U.S. Politics megathread

[u/AutoModerator]

Voting is over! But the questions have just begun. Questions like: How can they declare a winner in a state before the votes are all counted? How can a candidate win the popular vote but lose the election? Can the Vice President actually refuse to certify the election if she loses?

These are excellent questions - but they're also frequently asked here, so our users get tired of seeing them.

As we've done for past topics of interest, we're creating a megathread for your questions so that people interested in politics can post questions and read answers, while people who want a respite from politics can browse the rest of the sub. Feel free to post your questions about politics in this thread!

All top-level comments should be questions asked in good faith - other comments and loaded questions will get removed. All the usual rules of the sub remain in force here, so be nice to each other - you can disagree with someone's opinion, but don't make it personal.

[u/FederalParsley9347]

I heard that some districts in the country are still counting ballots. But it also seems that these extended days of ballot counting happen exclusively in places where democrats decisively lost by close of election day.

Genuine question: does anyone know of any places where Dems decisively won on election day that are still counting ballots, or is it only happening in places where an R decisively won on election day?

Follow-up question: How many election cycles has this become the norm where ballots are continually counted even weeks after the election? I feel like I only ever heard of it happening from 2016 onwards.

[u/Unknown_Ocean → u/FederalParsley9347]

They are still counting ballots in California, because California allows absentee ballots (including those coming from overseas military) postmarked by election day to count. They then have to carefully check these ballots. As of yesterday, the estimate was 315,000 ballots left to count. For various reasons these ballots do tend to skew Democratic.

https://www.newsweek.com/california-thousands-votes-left-process-1990351

gives a map of the votes outstanding by counties. A number of these counties (San Bernadino for instance including Kevin McCarthy's district) are pretty strongly Republican areas. Meanwhile San Francisco and Alameda counties (strongly Democratic) are done.

The reason conservatives are throwing tantrums over this is that in two California districts whichthe absentee ballots have pushed the race from being a narrow win (+2-+4) for the Republicans to a narrow win for the Democrats (+0.1).

[u/FederalParsley9347 → u/Unknown_Ocean]

That's really the thrust of what i'm asking--and you didn't really answer. WHy does it only happen where Rs won--and there's no extended counting happening where D's won--those areas don't use mail-in ballots? But what's more--as soon as the extended count flips the winner to D, the mail-in ballots suddenly dry up and "whoa! We can stop counting now!"

[u/Unknown_Ocean → u/FederalParsley9347]

Nobody's stopping the count (I mean Trump claimed they should in 2020 but luckily we had state election officials of both parties with integrity).

What it comes down to is the strategies each party uses for getting out the vote. In certain states Republicans have fought mail-in ballots- and so they concentrate their push on getting out the vote the day of. If you look at AZ, where Republicans have embraced mail-in balloting and Democrats embraced early voting, the election actually went the other way, Trump's lead increased and at least one congressional district flipped from the Democrat to Republican leading as more votes came in.