Just more evidence that mail-in voting is the way to go. When I put my and my wife’s ballots in the drop box (she’s recovering from her last round of chemo) there was NO line. In fact, the closest person was a father riding bikes with his three very-young children on a nice fall day. From the wobble, I’d guess the oldest just had the training wheels off of hers.)
Took me, maybe, 12 seconds (I had to unbuckle my seat belt to reach the slot.) and I didn’t even have to get out of my pickup .
It’s not new either. We’ve had mail-in voting now since 2013. In 2018 our rate of suspicious ballots was .0027% (voter fraud? WHAT voter fraud?) and our participation rate was 59%.
I keep hearing about early D voters vs R voters and who has the advantage. But a great many voters are registered as Independent or no party (they are the largest block in many states). So doesn’t that mean that the party registration of voters is not that useful a statistic?
Then look at the stark increase in youth voting this election.
h/t @KalTX
Imagine that much of the early youth vote tally is going to be in the MANY college towns in the state.
Which, while Harris County is home to UH, Rice, TSU, and HBU-- those numbers of voters aren’t as great a percentage as some other smaller college towns (College Station, Lubbock, San Marcos, etc.).
Trump’s administration has provided a very instructive edge case for our system of government; it has demonstrated the very real limits of existing laws, and of checks and balances. In particular, it has revealed just how much we rely on unwritten but well-understood shared values and conventions, and how dangerous it can be when they are disregarded.
The Trumpist PR strategy is critical. They are pushing hard to lock in that “calling the election on election night” isn’t just a media-hoopla habit we’ve got used to but somehow a constitutional requirement, so not to do so is ipso facto a blown election that has to be thrown to the SCOTUS. It’s kind of Florida 2000 writ large. If they can get ANY of the majors to call him the winner, then by the Bush v Gore precedent he is the injured party if he isn’t awarded the presidency. And remember how Bush v Gore said it wasn’t to be used as a precedent? That was a funny joke they put in there, wasn’t it.
It’s roughly quadrupled from 2016, with three days still to go (and the closing days are usually about as busy as the first couple days).
ETA: This is wrong, and I apologize for the error. I was comparing to the wrong election. 2020 early voting is roughly double this point in the 2016 general election.
Apples and oranges, given the dramatic increase in Texas early voting overall. I’m willing to say that 18-30 year old voters are increasing their turnout fairly dramatically from 2016, but it’s nowhere near as big as that chart chart would have us believe.
It sounds like voters in Wisconsin will almost certainly have their votes tossed in the trash if they mail them today through Election Day. Are Wisconsin Dems being urged to either vote in-person early or on Election Day, or deposit their ballot in a drop box? I hope so. Wisconsin TPMers: Any insight on this?
Of course, back in the “originalist” times it would be days before each state’s ballots were tallied, and weeks before they were all aggregated so that the electors could sit. But that’s not an interpretation any of the so-called originalists would take if they could gain an advantage by discarding it.
