Only two weeks after primary day and California has less than a million presidential ballots left uncounted. An estimated 923,515 ballots as of 11:56 am this morning, June 21.
Gee, it's a good thing AP declared the winner the night before the primary. Otherwise, the suspense might have undermined confidence in the Democratic democratic process.
http://elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov/statewide-elections/2016-primary/unprocessed-ballots-report.pdf
ReplyDeleteTom you might have heard of something called 'statistics'. You might compare this list of unprocessed ballots by Couny compared to the actual counted votes of those Counties and so some simple analysis of the likelihood that any given County's unprocessed votes will break so strongly against the processed ones to materially effect the margin.
Take the Counties that actually went for Bernie and assume that 100% of all provisionals were for Sanders and then take the Counties that went for Hillary and assume a 50/50% split. Would that really move ANYTHING?
No. And that is with five thumbs on the scale. Right now the margin is still at 10 points with 90% counted. Not only are you not going to have a different result, there is no reason to believe the margin will close much or at all. Because you can set down and prove with a pencil and paper that a 90% sample Statewide and similar samples in most counties just doesn't have margins of error that large. Unless you have solid reasons to argue that early/provisional voters are so out of random sample to challenge the (relatively) simple arithmetic.
Bruce,
ReplyDeleteYou seem to assume that I expect the outcome to be changed by the full count. I don't. I do expect the margin to tighten and in fact the margin HAS tightened as more and more votes have been counted.
The EU Leave vote occurred yesterday and ALL the votes have been counted by now. The slow count in California was just one aspect of a seriously mismanaged electoral system. That is all.
Tom fair enough. But this sentence from your four sentence post was just feeding the conspiracy theorists among the Bernie Bros who are insisting that "Bernie REALLY won California". He didn't. And the final margin while marginally smaller (see what I did there?) doesn't materially change the narrative that Bernie got thumped even in the more left Counties in California by what would in almost any election be seen as landslide numbers.
ReplyDeleteI watched the election night results with a particular attention on County by County results based on my knowledge as an almost life long inhabitant of the SF Area. If Bernie was going to win he was going to have to carry the ultra-liberal Yuppie Marin County, the City and County of San Francisco (gay and strongly multicultural) and Alameda County (home of still radical Berkeley and Oakland) by big numbers. And he didn't. Moreover those Counties, the most leftist in the whole State, also had relatively small numbers of provisionals. Instead those uncounted votes were concentrated in Counties like Los Angeles that not only had election night numbers strongly running Hillary but were not natural fits for Bernie's messaging.
In short if Bernie got thumped in Berkeley he wasn't going to win California.
Now it may be a fair point to criticize California on its slow walk on counting mail-ins and provisionals. But this is in part an artifact of a system that allows you to vote right up to the last day by mail with ballots that cannot arrive to be counted for a few days. But nobody was really attacking California on Goo-Goo grounds and for you to suggest your post was about that is somewhat disingenuous. The entire narrative around the slow walk of California provisionals was and is "Bernie wuz robbed!!!!". He wasn't. He lost by a 10 point margin, one that is not in any important way different than the one reported on election day.
I saw your post as simply an attempt to chum the waters. Which I see as unproductive. But it is (for now) a free country.
Ooops. Left out the sentence/smoking gun:
ReplyDelete"Gee, it's a good thing AP declared the winner the night before the primary."
As if you can derail a "political revolution" by a pre-election projection. Bernie supporters "Time for a Revolution that will unend Politics as we know it!!! We just have to show up for the polls!!!!. What? AP predicted a loss? Screw it, lets stay home, smoke some bowls and go to the Indie Music Festival instead".
Sorry, Bruce, but any disingenuousness is in your imagination. AP's declaration was BULLSHIT and was intended to discourage voting. A lot of people encountered huge obstacles to voting.
ReplyDeleteI grew up in California and I am perfectly aware of where Bernie would have had to win get a majority. That would not have even mattered. He would have had to have won by a LARGE MARGIN. What I am talking about is the CRAP electoral system and the fact that those who operate it don't appear to give a shit about how obviously bad it is. Elections are not rocket science.
I'm not a Bernie Bro, although I like some of what Sanders says. I didn't really want him to win the Dem nomination. It's like he says, revolutions are from the bottom up, not from the top down.
And this...
ReplyDelete"As if you can derail a 'political revolution' by a pre-election projection. Bernie supporters 'Time for a Revolution that will unend Politics as we know it!!! We just have to show up for the polls!!!!. What? AP predicted a loss? Screw it, lets stay home, smoke some bowls and go to the Indie Music Festival instead'."
...is just condescending bullshit, Bruce.