Frank wrote on Nov 17^th, 2022 at 9:04am:


Where did he get that number from? The guy is talking through his arse.

Even the MSM reported Biden's 'win' was marginal.

Well done, Mr Biden   

Lately I’ve been reading a lot about the transformation of Indian politics since the 1990s. A very useful introduction to right-wing Indian thought is the veteran journalist (and now BJP member of parliament) Swapan Dasgupta’s Awakening Bharat Mata. It begins: ‘Till the turn of the century, the counting of votes in an Indian general election was a prolonged three-day affair. Since the electronic voting machines were introduced nationally, the tense wait for an outcome has been reduced to barely three or four hours.’ The message I take is that delayed election counts are the hallmark of corrupt and underdeveloped 20th-century sinkholes, and prompt election counts the mark of civilised modern nations on the rise.

The United States is moving in the other direction. Until two elections ago, it was possible to stay up until the contours of a midterm election were crystal clear. But this year five Senate seats and 66 House seats were undecided the day after the election. Perhaps there are still some votes to be brought by rickshaw once spring melts the frost in the mountain passes. If you wonder why so many American voters tune out Democrats’ warnings that Republicans are a ‘threat to democracy’, you haven’t been listening to Democrats’ own plans to make vote counts more opaque. ‘Elections are not over when the polls close,’ said President Joe Biden’s cybersecurity chief Jen Easterly at a Washington event recently, adding: ‘Sometimes it takes weeks.’ Not in functioning democracies it doesn’t.

The reason the count takes so long is the radically expanded menu of voting options introduced during Covid – vote-by-mail, universal absentee ballots, unmanned drop boxes, sometimes even extended deadlines. Democrats – with more institutional memory of ‘organising’ votes on shop floors, at church gatherings and in care homes – have gravitated to these more free-wheeling forms of voting. Republicans prefer voting at a polling booth on election day. You could also say that Democrats want to maximise ballot access, Republicans ballot security. The upshot is that the US is fracturing along yet another axis – it is acquiring two separate voting systems. To oversimplify a bit: just under half the ballots get cast before election day by mail, and Democrats win those overwhelmingly. The remainder are dropped in the ballot box on Tuesday and Republicans win those in a landslide. So to the television viewer, election night is no longer an intelligible flow of information. You get what looks like a Democrat landslide as the mail ballots are counted first, then Republicans rally, then Democrats have a final spurt as ballots pour in from urban districts. Not a system best calculated to allay worries about fraud.
Christopher Caldwell