Wait for it…

It feels like this election has been going on for a decade, but don’t expect to know who won tonight (Nov. 5 2024).

Yes, huge numbers of voters got their shit together and mailed in or voted early. Georgia and North Carolina had more than 40 percent turnout before the weekend even started.

Yes, voting machines have become more secure, have been updated and used in even more places since 2020 to speed the process.

Yes, election officials have been getting ready for huge voter turnouts for months.

But none of that means the counts will be done in one day. If you have ever had a dinner party of more than 40 and had to count and recount the guests, you can guess how long it may take to count 160 million ballots or more.

I learned long ago that election night results are actually just an educated guess. Counties “canvass” the results weeks after every election. The final detailed counts never match what was reported on election night. Sometimes the gaps widen, sometimes they shrink.

Very rarely do the “results” ever change. But they can. (see Al Franklen’s first election to the US Senate in Minnesota — the counting took 8 months).

2020 was fucked up in many ways from the Pandemic and the scramble to get people to vote early or by mail or drop box, but almost none of that effected the time it took to count.

Remember how long it actually took to call some of these swing states?

Grabbed this photo off the corporate TV news the other day.

I forgot that we really didn’t find out until the following “Saturday” that they called the election for Biden. “Called” was not the official count. That’s when the media declared a winner. So far the corporate weasels have been careful enough not to call states for the wrong guy (except 2000 when they all called Florida for Bush — but we now can guess if they had done a full recount of the entire state, Gore probably won it).

But that’s just a guess. Why? Because we are all favoring speed over accuracy, and that’s Bullshit. The media and the voters want their answers and they want them in hours. That way they can tease us with disaster and drag our eyeballs to the screen so they get paid.

But fully accurate counts can take days or weeks.

Of course, the Steve Bannon’s and Roger Stone’s of the world are going to push Trump to declare victory “early” no matter the state of the race. They will twist the voter’s unrealistic expectations into assumptions of fraud or cheating. Fuck them.

A little patience from all of us can go a long way to blocking fascism. (I don’t use that term lightly, but those two are clearly fascists.)

Know what else would block fascism?

Getting rid of the Electoral College

If we really wanted to speed up results for Presidential elections, we would just get rid of the electoral college. The popular vote is much easier to predict based on early returns. The big eastern states like New York, Massachusetts, Virginia, and Florida tend to show enough votes early (since Florida fixed many of it’s issues in 2002) that very accurate predictions can be made on election night based closed to final returns in the East and partial returns in the West.

There’s no waiting on the final counts in swing counties in the swing states or the slow counts coming from the poor and crowded urban counties. A few thousand votes in Georgia or Pennsylvania will get lost in rounding errors for gaps of 3-10 million votes.

It would be easier to trust elections with popular votes. It would be much more difficult to “rig” the count of millions of votes in tens of thousands of polling places and thousands of counties in the entire country than to just “find 11,780 votes” in Georgia.

But we are still stuck with the Electoral College. We are still living with the “big lie” that elections were rigged “just against Trump” in 2020. That lie is so stupid on its face, I can’t believe the number of people who fall for it. If you are going to “rig” an election wouldn’t you rig it to get a super majority in every state and both the US House and Senate? Who really thinks Democrats are so smart they would pull a double jujitsu move to only mess with Trump but let Mitch McConnell, Joni Ernst and Susan Collins win…

Recently, I had to take that lie personally.

I had some “notes” thread on Substack where an election denier said there were “1.27 million fraudulent votes in Phoenix” in 2020. Of course he had no proof — just some conspiracy theory from “a friend” with a security clearance.

Of course all of his facts were wrong. There are only 1.6 million people in Phoenix — there are not 1.27 million voters in Phoenix. If he meant Maricopa County — where I live — he was calling my vote into question. Calling me a fraud. Fuck him.

So, we all know if/when Trump loses, we are going to hear the craziest stories you can imagine. Worse than Italian satellites and dead South American dictators changing votes. The longer the count takes, the more crazy stories will come out, and the more lawsuits will be filed.

But we all need to stay away from the bullshit. Be patient. Let’s demand accuracy over speed. Ignore the media’s insatiable need for attention and trying to loop us in with fear and outrage. It’s the only trick they have left to sell us boner pills, medicare plans, and adult diapers.

Let’s make sure we get the count right the first time and hope this is the last time we have to put up with the orange Putin Puppet and his ilk lying about elections (and calling “my vote” into question).

I know. It sucks. But we will all be better off if we just wait a little longer to get accurate results.