What Do We Expect to Learn From Early and Near-Fuzzy Voting in Trump’s 2020 State Senate Elections? The Case Against Fickle Voting
It is really Election Season with early voting, more acceptance of mail voting, and the prospect of razor-thin races.
It is difficult to see how many of these elections will last for weeks or days. This is all perfectly normal when there are close elections. It doesn’t mean that there is fraud – despite the lies about his 2020 loss that former President Trump has pushed and so many candidates he’s backed have promulgated.
Republicans need a net gain of just five seats to take back the House. They were in the driver’s seat and widely expected to reach that. If there is a GOP wave or if Democrats hold on to the House, it will not be known for a while.
The first reported results show mail ballots that were cast early and come from Democrats who are more supportive of postal voting. Later waves of results will come from in-person polling places or mail ballots that arrived on Election Day – which will likely skew Republican, as they did in 2020.
For the Senate, all eyes are going to be on four states – Pennsylvania and Georgia in the East and Arizona and Nevada in the West. In Georgia, there’s a libertarian on the ballot, who very likely will serve as a place for protest vote – meaning neither the Democrat nor Republican in the race might surpass the 50% threshold required to win the election outright.
The Senate won’t be known for a month after the election if that happens, because the election will have to be held again in December.
How to Look for a Blue Shift in the United States, and What to Expect If You Are Not Going to the Polls on Election Night
This happens because of varying state-by-state rules for how people can vote, how and when election officials tally the votes, and how often new results are posted. It’s also exacerbated by recent trends in voter preferences, with Democrats much more likely to vote-by-mail or use ballot dropboxes, while Republicans disproportionally favor going to the polls in-person on Election Day.
Pennsylvania is a place where we are expecting a dramatic shift on Election Night. Vote tallying should be faster this year than in 2020, considering there will be fewer mail-in ballots likely, but those mail ballots will still take longer and will lead to confusion. A “Red Mirage” and a later “Blue Shift” are things to be wary of. Democrats have often said they will be voting by mail, and lots of mail-in ballots will be reported early. It could initially appear like a Democratic lead, but after in-person ballot results come in, it’s likely that Republicans are ahead in a close race. The mail ballot results will trickle in later in the evening, which will favor the Democrats, since they take longer to tabulate. Philadelphia took a long time to report its results. This is what always happens. It is not nefarious.
Wisconsin doesn’t allow election officials to begin processing mail ballots until polls open on Election Day. Also, if Milwaukee (high concentration of Black voters) and Dane (University of Wisconsin, younger and more liberal voters) take a longer time to report, then you could see another Red Mirage.
A blue to red shift could play out in Arizona, because election officials can start processing mail ballots as soon as they are received. This is an arduous process – election workers spend days opening envelopes, verifying signatures, and piling stacks of ballots for easy tabulation. (They can do this prep ahead of time, and start counting early, but the results aren’t released until Election Day.)
But the shift might not be as sharp this time around. The share of Georgians voting by mail will likely be smaller in 2022 than in 2020, because the Covid-19 pandemic has subsided. Election officials have experience tabulating mail-in votes, leading to a faster count. The impact of the blue shift will likely be blunted by these factors.
Georgia and Nevada both have a similar story. It’s a growth state, and most of that boom has been in Las Vegas, which is in Clark County, the largest population center in the state and where almost 70% of all the state’s votes came from in 2020. Clark and Washoe (Reno), which went for Biden in 2020, count more slowly than the more rural counties that will overwhelmingly favor Republicans. Also, post-pandemic, Nevada is one state that has moved toward mail voting. People can still vote in person but they need to opt out of receiving the ballot.
The Implications of Early Election Results for Election Propagation and Voting in the United States: A Case Study of Biden, Kemp, and Abrams
Legal challenges and recounts can also lengthen the time before a winner is determined. Expect that this will go on a while, so patience will be needed in this impatient time.
Biden and the two Democratic nominees for Senate all prevailed in very close races. (Biden’s victory came in November, while the Senate candidates won runoffs in January 2021.) The red mirage that had arisen from the early results had been overcome as more and more ballots were counted.
These quirks of the US election system are normal and somewhat predictable. They aren’t indicative of fraud or wrongdoing despite what some Republicans have said.
When there are more people voting bymail or early, they can become more exaggerated. And this year has already seen tens of millions of ballots cast before Election Day.
Arizona is one of the most important states this cycle. There are competitive races for attorney general and secretary of state. The Republican nominees promoted a conspiracy about the legitimacy of the election.
The Grand Canyon State has a long history of mail-in voting. The method was being abandoned by some Republicans due to false claims of fraud made by Trump. Now, mail-in voting is more popular among Democrats, making the early results look “bluer.”
These shifts can be unpredictable. The Democrats beat the Republicans in the Senate race. The race was called six days after Election Day.
This was dramatic in 2020. Trump was in the lead for the majority of Election Night, but by the time mail-in votes were counted in major cities like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, his lead had been wiped out. Biden won the Keystone State by about 63,000 votes, and his projected victory there, on the Saturday after Election Day, was when he clinched the White House.
The state offered grants to counties that pledge to continuously count votes after the polls close – instead of going home in the middle of the night and restarting Wednesday morning. All but four of the commonwealth’s 67 counties took advantage of this deal. The new policy should speed up the count.
A similar “blue shift” is expected this year, where there are close races for Senate and for governor, featuring incumbent GOP Gov. Brian Kemp in a rematch against Democratic nominee Stacey Abrams.
Remember that Georgia is a runoff state, as results start pouring in on Tuesday night. If a candidate doesn’t get 50% in the race, there will be a second election next month.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/07/politics/blue-shift-red-mirage-2022-election-results/index.html
The 2022 Nevada Midterm Election had a Bulk of Late-arriving Votes Counted by Universal Mail-in Voting
Furthermore, this is the first midterm election in Nevada with universal mail-in voting. It is still in place for the 2022 cycle despite the state adopting the system in 2020 when the Covid-19 epidemic hit.
There are ballots that arrive at election offices after the polls close. Some people refer to these as late-arriving ballots. In Nevada, they are legal votes and can be counted if they arrive by November 12.
It will be tough to project the winners on Tuesday night because of all the uncertainty related to ballot counting and legal votes.
There was a “blue shift” in Biden’s favor in 2020, and his victory became clear within 24 hours. In 2020, Wisconsin was the first state in the country where Trump flipped to Biden, a phenomenon that news networks were able to project.
In the Badger State, there is a Senate race featuring a Republican incumbent and a close governor’s race with a Democratic incumbent.
Many localities were allowed to process their mail-in ballots before the election under a law passed last month. While many clerks aren’t taking advantage of the extra processing time, some of the largest cities in the state are — including Detroit and Grand Rapids, the two biggest cities.
Biden was helped by late waves of ballots from Detroit, a Democratic stronghold that historically counts its votes slower than other jurisdictions, because it’s the largest city. Results from Detroit will be critical in determining if incumbent Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, fends off GOP nominee Tudor Dixon.