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Comment by jkepler | Hacker News Reader

This isn't the first time spreadsheet errors have messed with election results.

It was a column error in tabulated election results that cause all the conflict in 2020 in Antrim county, Michigan. Any computer folks who took the time to read the report by an University of Michigan computer scientist hired by the Republican chaired bipartisan committee that the Michigan state senate would have seen that there was no vote fraud, but user error that got caught almost immediately in the accountability systems that were in place to catch any errors like that.

If we stopped trying to report election returns in real time like sporting events, and could be patient a few hours, we could avoid a lot of these highly divisive controversies.

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> If we stopped trying to report election returns in real time ... we could avoid a lot of these highly divisive controversies.

At least in the United States, election results were reported the same night for decades and there were very few questions surrounding the truth, even in 2000 people agreed on the need for a recount, even if they disagreed on the methodology or the ultimate result.

Only since 2020, all of a sudden results take multiple days and the electorate is supposed to just understand "this is how it is now" and not question anything, despite witnessing major swings in individual states or districts occurring overnight.

I agree things have become far more contentious since 2020. Trump's campaign used that controversy to fund-raise for "legal defense" but the small print in his campaign emails I received also said the funds could be used to pay down his campaign debts.

If you haven't read the Michigan Senate report (result of an 8-month bipartisan investigation chaired by a Trump Republican), please do. It cleared the air and answered tons of questions for me, seeing the evidence they found and realizing that there are simple, understandable reasons explaining what happened and also explaining the ruckus that resulted from so many people crying fraud but being unwilling to take time themselves to investigate the facts of the matter.

I'm not claiming fraud. But when the way an election is administered is radically different than all prior instances, that leads to seeds of distrust, and I think it is perfectly foreseeable that many people would jump to the conclusion that some fraud is involved. By your own admission, you needed an 8-month long investigation to quell your own concerns.

> But when the way an election is administered is radically different than all prior instances

Again, that is simply not the case. At all. State governments[1] run several elections every year, and they use the same processes and laws for all of them. Surely you've voted many times since 2020, right? And probably before, right? And... you didn't notice that it's the same process?

[1] This was not, and has never been, "an election" that is "administered" in a central way. Every state has its own laws. Every state runs its own election. The only federal "election" involved is the ceremonial one involving the meeting of the state electors.

Plenty of states changed their laws and procedures in 2020 in response to Covid restrictions. Early and mail-in voting were significantly expanded. To say "it's the same process" is not accurate, when comparing 2020 to prior years.

> This was not, and has never been, "an election" that is "administered" in a central way

The lack of central administration is the primary source of skepticism. States and regions each determined their new rules independently without formal oversight or approval. A single nationally-run election would have ensured everyone followed the same rules, even if those rules weren't perfect or to everybody's liking. Without that, all kinds of rumors and stories and misunderstandings were reported in the media, regarding different local rules around mail-in ballots, signature verification, drop-off boxes, counting procedures, polling hours, etc. Even if jurisdictions followed their own rules perfectly, it led to questions about why those rules were set that way in the first place. People in California thinking Florida is rigging things, while other people in Texas assuming Michigan is corrupt, etc etc all over the country, mostly based on unsubstantiated rumors and media reports, but influential nonetheless.

I know it was rediculous! Biden was leading Texas and then all of the sudden we're supposed to expect a surge of red votes and now Trump carried the state?

But in all seriousness.

1) "Decades" is 5 elections which is a sample size of garbage.

2) The election results haven't been actually reported on the same day for a long time. Absentee ballots aren't countable until after Election day in many states making it trivial to demonstrate that they haven't been counted until the next day meaning you can't have reported the exact results on the first night.

Now, news media have been making predictions on who is going to win the election and they did refrain from doing that. But one big thing to remember is that states where Republicans determined the election process such as Arizona did not even count 100% of their ballots by Nov 12 (9 days after the 3rd, aka Election Day).

The difference, I'd argue, is that generally the loser of an election makes a public statement conceding that they lost. 2000 definitely was an outlier in this regard as well, but I think it still differed in that the disagreement was about counting the votes, not about the integrity of the election itself. Once you have a major candidate who's willing to make a baseless claim of fraud and a "stolen" election, suddenly the process that used to happen behind the scenes quietly in the past to count and verify the result that was announced earlier is put under a microscope and analyzed by people who have no idea how that process actually works, which is...well, almost everyone.

> I think it still differed in that the disagreement was about counting the votes, not about the integrity of the election itself.

How could one question the vote-count without questioning the integrety of the election?

I might have been imprecise; in 2000, the claim was that the tallying of votes led to an incorrect result, whereas in 2020 the claim was that a massive number of illegal votes were cast and therefore caused the result to be different than it otherwise would have been. The former could easily be attributable to something like a spreadsheet error (like in TFA), whereas the latter would require malicious intent to commit election fraud. It doesn't seem surprising to me that alleging criminal intent to submit huge numbers of fraudulent ballots in what would have had to be several states would cause a larger public response and interest in the details of how votes are counted than arguing that a single state (Florida) should have to count the ballots again to verify the final total.

> Only since 2020, all of a sudden results take multiple days and the electorate is supposed to just understand "this is how it is now" and not question anything, despite witnessing major swings in individual states or districts occurring overnight.

The main reason the counting took much longer was three-fold: many more votes were cast by mail than was typical, several states were quite close in their vote count (three states within 1%), and a few states were prohibited from taking any preparatory steps to counting mail ballots prior to election day. And this was known--and heavily reported on!--well before the election.

Counting mail-in ballots is intrinsically harder than in-person ballots. Indeed, very rarely is it ever actually completed on election night (not least of which is that in many states, the votes need not be received by election day to be counted). However, usually mail-in ballots aren't enough to decide the results of an election. But when 2/3 of the ballots are via mail, and especially when there was an expected partisan difference between in-person and mail-in ballots, it takes a lot longer to develop a good consensus as to when one of the candidates is highly likely to have won.

> Only since 2020

Good grief. That's just simply not correct. What happened is that in 2016 and 2020 specifically, the presidential election turned on a handful of states that were (by definition, really) very close. Close results take longer, because if it's not close you can call an election without finishing the count. If the close states are not critical to the result, as is more common, no one cares.

> major swings in individual states or districts occurring overnight

Again, no. This is not a new effect, nor is the fact that different groups of ballots skew differently and are counted at different times.

2016 was called on election night.

Forgot to link the Michigan Senate report: https://misenategopcdn.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/99/doccume...

Mind that in this case the vote was not a large nation wide vote like a U.S. primary, but an election at a party delegate convention. Thus 400 or so voters. That should be doable in acceptable time.

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