Yet another Australian. I have scrutineered for the Australian Labor Party in Federal, State and Council elections for more the the past twenty five years. The election officials in fact do a Two Party Preferred or as the recent Queensland state election called it, Two Candidate Preferred count immediately after the first preference count.
The official in charge of the polling place phones the count in to the Australian Electoral Commission or the Electoral Commission of Queensland after each count is complete.
We scrutineers also phone the results back to our candidates.
If you are good enough and pay attention you can get an indication of preference flows while the first preference count is being done. Which is why if you watch the election coverage on television the people from the political parties can say they have an indication of preference flows before the official counts come in.
Of course then all the votes are taken back to the central polling office and they start counting from scratch on the Monday.
Agreed. What Biden has is a population that passionately objects to Trump and the GOP, and thinks he was a close enough match to “Any Competent Adult”. It’s not the same as popularity, so he’ll have to work harder to use it, but at least for a few months he can get some stuff done and count on cheering if he crosses McConnell’s Senate (which, sadly, it looks like it’ll be, unless some Republicans start doing the “maverick” act and occasionally break party discipline.)
If I were Biden, I’d start off by letting kids out of cages, and issuing an executive order cancelling most of Trump’s executive orders, including the Muslim Ban, his Tariff Man ones, and anything immigration related or pollution related, and telling the Spaaaace Forrrrrce that they are now non-military and work for NASA.
He’ll also need a Justice Department in a hurry, which will be interesting if McConnell refuses to have confirmation hearings for his AG and other appointees.
The US elections have complexities many other countries don’t have. For instance, we vote for all the offices, rather than voting for an MP and having that determine the Prime Minister, so there are a lot more things to count. My California ballot had about 7 pages, including all the school board elections and dozen state and several local ballot referenda.
And then there’s the “No Brown M&M’s” rule, which makes everything else take longer to count.
Alaska isn’t a big deal for the Presidential election - 3 electoral votes could count, but we’ve also seen the count running 2/3 Trump, so it’s unlikely that the result will switch at some point, unlike Pennsylvania which was set up for the Red Mirage. And we know it’s big and snowy up there.
AK is a big deal for the Senate, though it’s also running 2/3 GOP, because it gets two Senators for a population less than half the size of my county, and one of their senators keeps pretending she’s a moderate and will consider voting for the right thing instead of her party’s choice, then doesn’t. (But she’s not up for re-election, and her fellow waffler, Susan Collins of Maine, seems to have won handily.)
Unfortunately, competent adults don’t do that. Competent adults know that the only way forward is to make meaningless incremental improvements while the Republicans take a sledgehammer to the sand castle those improvements are built upon.
