We didn't wait for days because it was close; races which were much closer were called much sooner.

We waited because calls are made by projections, which are based on statistical extrapolation, which are sensitive to patterns of comparable comparable ballots, and the high mail in count and partisan divide in mail-in ballot usage made projection much more difficult than it normally is.

> Biden has ~50.6%, if that's not close I don't know what is.

A >3 percentage point margin isn't close by standards that make any sense applied to US Presidential elections.

That said, even if it was particularly close, the bigger point is that that wouldn't be evidence that it wasn't tumultuous, since “tumultuous” isn't in any way opposed to “close”. That it also wasn't particularly close is a secondary issue.

Any choice in publishing one news is simultaneously an active a choice in not publishing another. Furthermore, there is not one singular truth to report in the vast majority of news, in particular of political nature.

The solution is not to find another news outlet that feels more like truth. Instead, find a few different news outlets and understand their biases.

News and media has manufactured consent and outrage since their inception.

They're directly responsible for uncovering heinous crimes and for causing them.

My best understanding is this is not really settled yet. I'm guessing this may be a contributing factor to why some people -- not me -- are flagging these articles.

Articles get flagged by users. Unless someone doing the flagging is willing to speak up, speculation is all we really have and even having some people speak up doesn't mean we know all the reasons why people choose to flag a piece.

What I see is 4 million more votes for Biden than Trump. In any other electoral system this would have been a rout.

No electors have been selected yet.

The coronavirus pandemic seems close to a no-win scenario. Even most of the success stories (which, I should note, always seem to be countries very different to Europe and the US) are a lot messier and more ambigious than they look from the million-mile foreign press view.

edit: so i've now been rate limited for posting three things. What the posters beyond assume is not what I meant. I'll not be able to answer for about two days or so. nice

California, for example, has only counted 77% of their votes. New York has counted 84%. Illinois has counted 89%.

I just caught the end of some discussion of this on NPR. Based on the number of votes left to count in the various states and how they are expected to turn out, there is a good chance it will end up at around 8 million.

Also, it probably makes more sense to look at it out of the number of voters, or the number of people who could have voted, rather than out of the whole population.

> Biden is likely to wind up with one of the higher percentages of votes as a share of the U.S. population that we’ve seen in a long time

Referencing this tweet, text copied below as well https://twitter.com/jtlevy/status/1324408585590329345

[credit: Jacob T. Levy]

  vote share * turnout

  Reagan 1984: 53.3*58.8= 31.3%

  W Bush 2004: 50.7*56.7=28.7%

  Obama 2008: 52.9*58.2=30.8%

  Biden 2020, estimated: 51*66 = 33.7%

  counted so far: 50.5*60.3=30.4% (as of 2020-11-05)

If it were not for the pandemic I'm convinced the Trump turnout for this election would have produced results rivaling Reagan in 1984. Even with a pandemic he was able to drive more voters to the polls on election day than any point in American history.

I won't comment on whether the US is red or blue or purple.

However, it's quite clear that the Trump administration specifically and the Republican party in general have been engaged in actively suppressing voters in general, and the democratic party's electorate in specific.

We're talking about an administration that, while fully aware that there was a disproportionate and significant amount of pro-Democratic party voters who depended on mail-in ballots to cast their vote, they did their best to:

* sabotage the USPS's ability to process and ship mail up to the election,

* enforce rules refusing to account for all mail-in ballots,

* and prop up their own electorate to vote in person to avoid the risk of their votes being filtered out by their sabotage campaign.

We're talking about a campaign designed to filter out votes to competing candidates, hoping to skew election results in your favor.

This is not how a party that values basic democratic values operates.

The fake allegations of voter fraud and the extensive efforts to suppress votes will damage future elections. And the presidential election survived attacks, but the senate could be impacted.

Over 70 million people voted for Trump. If you hand-wave away his popularity and call all of them bigoted, then you are part of the partisan problem in our country.

"If Republicans don't challenge and change the U.S. election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again," Graham said Sunday on Fox News. "President Trump should not concede. We're down to less — 10,000 votes in Georgia. He's going to win North Carolina. We have gone from 93,000 votes to less than 20,000 votes in Arizona, where more — more votes to be counted."

https://thehill.com/homenews/525063-lindsey-graham-if-trump-...

Washington allows ballots to be postmarked the day of the election: https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/dates-and-deadlines.aspx

Utah allows ballots to be postmarked the day before the election, so long as they are received before noon of the day of the county canvass (generally, the day after the election but as late as ten days after the election, depending on the county). https://www.vote.org/utah/

(I have participated in election litigation in multiple states. I know more about election law than you do. You will not win this battle.)

Florida is likely a lost cause (between conservative minorities and the elderly), but you don’t need Florida to win national elections (clearly). If the electoral college is done away with, it’s also moot, as there is enough popular vote margin at the national level to always go blue.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/signature-...

The point of requiring signatures was never about preventing fraud, since it was never an issue historically. The requirements were issued in the 20th century to reject black votes, as at the time the requirements were passed, many black voters couldn't write.

There were a number of factors that pretty much guaranteed the delays we've seen, all of which had lots of press coverage long before election day[0]:

"There’s a good chance we won’t know who won the presidential election on election night. More people than ever are voting by mail this year due to the pandemic, and mail ballots take longer to count than ballots cast at polling places. But because each state has its own rules for how votes are counted and reported, some will report results sooner than others. Those disparate rules may also make initial returns misleading: The margins in some states may shift toward Democrats as mail ballots (which are overwhelmingly cast by Democrats) are counted, while states that release mail ballots first may experience a shift toward Republicans as Election Day votes are tallied."

[0] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/election-results-timing...

Senate control is still an open issue. There will be a runoff in GA in January to determine control.

The only reason this was under contention days after the election is that PA wasn't able to start counting their mail in ballots until election day. This was a choice made by the PA legislature. I don't know why. If PA was allowed to precanvas, PA would have announced like FL on election night and this would have been over Tuesday.

That's kind-of true. They've definitely maintained it through the end of the Trump Administration, since when the Senate convenes it will be 48-48 with two vacancies to be settled by runoffs two days later, and Pence will still be VP. But as of January 21, the outcome of the two Georgia runoffs will decide the balance of the Senate.

> The fact that the presidential race is close enough to still be under contention days after election night

It's not particularly close, it just has an unusually hard to project due to the pattern of vote counts resulting from one candidate urging voters not to vote by mail-in ballots, large mail-in vote totals, and the timing of mail-in ballot counts vs. counts of in-person ballots in various states. Both by popular and electoral votes, it's going to be less close than the average election of the 2000s.

“Easy to project the winner” and “close” are generally correlated, but fundamentally different, qualities, and this is a case where the usual relationship between them did not hold.

Losing a solid voter base might mean that the Republicans need to change their platform to appeal to more voters, but it doesn't mean that they're forever doomed and will never win another election. Maybe that means compromising on abortion. Maybe it means immigration reform - but from the Republican perspective, and not giving amnesty to illegal immigrants. (And funnily enough, IIRC amnesty isn't particularly popular among LEGAL immigrants) Maybe it means pulling their heads out of their asses re: climate change, and running on a revenue-neutral carbon tax.

All of this means changes, but not an end to the party.

No, there are allegations of USPS workers coming forward from conspiracy boards. In truth, there were no such USPS workers testifying, or even claiming, any of that. Even FOX News and One America couldn't find any evidence supporting the existence of these supposed USPS workers.

And on another note: military votes have been allowed to arrive after election day since at least WWII. Are you saying that most of the military votes cast in the past 6 decades are fraudulent?

And on a final note: it hasn't been possible to backdate postdates for at least a decade, as the USPS records when mail is received separately and in addition to the postdate, and it isn't possible to backdate that data unless you have access to the USPS database. Considering that the USPS is run by a Trump appointee, it is very unlikely that Democrats have that sort of access.

False on both counts.