afransen
Senior Member
It's looking like Wiscon and Michigan are going to Biden. Georgia is a wildcard--NYT still thinks Biden is the favourite to win. That would give Biden a clear win.
So, as at an hour ago, the State of Maine, on the east coast of the U.S. had only counted ~70% of the vote, some 15 hours after the polls closed.
I think that's nuts.
So I was curious to if I could discern why.
Apparently Maine is historically slow to report votes.
Here's what I found:
Among the causes of the slower results reporting is the state’s relatively large size combined with the fact that Maine decentralizes election administration down to the level of towns and cities. Instead of all ballots being counted by the state, or by Maine’s 16 counties, they are counted by each of Maine’s 500 municipalities. More than half of those municipalities contain fewer than 1,000 voters, and more than half of them count ballots by hand rather than with electronic equipment.
Maine law also prohibits electronic transfer of ballot data, no matter how secure the transmission, which means ballots and ballot data (from those jurisdictions that have machines) must be physically moved from each municipality to the secretary of state’s office in Augusta.
The above is from here: https://www.fairvote.org/here_s_why_...ection_results
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Putting aside that I think the electronic transfer of results rules are nuts.
What glares out at me is that Maine has more than 500 municipalities.
Its 1.3M people.
Ontario, has 14.5M people and 444 municipalities.
There are tenants/condo associations with more voters in them than a majority of Maine's local governments!
So much for that bloodbath, eh?
Regardless of what the final outcome is, the Democrats have yet again failed to make a decisive win against Trump in a presidential election. The party really should take a hard look at what they're doing wrong, instead of just pushing Russia-gate and smearing progressives.
I'm actually shocked at that, especially from a Fox poll.
The DNC clearly does not understand half of the US population. The polls were wrong, the pundits were wrong.
I'm glad the Senate is staying GOP. I expect next week we'll see Mitch McConnell declare that the Senate accept the election and will work with POTUS Biden. The GOP wants to be shod of Trump and will seize this chance.