Plan B Forum

The latest RCP national average has the election literally in a dead heat; 47.4% to 47.4%...

The electoral map stands at 201 for Obama to 191 for Romney with 146 electoral votes up for grabs....

There are nine...count 'em nine....states have a recent poll average with a difference between the candidates of 3% or less....the margin of error...

There are also several quite plausible scenarios that result in a 269-269 tie. You might think that would mean that the party that controls the House...(almost certainly the Republicans; the polls have the GOP with 226 seats to 183 for the Dems with 26 toss ups. That means the Republicans would have to lose all the toss up seats, and nine more on top of that for the Democrats to take back the House, and with a national election this close there's really no realistic scenario under which that happens.) would automatically win the Presidency.

But not necessarily...

There is no legal requirement for the electors to vote for the candidate they are pledged to, (there are fairly recent precedents for electors who have not done so) and the Electoral College doesn't meet till December...

On top of all of this , we now have the Sandy Wild Card...

As close as this race is, in addition to the prospect (again) of having one candidate win the popular vote and the other the electoral, we could easily wake up on next Wednesday morning with half a dozen "Floridas" all facing recounts and lawsuits....weeks and week dragging tortuously on before a victor is known...

You think this campaign has been ugly? Just wait till you see what happens if that takes place....

After all that has happened, as I analyze the numbers, I still find myself believing that the most likely scenario is the same one I thought would be the final result over a year ago...Obama wins reelection in a squeaker....

But whoever wins the race, I sincerely hope that even if it's close, it's still clear who the victor is by Wednesday morning... It would be terrible for the country, with all the challenges it faces, to go through the kind of uncertainty and wrenching ordeal we went through in 2000, and then at the end of the process winding up with a President that a large portion of the public views as "illegitimate"....

Please dear Lord, spare us that....

If it's a tie we could end up with a president Romney and vice president Biden.

______________

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2012/11/t ... -2012.html

"...

In the now-cast, Romney crosses 20% with downward momentum. It is really, really hard to win the electoral college without winning Ohio, and really hard to win Ohio if the polls six days before put you down by 3%.

As Nate writes:

Mr. Obama is not a sure thing, by any means. It is a close race. His chances of holding onto his Electoral College lead and converting it into another term are equivalent to the chances of an N.F.L. team winning when it leads by a field goal with three minutes left to play in the fourth quarter. There are plenty of things that could go wrong, and sometimes they will.

But it turns out that an N.F.L. team that leads by a field goal with three minutes left to go winds up winning the game 79 percent of the time. Those were Mr. Obama’s chances in the FiveThirtyEight forecast as of Wednesday: 79 percent.

Not coincidentally, these are also about Mr. Obama’s chances of winning Ohio, according to the forecast. ..."

___________________________________


yrs,
rubato

I heard on the radio the other day that the result may be delayed because of the bizarre pre-voting scam in Ohio. Apparently, if you request a ballot for early voting and vote on election day, the election day vote is deemed "provisional" until they confirm that you are not voting twice. If the election is decided by less than the number of provisionals, the loser is going to ask for a verification.

One might note the amazing fact that Democrats always favor the initiatives that make voter fraud easier. Then they deny that it ever happens.

Voter fraud = stopping the vote count in Florida in '2000.


yrs,
rubato

dgs49 wrote:One might note the amazing fact that Democrats always favor the initiatives that make voter fraud easier. Then they deny that it ever happens.

Or Democrats are favoring initiatives that make the democratic process easier to take part in. Meanwhile the Republicans are spreading fear and misinformation because it benefits them to have fewer people out voting.

Of course, as usual Dave gets it completely wrong, by confusing early voting with absentee voting. If someone is shown to have received an absentee ballot and then shows up to vote on election day, they get a provisional ballot which will be compared against the absentee ballots received to ensure they didn't vote twice. The reason that provisional ballots cannot be verified for ten days is that absentee ballots can be postmarked up to one day prior to the election, so they allow the ten days to ensure that all ballots that were mailed have been received. This has nothing whatsoever to do with early voting, where voters present themselves in person to vote before election day. There is no greater risk of fraud from early voting than from voting on election day, because exactly the same process is used for both.

rubato wrote:Voter fraud = stopping the vote count in Florida in '2000.


yrs,
rubato

The dems counting dead people in Chicago cemetaries since the 1930's.

dales wrote:

rubato wrote:Voter fraud = stopping the vote count in Florida in '2000.


yrs,
rubato

The dems counting dead people in Chicago cemetaries since the 1930's.

I can prove what I said. Can you?

Pussy?

yrs,
rubato

I can prove what I said. Can you?

Pussy?

Speaking of things that have been proven and the way a pussy responds when the proof hands him his ass....

An excellent example begins here:

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=7793&p=98118&hilit= ... ume#p98118

dales wrote:

rubato wrote:Voter fraud = stopping the vote count in Florida in '2000.


yrs,
rubato

The dems counting dead people in Chicago cemetaries since the 1930's.

1960 ?

rubato wrote:

dales wrote:

rubato wrote:Voter fraud = stopping the vote count in Florida in '2000.


yrs,
rubato

The dems counting dead people in Chicago cemetaries since the 1930's.

I can prove what I said. Can you?

Pussy?

yrs,
rubato

From Wiki:

However, a special prosecutor assigned to the case brought charges against 650 people, which did not result in convictions.[24] Three Chicago election workers were convicted of voter fraud in 1962 and served short terms in jail.[24] Mazo, the Herald-Tribune reporter, later said that he found names of the dead who had voted in Chicago, along with 56 people from one house.

Game set match, now bugger off......... pissant!

3 convicted out of 653? Ahem. Quite the barn-burning success.

I thought you claimed to have something more substantial than that??

yrs,
rubato

More Republican voter fraud:

Past.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/bl ... e-20120530
"...
Back in 2000, 12,000 eligible voters – a number twenty-two times larger than George W. Bush’s 537 vote triumph over Al Gore – were wrongly identified as convicted felons and purged from the voting rolls in Florida, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. African Americans, who favored Gore over Bush by 86 points, accounted for 11 percent of the state’s electorate but 41 percent of those purged. Jeb Bush attempted a repeat performance in 2004 to help his brother win reelection but was forced to back off in the face of a public outcry. Yet with another close election looming, Florida Republicans have returned to their voter-scrubbing ways.
... "


And present:

"...
Florida Republicans have taken voter suppression to a brazen extreme. After the 2010 election, Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, instructed Secretary of State Ken Browning to compile a massive database of alleged "non-citizen" voters. Browning resigned in February rather than implement Scott’s plan, saying "we were not confident enough about the information for this secretary to hang his hat on it."

But in early May his successor, Kurt Detzner, a former beer-industry lobbyist, announced a list of 182,000 suspected non-citizens to be removed from the voting rolls, along with 50,000 apparently dead voters. (Seven thousand alleged felons had already been scrubbed from the rolls in the first four months of 2012). On May 8, the state mailed out a first batch of 2,600 letters to Florida residents informing them, "you are not a United States citizen; however you are registered to vote." If the recipients do not reply within thirty days and affirm their U.S. citizenship, they will be dropped from the voter rolls.

The first batch of names was riddled with inaccuracies. For example, as the progressive blog Think Progress noted, "an excess of 20 percent of the voters flagged as 'non-citizens' in Miami-Dade are, in fact, citizens. And the actual number may be much higher." If this ratio holds for the rest of the names on the non-citizens list, more than 35,000 eligible voters could be disenfranchised. Those alleged non-citizens have already included a 91-year-old World War II veteran who’s voted since he was 18 and a 60-year-old kennel owner who has voted in the state for four decades. It’s impossible to quantify how many eligible voters will be scrubbed from the rolls if they’ve moved, aren’t home, don’t have ready access to citizenship documents, or won’t bother to reply to the menacing letter.

..."

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.co ... ly-biased/
" ...
Nov. 2: For Romney to Win, State Polls Must Be Statistically Biased
By NATE SILVER



President Obama is now better than a 4-in-5 favorite to win the Electoral College, according to the FiveThirtyEight forecast. His chances of winning it increased to 83.7 percent on Friday, his highest figure since the Denver debate and improved from 80.8 percent on Thursday.

Friday’s polling should make it easy to discern why Mr. Obama has the Electoral College advantage. There were 22 polls of swing states published Friday. Of these, Mr. Obama led in 19 polls, and two showed a tie. Mitt Romney led in just one of the surveys, a Mason-Dixon poll of Florida. ... "

______________________________________


Already breathing a sigh of anticipatory relief that the party of lies and treason will not occupy the WH.


yrs,
rubato

You mean.... it'll be vacant?

On Wednesday, November 7th, when "all is said and done," and all the bullshit, and all the rhetoric rings hollow for just a brief moment, the only thing that matters is that the winning candidate garners 270 Electoral votes. Nothing else matters.

Now ask yourself which one of the six presidential candidates has a lock on that number -- and then some? Case closed... and now we all move on accordingly.

305 / 233

God bless the Electoral College.

Your electoral system is insane.

Gob wrote:Your electoral system is insane.

The average Briton has only had the vote since the end of WWI. It takes time.

And we didn't have to wipe the mud off our knees.

yrs,
rubato

Gob wrote:Your electoral system is insane.

I fully agree. Nonetheless, it's our system, and the system we work with, until Congress acts to change it. Of course, the popular votes makes the most sense but as you mentioned, "Your electoral system is insane." Insanity dominates the body politic. Pass the Thorazine, please.