some of which I would personally agree with, and others I would not.
But THAT would be up to, not me, not, you, not PB, but Congress.
Did anyone think it was up to PB? The election is also up to the American people but that doesn't stop us voicing opinions about it.
Now Brexit is delivered, Farage won't hesitate to stand against the Tories, thanks!
Except its youngsters who don't like lockdowns, not exactly natural Tory territory.
That's just its catalyst. UKIP and BP were always a convenient temporary home for dissatisfied Tories (not just Tories, but definitely home for some of them), and a bunch of MPs basically acted as though they were part of it without even needing to leave the Tories, thus influencing them from within. Plus it doesn't take much to turn a slight win to a loss or a loss to a big loss, depending how Farage plays it.
He's always know he can mess them about, and clearly likes that more than anything else.
I think a bigger danger for the Tories isnt anti Lockdown, it will be anti-immigration, weak on crime, etc.
PA update - Butler County (which a few days ago had a low return rate and there was concern that lots of post had gone missing) now has a return rate of 74.6% - just 3% below the state average.
Again, evidence that the post appears to be working perfectly well.
An un-named Senior Tory predicted yesterday that BoZo would be gone by the locals
That process has accelerated tonight
"un-named Senior Tory" means some complete and utter arse like Desmond Swayne. Boris may be toast by then, sure, but it'll be for brexit reasons. The country is with him on lockdowns, and he knows it - hence his statement today that he was acting to avoid a medical AND MORAL disaster.
If the Corbynites form their own party and take a similar chunk out of Labour’s support we could end up going in short order from two party politics to Dutch-style fragmentation.
One I don't think they have the guts, two if they don't like non-Corbyn Labour why wouldn't they just return to the plethora of far left parties that exist on the fringe? Corbyn himself is a case in point, never loyal but committed to the brand it seems.
Fwiw I think the entire US switching to Oregon's system wouldn't be a bad thing
That's what WA State did. Except that OR requires ballots to be received by election authorities by 8pm Election Day, whereas we require ballots to be returned by then OR postmarked by EDay.
Interesting, Republicans were strongly opposed to all vote-by-mail for King County, the biggest in the state and the largest bloc of Democratic votes in the Evergreen State.
But rather strangely the GOP was happy, indeed eager, to introduce VBM elections in OTHER counties, which (again strangely) turned out the usually vote Republican.
If lockdown-lite (i.e. lockdown but with education open) doesn't work then keeping it going until the Christmas holidays start will make it full-fat lockdown by default. And we know that that works, as long as we have the same level of compliance as last time.
1. *IF* there's the same level of compliance 2. *IF* it continues all the way until the Summer (because when you stop you go into another cycle of panic about rising cases after approximately seven minutes) 3. *IF* a large fraction of the population doesn't starve to death in the meantime, because so many people are out of work and destitute that the state can no longer afford to stuff all their mouths with food anymore. The fact that the Treasury won't so much as cave to the Marcus Rashford school meals campaign anymore is telling
Apart from that, lockdown is a fantastic solution.
That is a particularly stupid post.
- We had about 10 weeks of lockdown followed by a period of 17 weeks (not 7 minutes) of no lockdown; lockdown will not continue all the way to summer, even under the mismanagement of this inpet government. - No one is starving. - The state can continue to borrow cheap money and/or print money for the foreseeable. - The economic consequences of no lock-down are likely to be worse given the case numbers, hospital overload and deaths would continue to rise.
To the extent that lockdown measures worked (temporarily) earlier this year, then it's almost certainly because of high levels of terror/emotional blackmail driven compliance, which also involved large numbers of terrified people dying at home instead of seeking medical attention, and because it ran very conveniently into one of the warmest Springs on record. This time people are variously despondent, sceptical and sick to death of the whole thing and we have shitty Winter to deal with.
No one is starving yet, because we've not had the tsunami wave of unemployment which is bound to be caused by months and months of continuous or cyclical lockdowns. Large swathes of the economy are already critically weakened, and business confidence will be absolutely zero in sectors like hospitality because nobody knows how long they will be shuttered for or when future restrictions will be reimposed yet again. Do you trust the Government to lift restrictions by December 2nd? Does anyone? If they do then will they be lifted fully, or partially, or everywhere, or only in certain places? And when will the third, fourth and fifth lockdowns occur?
We have to seriously question how many hundreds of billions of pounds of debt the Government can continue to rack up - and we could easily be talking another half-a-trillion if it tries to prop all the affected sectors and workers right through until Summer - before the markets stop lending, and the fact that it all then has to be borrowed through QE makes it obvious that the state is effectively being financed directly through the printing press. And what then?
The lunatic forecasts of the trajectory of this disease are probably incorrect - the infamous Vallance graph was total bollocks; the North-East council leaders were begging not to be put into Tier 3 before this all went to shit because they believed Tier 2 to be working, and so forth. There is no particular reason to believe that the doomsday scenarios which have sent the Government into panic mode are right. And in any event, quite how we are meant to sustain a functioning healthcare system against a background of massive unemployment is quite beyond me. Slightly less than half the total population was in any kind of work even before this all kicked off, the remainder being kids, students, the retired, the unemployed and the economically inactive (the severely disabled, stay-at-home mummies and so on.) Move an extra six or seven million from the working column into the dependent on handouts column and we've had it.
Vallance was predicting 50K cases a week by mid October and according to the ONS he probably wasn't far off that even with the Tier system.
Weren't they also predicting 200+ deaths a day by mid-November? And here we pretty much are.
Aye. I did notice that all those who were scorning the predictions in papers like the Telegraph are pretty much silent about that particular fact now. They have moved on to rubbishing the next set of predictions without actually referencing that they were wrong about the last lot.
With respect to US voting process, note that it is within the power of Congress to enact legislation (subject to Presidential veto) to regulate the conditions for FEDERAL elections.
Which already impacts most even-year state presidential and regular primaries, as well as even-year general elections, because of the presence of presidential and/or congressional races.
However, the scope of existing federal election legislation is pretty limited, especially with respect to the mechanics and details of voter registration, ballot access, voting procedures and vote tallying.
SO it is within the power of Congress to impose more specific regulations, including in line with suggestions on PB. Some of which I would personally agree with, and others I would not.
But THAT would be up to, not me, not, you, not PB, but Congress.
Did anyone think it was up to PB? The election is also up to the American people but that doesn't stop us voicing opinions about it.
You are absolutely right. Yours truly is also full of useful advice - which for some reason Congress in it's wisdom chooses to ignore!
If the Corbynites form their own party and take a similar chunk out of Labour’s support we could end up going in short order from two party politics to Dutch-style fragmentation.
One I don't think they have the guts, two if they don't like non-Corbyn Labour why wouldn't they just return to the plethora of far left parties that exist on the fringe? Corbyn himself is a case in point, never loyal but committed to the brand it seems.
Perhaps the far left parties can form a super group of XR, BLM etc....
AstraZeneca Plc said on Sunday Britain's health regulator had started an accelerated review of its potential coronavirus vaccine.
"We confirm the MHRA's (Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency) rolling review of our potential COVID-19 vaccine," an AstraZeneca spokesman said.
I was going to respond to @Black_Rook 's mega post FPT. But others already have. My take on all this is to point to the elephant in the room - students.
In 6 or 7 weeks all these students are going home for Christmas. Shagger will lift the lockdown over Christmas knowing people will not stick to it anyway. So the students leave their palaces of pox to go home and give it to their parents, their siblings, their grandparents.
January is going to be brutal.
?
Cambridge University is testing all students every week.
So, out of a total of 23 000 students, how many students tested positive for COVID in the week 19-25th October?
The answer is 156.
That is 0.7 per cent of the student population ...
So, a plan be might be test all students final week, let the 99.3 per cent of the population that are free of COVID go home, keep the 0.7 per cent infected for another week, and then let them return.
No real problem.
The worrying thing is that the government should be announcing now what the confirmed plan is...instead nothing....what the betting they get to end of November, then some panicked plan.
The Universities are full of smart people. They can figure out what needs to be done themselves without involving the government.
FPT - many people seem to think Trump is some evil genius, like Blofeld, rather than a paranoid egotistical big mouth who shouts his gob off whenever he can, with a constituency of fans who hang on his every word.
The Trump Corporation doesn't have its tentacles extended into every part of the GOP, let alone the whole constitution of the USA. Yes, he has a few people personally loyal to (and dependent) on him but he has a lot of others who keep their mouths shut and heads down whilst he's ahead but hold no love for him (if you don't believe me just look at how quickly his ex-employees speak out).
I don't think the votes will be fixed or the counts. Almost all the legal challenges will fail. There are a lot of decent people in American (just as here) most of whom even if Republican or GOP will do the honourable thing.
He might try (very loudly) to declare victory on election night off the back of some early half-baked results.
He will simply be ignored.
The problem is he won't be ignored. Enough excitable Trump fans armed with automatic weapons will take the spurious notion that they had their election stolen very badly indeed.
Yes, there might be some disorder. There's been plenty over George Floyd this year too.
Riot police and federal agents will deal with it. It won't affect the election.
Your second paragraph is either very casual or you underestimate the potential brutality that Trump will incite. Trump's angry brigade won't just be a rebellious rabble, they are a supremely well armed series of militias. If Trump goes down the road that he seems to want to tread, things will quickly become very bad.
Have there been many serious large scale gunfights between the military/FBI/ATF vs random informal second amendmenters, and what tends to be the outcome? Waco is all I can think of.
Actually I'm quite surprised that thus far a whole load of angry steroid-abusers with assault weapons hasn't let fly (with a few dishonourable exceptions). The pessimist in me thinks it's only a matter of time, maybe not very much time.
I've updated the spreadsheet comparing 538's projections with the 2016 election result. An interesting fact is that Trump's share of the vote is expected to increase in 16 states.
This is why it's so important to count all the votes swiftly overnight.
UK and India manage it. No excuses for USA.
Multiple counties in PA have committed to counting postal votes the next day. Due to the GOP fuckery they can't even verify the postal until after polls close. Given staffing levels in some counties it will take days to simply open and check signatures on the votes never mind actually count them. Given the huge preponderance of Dem votes in the postals (see my post above/below) this is going to have a massive red shift effect on election night.
The thing about this is, if we've got completed counts in FL, NC and MI, we have pre-election and exit polls, and we have the in-person counts and numbers of postal votes cast for all the above and also PA, shouldn't he networks be able to call PA with quite a high degree of certainty before they count the postal votes?
AstraZeneca Plc said on Sunday Britain's health regulator had started an accelerated review of its potential coronavirus vaccine.
"We confirm the MHRA's (Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency) rolling review of our potential COVID-19 vaccine," an AstraZeneca spokesman said.
Vaccines are always coming. Shame they're never actually here.
Anyway, we're already stuffed for the whole of this awful Winter. Best that can be hoped for is it does a good enough job that we don't have to go through this shit in endless cycles every Autumn and Winter for the rest of time.
Comments
"It's not hard."
Just out of curiosity, have you ever observed, in person, the actual tabulation of official election ballots, anywhere in the United States, or anywhere else?
Riot police and federal agents will deal with it. It won't affect the election.
https://twitter.com/nickgutteridge/status/1323008208357806080?s=20
What an EU classic. Predicted this weeks ago.
I agree that this site needs fixing, particularly given how bust it will become next week.
Thanks - but no thanks.
It's a bad habit to get into.
The vast majority of the votes will be in within a few days (with some long tails) and the results very clear.
Lots of Republican and Democrat statesman and politicians, including some hitherto loyal to Trump, will then start to make their voices heard.
In 6 or 7 weeks all these students are going home for Christmas. Shagger will lift the lockdown over Christmas knowing people will not stick to it anyway. So the students leave their palaces of pox to go home and give it to their parents, their siblings, their grandparents.
January is going to be brutal.
I think the issue the US seems to have is not funding polling stations and counting agents properly.
No one is starving yet, because we've not had the tsunami wave of unemployment which is bound to be caused by months and months of continuous or cyclical lockdowns. Large swathes of the economy are already critically weakened, and business confidence will be absolutely zero in sectors like hospitality because nobody knows how long they will be shuttered for or when future restrictions will be reimposed yet again. Do you trust the Government to lift restrictions by December 2nd? Does anyone? If they do then will they be lifted fully, or partially, or everywhere, or only in certain places? And when will the third, fourth and fifth lockdowns occur?
We have to seriously question how many hundreds of billions of pounds of debt the Government can continue to rack up - and we could easily be talking another half-a-trillion if it tries to prop all the affected sectors and workers right through until Summer - before the markets stop lending, and the fact that it all then has to be borrowed through QE makes it obvious that the state is effectively being financed directly through the printing press. And what then?
The lunatic forecasts of the trajectory of this disease are probably incorrect - the infamous Vallance graph was total bollocks; the North-East council leaders were begging not to be put into Tier 3 before this all went to shit because they believed Tier 2 to be working, and so forth. There is no particular reason to believe that the doomsday scenarios which have sent the Government into panic mode are right. And in any event, quite how we are meant to sustain a functioning healthcare system against a background of massive unemployment is quite beyond me. Slightly less than half the total population was in any kind of work even before this all kicked off, the remainder being kids, students, the retired, the unemployed and the economically inactive (the severely disabled, stay-at-home mummies and so on.) Move an extra six or seven million from the working column into the dependent on handouts column and we've had it.
And you are not alone.
Labour landslide
Now Brexit is delivered, Farage won't hesitate to stand against the Tories, thanks!
I thought Brexit was the solution to all our travails? Now we have to Reform as well? Couldn't we have done the reform first and then seen if we had to Brexit?
Apparently not.
So they are going to shut all the pubs and bars. Both inside and outside.
Pubs are full of beer which, in a month, will be completely useless and will have to be dumped (actually it will have to be dumped long before that to prevent it contaminating lines)
So the pubs are all announcing they are going to be selling off the beer cheap before the lockdown. At the same time all the drinkers are facing a month without the pub.
So we have a finite time to drink up at a much reduced cost. The pubs are advertising this all over social media to make sure they can sell as much as possible before Thursday. This means far more people will be exposed than would otherwise have been the case if they had just kept the pubs and bars open for open air service only.
Emerson College Polling
@EmersonPolling
·
33m
PENNSYLVANIA POLL:
General Election
@realDonaldTrump
46%
@JoeBiden
50%
Someone else 2%
Undecided 2%
Still polls for GA, FL, NC and TX left to come , busy day for them
Almost 40 years ago, I saw Götz Friedrich's setting of The Ring cycle at The ROH, the tickets were heavily discounted, only because the performances were widely apart over 4 weeks. Was amused to see that unknown players had noted the times for each act in past performances.
Haven't forgotten the mesmerising sound of the Wagner tubas opening Das Rheingold.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjkjF9OfMe0
While I think you misunderstand our situation on this side of the Atlantic (and Pacific) very much respect your face-time experience re: vote counting, and am interested in more details.
Back in 1992 yours truly observed vote counting for that year's Irish general election, for Dublin Center constituency, which was conducted (along with number of other counts) at the Royal Dublin Society (RDS).
The count for this STV election took place the day after Polling Day. The speed of counting the first preferences (in this STV election) was impressive, as was number of workers employed for the task. BTW, in addition to Dail election, there were two constitutional referenda, each with separate ballot paper; counting on these was deferred until after the Dail votes were tallied (as you suggested for US.)
And here we pretty much are.
It was grest PR, piss poor science.
2,404k mail ballots returned out of 3,097k requested.
Overall return rate = 77.6%
Democrat return rate = 81.7%
Republican return rate = 70.2%
OK, the Dems requested far more ballots in the first place, so there are still 120k more Dem ballots outstanding than Rep ballots - but even so those numbers surely overall look very good for the Dems.
The numbers also don't suggest any significant problem with the postal service.
That process has accelerated tonight
Lol. They all have a good idea of when they stand a reasonable chance of being called to speak. They turn up in an empty chamber (or log in via zoom) and join a short queue of those waiting to speak. Their speech is heard only by a handful of others in the same queue, the official stenographers, and if they are lucky they might get a sentence or two into the local paper via a press release put out by their back office minions.
The idea that they all sit there listening to each other’s pre prepared points is very sweet. Maybe those who are particularly interested in the subject might tune in for the opening and closing speeches, and perhaps the one from LOTO. That’s it.
Certainly there could be a short term hit, so some big Labour leads, but Brexit Party didn't stop a Tory landslide, so it really is the height of hubris to assume its successor will definitely having staying power and also not tactically stand like BP did.
"We confirm the MHRA's (Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency) rolling review of our potential COVID-19 vaccine," an AstraZeneca spokesman said.
https://uk.mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN27H1BD
Which already impacts most even-year state presidential and regular primaries, as well as even-year general elections, because of the presence of presidential and/or congressional races.
However, the scope of existing federal election legislation is pretty limited, especially with respect to the mechanics and details of voter registration, ballot access, voting procedures and vote tallying.
SO it is within the power of Congress to impose more specific regulations, including in line with suggestions on PB. Some of which I would personally agree with, and others I would not.
But THAT would be up to, not me, not, you, not PB, but Congress.
https://twitter.com/bopinion/status/1322937610348777474?s=20
uBlock Origin blocking platform.twitter.com with Windows/Firefox on my PC works perfectly for blocking embedded tweets and site reloads take one second (see above. The same fix doesn't work in Android/Firefox for some reason.
Ok, I don't think anyone expects Labour to drop back down to the low 30s, but the 40s that both have managed in the last few years is a bit unusual since 21st century.
Cambridge University is testing all students every week.
So, out of a total of 23 000 students, how many students tested positive for COVID in the week 19-25th October?
The answer is 156.
That is 0.7 per cent of the student population ...
So, a plan be might be test all students final week, let the 99.3 per cent of the population that are free of COVID go home, keep the 0.7 per cent infected for another week, and then let them return.
No real problem.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8902777/Eager-shoppers-strip-supermarket-shelves-toilet-roll-pasta-lockdown-2-0-looms.html
People state what they want to happen - and then dress it up as a "prediction".
In Ireland was impressed by the best of the party observers. Who back in 1992 were considered by just about everyone to the "tallymen" for Fianna Fail. Team of them would carefully watch the opening and stacking of ballot papers to calculate 1st preferences - they would come up with a very good estimate hours before the official announcement.
He's always know he can mess them about, and clearly likes that more than anything else.
Again, evidence that the post appears to be working perfectly well.
Interesting, Republicans were strongly opposed to all vote-by-mail for King County, the biggest in the state and the largest bloc of Democratic votes in the Evergreen State.
But rather strangely the GOP was happy, indeed eager, to introduce VBM elections in OTHER counties, which (again strangely) turned out the usually vote Republican.
Go figure!
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DMLMGjv6z3fgJ41auwoomcGzg_pabwSQjIsfpI6wnqc/edit#gid=0
Anyway, we're already stuffed for the whole of this awful Winter. Best that can be hoped for is it does a good enough job that we don't have to go through this shit in endless cycles every Autumn and Winter for the rest of time.