Here's another thing to look at: the Florida time series starts on election day. But vote counting Florida didn't start on election day. The state was allowed (because they are smart about this) to start counting 23 days in advance of e-day. The author of this thread is unaware of that, and has been fooled by Florida's efficiency into believing that vote returns are uniform everywhere. But that wasn't true in PA, where there was no preprocessing time at all. The clock started in PA on e-day, and the busiest, largest, most Democratic counties naturally took longer to count.
> While county election officials were able to verify signatures and voter registrations upon ballot receipt, normally, absentee ballots can't be further processed or opened until Election Day. But this year, beginning 15 days before the 2020 general election, officials were allowed to open returned absentee ballots, remove those ballots from both the outer and inner secrecy sleeve envelope, and scan the ballots using a ballot scanner machine.
> At least three election workers must be present at all times during this processing and officials are prohibited from doing any tabulation of results until polls close at 7 p.m. on Nov. 3. At that point, tabulation is simply pressing a button.
Again: we watched the ballots come in from Georgia. They came in county-by-county, in partisan-leaning lumps. There was a running joke on Twitter on Wednesday about people who have never been to Georgia suddenly acting like they knew where Clayton County was. It was a whole shared cultural experience!
I'm still struck by the fact that you'd have had to not be paying attention at all to not understand that the results weren't arriving uniformly from across the state, or that different locations in the state have different partisan leans. From what I saw, the whole country was basically transfixed by those two facts. We got nothing done! For like a week!
It's fine if you're not paying attention, but way less fine to build a narrative about voter fraud based on it.
So you're saying one county, with ~80,000 delayed votes, ~60% of which were for Biden, completely eliminates Georgia as a counterexample here? I don't have a good spider-sense for this kind of number crunching so I'd have to do some math.
> It's fine if you're not paying attention, but way less fine to build a narrative about voter fraud based on it.
I have not been claiming there is anything to this theory, but it is fun to argue about. And I'm definitely not happy to see this argument get personal, but from my perspective, it is least fine of all to gaslight people with a nonsense fairy-tale that corruption and fraud do not exist.
The gaslighting happening here is the accusation of widespread fraud without any evidence, based on the kinds of intentional misunderstandings tptacek spent so much effort laying out for you.
For what it's worth, my "you" upthread was meant to be rhetorical, to refer to the batshit Twitter thread, but I can see how it would have been taken as personal. I mean, I still think we should all be able to quickly and decisively agree that the thread was, well, batshit. But I wasn't trying to confront anyone commenting on HN.
