ChiGoose

Woof. That’s rough, buddy. Tonight’s our anniversary so it’s a convenient way to get away from the noise. You can order deep dish pizza delivered anywhere in the country. My wife and I sponsor a hole at our family golf tournament in Rochester where we mail the winner some deep dish. It’s a big hit. However, the true Chicago style is Tavern style. Unfortunately, both are inferior to WNY pizza. When I’m back in Rochester, I always make sure we get TK’s in Fairport one night.

Best thing you can do for the election returns today is turn off the TV for the next ~2 hours. As invested as I am in this, I’m going out to dinner with my wife tonight and don’t plan on turning on the returns until about 9pm ET.

When the president leaves office, they lose possessory rights to government documents. The documents are sent to NARA for safe-keeping. They may, however, retain access rights and can view the documents at a NARA facility. They may also negotiate with NARA to have documents moved to presidential museums and such. A good example is that when Obama left office, his non-classified documents were transferred from DC to a NARA facility here in Chicago. He doesn’t have them in his possession, but they are nearby. He likely will negotiate to have some of them displayed in his presidential museum when it is finished. His classified documents remain in a NARA facility in DC. And even if presidents can retain possessory rights to documents, at no point has Trump or his lawyers argued in the courts that they obtained NARA permission for him to retain possession of the documents. This is about as slam-dunk as it gets.

This seems like a safe bet. Dems ain't taking a Senate seat in Kentucky tonight.

I see I missed an opportunity to invest in Reynolds Wrap stock before everyone went out and made themselves tinfoil hats.

I would not put faith in exit polls on election night. The only exception being Jon Ralston in Nevada. That's it. If you see exit poll analysis that isn't Jon Ralston's coverage in Nevada, just ignore it.

Trump illegally possessed government documents, refused to return them, and then lied when he claimed to return them all. And still, the FBI search would likely have not been known if Trump himself hadn't blurted it out because he's a narcissist with the emotional temperance of a toddler. If anyone other than the former president had done what he did, they'd already have been indicted. But yes, carry on with your ignorance.

Probably the GOP. The question is by how much. If they net fewer than 30 House seats and 4 senate seats, then that is an underperformance and a silver lining for the Dems (for what it’s worth). Any more shows strong GOP gains.

Well, you see, you can’t seat a judge in an election year and that’s why we can’t even interview Garland. Also, you can seat a judge whenever you want, so we need to get Amy Coney Barrett on the court in a matter of weeks.

Not only that, but it'll mean that basically no justices get confirmed for the next two years because the GOP only believes in power. They will leverage that power to keep as many vacancies as possible (no matter the harm) in case they win the White House in 2024.

I understand it's not technical. I just don't think the government should restrict the ability for people to vote because of bad faith actors. I don't think the SCOTUS leak is relevant but I am hoping that the Chief Justice makes the investigation report public. It shouldn't have been leaked and whoever did it should be held accountable. If you think poll workers are partisan, I would encourage you to volunteer to be one next time around and actually pay attention to how things work. It's a good experience and will dispute many of the myths around how things work. Even be an election judge for the GOP if you'd like (or whatever party). I did that one year and it was pretty cool. And I am usually the first to push back on anecdotes, but yesterday a friend of mine who is organizing poll watchers for the local Dems called me. He had been sent the credentials via email but he works for the government, so he wasn't allowed to print them at work. I had him send the files to me and I printed them and dropped them off at his house later. He probably could have just printed them and gotten away with it (it's just a handful of pages) but since that was against the rules, we came up with a plan that involved an extra hour and a half of driving around because he didn't want to break the rules. I think that example is FAR more illustrative of election workers than the myth that they are all partisans trying to rig the election for their party.

I personally just don't believe that the government should bend over and impede the exercise of the franchise because of bad faith actors and poor journalism. I also reject the notion that poll volunteers are partisan. There are strict rules governing what can be done and said in a polling location and there is oversight and checks on the process. These are good people volunteering as part of their civic duty and should be applauded, not demeaned. Frankly, many states have no problems with pre-canvassing mail-in ballots before election day and then getting all of the ballots counted on election day. Those states should be the ones we emulate. Going back to everybody just voting on one day because we are worried that gullible people will believe falsehoods about the election is cowardly and impedes the ability of people to vote.

A much better solution would be to keep early voting and just allow canvassing and processing before Election Day. Then the ballots will be ready to count with the Election Day ballots and it can be done quickly. Remember how bad Florida was in 2000? Since then, they’ve worked on their process and now will be one of the quickest to finish counting today. You can have early voting and count by the end of Election day

If they rigged it, they SUCKED at it. Who rigs an election to LOSE seats in the House and barely hold the Senate, preventing any big legislation?

I swear to god, this board is just full of people wantonly speculating and totally incapable of even looking up simple facts. Why some votes are counted later Here's a good explainer with a handy chart: States fall into a range of rules about processing and counting mail ballots; from processing and counting them as they come in, to not being able to process or count until Election Day. It's those latter ones that take a while to finish because they are waiting until Election Day to even open the mail. Then they need to complete the canvassing and verification before even counting. It's not hard, people. Well, I guess it is to some of you...

Hey remember all you tin foil hat conspiracy nuts: Since the Dems are rigging the election anyway, there’s no reason for you to go to the polls. Sleep in, stay home, and have a restful day!

From the mouth of one of the top GOP strategists of his era: -Lee Atwater [emphasis added]

In any case, the fundamentals point to GOP netting ~30 House seats and 4 senate seats. Dems can over perform and still lose both houses. Or squeak out a narrow victory. Or get crushed. We’ll find out tomorrow (or later because some states don’t process mail-in ballots in advance).

Ah, my bad. I misread your post. I thought you had said that Russians hacked the voting machines, which is not what you wrote. My apologies.

I’m sure everyone would be fine if Parag had said to vote Dem, right?

A red wave should be the baseline expectation. The president’s party loses, on average, ~30 House seats and four senate seats in the midterm elections. This would give us a 243-194 GOP House majority and a 54-46 GOP senate. The GOP could do better than that because of inflation and Biden’s approval rating. Or they could do worse because of their extremist candidates and Dobbs. The polling is all over the place and not super reliable because the response rate on phone polls (the best kind of polls) is less than 1%. That means that pollsters have to try to account for partisan non-response bias. How exactly they do that can put a hefty swing on the end result.

I don’t believe this is true. Russians hacked the voter registrations in some states but I’m not aware of them getting to actual voting machines. Also, all of the people sharing this Politico article should actually read it. While it has some useful information the headline is inappropriate.

LOL. Imagine admitting that you’re just posting stuff without reading or understanding it.

More strawman arguments to deflect from the fact that you seem fundamentally incapable of reading an article you yourself posted.

Nice deflection and strawman from that fact that you can’t or won’t read.