I think everyone voted early, and by mail. Political engagement in my neighborhood (where Thom Dunn lives) is very high, and everyone on my street (except for the children) already voted.
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They seem to have realized they don’t have the numbers to do voter intimidation at any meaningful scale (not to mention it might backfire given that Election Day voters are more likely to be Republican, and it would give Dems a media victory).
Instead they are trying to play up any Election Day technical glitches or rule misunderstandings and insinuate that they amount to some giant plot by the dems to steal the election. See the #StopTheSteal hashtag for the general gist, or better yet, don’t. 
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That’s good to hear!
I found this, which is a tool that lets you check out early voting stats down to the county:
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There is also this, for watching tonight: Election Tipping Point States
Having said that, I don’t plan on connecting to any news source until 10:30 this evening. My plan is to watch Trump’s Favorite Movie (!), and then, depending on what I see, I’ll be drinking from one of these containers:
Either this:
or this:
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Sounds like an election night plan!
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Historically, that was an accepted bit of collateral damage. If you were disfranchising blacks, it was OK to disfranchise the poor whites if they got caught up in things. “Greater good” and all. Repealing the poll tax enfranchised a heck of a lot of white voters.
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The way I explain this to college students is that the Constitution is meant to give “the people” a great deal of power, and then prevent them from actually exercising it.
But, honestly, the Founders had witnessed what happens when “democracy” gets instituted. The state governments of the 1776-1787 period were a total mess, precisely because [from the POV of elites] ordinary people had way too much control. They were doing things like <ZOMG!> cancelling farm debt, cancelling bank debt, eliminating governmental positions that had been in families for generations, and all sort of things that ordinary people do when they seize the reins of power from elites.
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100% ditto here, FWIW
(Except I’m mumblety-mumble years old, not * cough * :-))
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i can’t see any route for abuse here. nope. none. 
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Conservatives accidentally making the opposite point is still one of my favorite forms of tweet.
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And is that a blue wave I see?
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they simply don’t associate your name and your vote, only your name and the fact that the ballot was processed. same as if you went into a polling place and they marked your name off in a book. the book doesn’t contain information on the content of your vote.
[ or, think of it like a Y shaped conveyor belt. your ballot moves up from the bottom, the choices go to the left and your name goes to the right. ]
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In my Detroit precinct, I had to wait maybe 5 minutes to vote, and everything was smooth as silk afterwards. There were more people voting there than I’ve seen in years! Every carrel was in use, and there was a slow but steady trickle of people walking in. Plus, there were cheers called out for three first-time voters while I was in the room. (This is a new thing, but I like it.)
There was no sign of voter intimidation, either. (My district is very ethnically mixed, which might have been a factor against it.) And it was an easy 15-minute walk to the polling place, in good, sunny weather, so hopefully that will bring more people out to vote.
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I haven’t seen or heard anything odd at the poling place across the street from us (where, weirdly, I don’t vote if I go vote in person). Situation normal, as it should be.
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Well I was confused by people talking about separate confirmations that the vote was “accepted” and “counted”. I understand notifying about acceptance - check the name without looking at the vote. If the name (and other information, no idea what the American forms look like) is good, toss the vote on a pile to be counted later, otherwise, discard it. But how would you notify people about the next step?
That would imply keeping the information about who cast which vote around for longer than absolutely necessary, which feels inherently dangerous. And it feels like there are now two separate steps which involve reading voters’ names of the envelope, which feels like it needlessly increases the time and effort needed for counting.
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I know that in LA County (and in Orange County) you have to sign up to be notified via text, email, or both. They notified me when they scanned my envelope and accepted my signature.
I watched something on the news and they reported that LA County separates the envelope from the ballot before election day, and then they scan the ballots on election day.
Also, there appears to be a code for each voter that is printed on each side of each page – no name is printed on the ballot. Once they scan (count) the ballot, it registers that I voted and triggers a text and email. It doesn’t record how I specifically voted. (I believe they keep the voters and the votes in separate records.)
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american forms for mail in voting i believe are almost all “scantron” forms: fill in the bubble.
in most? cases each form has a unique barcode for tracking that’s associated with your name. the results of tabulating the ballot and the barcode are not stored together.
a human being looking at the barcode has no way of determining who the barcode belongs to. and the computer reporting the barcode has no idea what the results are.
so, when i said “names” go out the right side of the Y, i should have said “barcodes” but those do become names.
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It is highly variable. Rules and allocations are largely set at the state level and ballot lengths are wildly different. I’m in a Democratic, but heavily white, municipality in a Republican controlled state. You could say we get some splash from voter suppression, but we aren’t the primary target. So, the place I live has 12 polling locations (13 in previous years, but a school is being remodeled). That serves a little over 50,000 people in a land area of about 15sq. km. If I vote before work, my average wait is under 5 minutes. If I go immediately after work, it climbs into the 30-45 minute range. If I wanted to go to early voting, there was one site for my county of 1.2 million people over about 1200 sq. km. The lines for that ran between 1-7 hours depending on the day and sometimes involved standing on a highway entrance ramp. That location was averaging something close to 2500 voters each day of early voting. The lines in the city of Cleveland have been multi-hour affairs for so many elections that there are entire networks of food delivery, musical performances, and other support teams to keep people from giving up and going home.
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