‘No change there then’…I hear you cry. But really, I am. The lads did cover the point but I thought some cross Pond perspective might not go amiss.
How can it be that a day after the polls closed there is not yet a result? I know the USA is a very much larger country than the UK, but as Mr Green points out, it’s all to scale, bigger places have more folk to do the counting.
We’re used to talking of the UK as really really small. In fact, if you put the UK’s most southerly point, the Isles os Scilly, on New Orleans (and why on earth wouldn’t you?) then our most northerly point, The Shetland Islands, would be somewhere near Fort Wayne Indiana. Likewise, with a population of about 67 million we’re only a million shy of the combined populations of California and Texas. Our polls close at 10 pm and yet by 10 am the next day we usually know which species of pond life will be pestering Her Majesty for a job as PM and measuring for new curtains at No 10 Downing Street.
This is not to suggest we’re better at elections than the US. We are every bit as capable of mucking up a p**s up in a brewery as the next country. But I do find it weird, if not downright suspicious, that a relatively compact state with about 12 million clever folk in it still doesn’t know how it voted a full day after the polls closed. California knows, Texas knows. As Bill points out only the battleground states are in this limbo…
5 replies on “I’m confused…”
I’m a Pennsylvanian. The problem here begins with some decisions of the state Supreme Court, none of which were overturned by the federal Supreme Court. They address whether or not certain votes should be counted.
The first mandates that mail-in votes received up to three days after election day must be counted. The argument for that is that mail could be delayed so it’s not the voter’s fault if their ballot doesn’t arrive by the day.
The second mandates that a mail-in ballot arriving after election day must be counted even if it doesn’t have a discernable postmark. I don’t know what the argument is for that – it would allow fraudsters to create ballots at any time in the three days mentioned above and turn them in, and they will have to be counted.
The third mandates that a mail-in ballot must be counted even if the signature on it doesn’t match the signature on file for the voter named on the ballot. Again, I can’t think of any argument in favor of it. It strengthens the second scenario because any signature at all (maybe even no signature at all) on a fraudulent ballot cannot disqualify that ballot.
I am certain that there is fraud happening in the Pennsylvania voting and that it is the Democrats committing it. The state government and the governments in the large metropolitan areas are dominated by Democrats, as is the elected state Supreme Court. Pennsylvania politics is well known for it’s corruption. These three decisions alone, even discounting the widely known corruption in places like Philadelphia, guarantee fraud.
I hate the idea but it does look like you’re right. The very particular way that media have prepped the ground for this suggest more thsn just a local phenomenon.
There’s always the odd ballot paper that will be argued over, (I once saw a council candidate try to argue that because the ‘n’ had fallen in the box next to his name the word ‘wankers’ scrawled across the ballot paper was a vote for him!) Nevertheless, this stinks.
Wankers – I love it. In any other election I night have done that myself.
And this same process occurs every four years. How it can be the case that a state just now forgets how to tally its votes in a timely fashion, after dozens of successful executions of the process, is utterly beyond me.
It can’t. Stopping the counting can only mean that there will be fraud. See my comment above.