Until very recently, people pretty much knew who won the vast majority of races the same night as the election. On Election Night in the year 2000, for example, the only state really in question for the Presidential Election was Florida. There were also a small number of other races that had yet to be determined for the 2000 Election, but the number of tight races were so few that people were not that worried.
Mail-in ballots have changed this situation dramatically. I will use the U.S. Senate race in Arizona between Kyrsten Sinema and Martha McSally to illustrate how mail-in ballots have created delays in figuring out who won. Fortunately, Kyrsten Sinema did not concede her race, because she currently has an excellent chance of winning, but you will soon see why she may have been tempted to give up way too early. In this article, I will attempt to illustrate the following:
1. How Kyrsten Sinema avoided what at one point looked like a sure election loss.
2. How mail-in ballots have changed Election Nights in a large way.
3. Why candidates need to be careful not to concede too early in states that have mail-in ballots.
4. Why so many Democrats were freaking out during the first hour of Election Night.
5. Why the Election Night got much better for Democrats as the the evening wore on
6. Why things keep getting better for Democrats as the days go on.
If you will, please take a glance at the illustration at the top that shows the race between Martha McSally, Kyrsten Sinema, and Angela Green. This is what you would have seen if you had gone to Google.com and did a search on “McSally Sinema race” anytime after 10:31 P.M. M.S.T. on Election Night, Nov 6, 2018. The total number of votes of all three candidates combined at this point was listed as 1,735,601 or about 1.7 million votes.
Notice that at this point, McSally was leading Sinema by 17,073 votes and that the illustration indicated that about one percent of the vote remained to be counted. Well, some quick calculations show that 1% was about 17,000 votes. In other words, at this point, it looks as if Sinema would need to win pretty much every possible outstanding vote to win the election, which seemed pretty much impossible. As I went to bed on Election Night, I thought Sinema was pretty much a goner, but the one thing that I had yet to realize was there were a lot more than one percent of the votes outstanding. I was not the only one to be in the dark. No one seemed to realize it yet—not fivethirtyeight.com, not Steve Kornacki on MSNBC—no one.
You see, if you go and vote at a polling place, they verify who you are before they even hand you a ballot. Most people show their driver’s license and sign their names and voila, they get handed a ballot. The voters fill in the ovals on a paper ballot, (or use a touchscreen voting machine if you are voting that way), and everything can be processed really fast.
However, mail-in ballots have to have each signature checked by hand against the signature on file, so the actual processing of the ballots is much slower than feeding computerized paper ballots into a machine. States process mail-in ballots as they come in before election day, but what happens if you get a ton of them right around election day? They still have to be processed, and that takes some time.
That is what happened in Arizona. It turns out that at the start of November 7, 2018, the day after the election, Maricopa County, the most populous county in Arizona, had a combined total of around 650,000 ballots, including mail-in ballots, early in-person ballots, and provisional ballots that still remained to be processed. In addition, Pima County had around 150,000 ballots to process, and Coconino County had a good quantity of unprocessed ballots as well.
Together, these three counties make up the bulk of the population of Arizona, and all three of them were leaning blue on election night. Other counties had ballots as well, and a bunch of these counties leaned red, but the combined total of the remaining ballots in red counties was nowhere near the combined total of ballots remaining to be counted in the three big blue counties. This is why tonight, as the totals were updated, Kyrsten Sinema was suddenly ahead by about 2,000 votes and then 9,000 votes—The three big blue counties had come through for Kyrsten SInema—and it was GLORIOUS.
According to The AZ Data Guru (a link I got from Erin in Flagstaff’s awesome diary “AZ-Sen - Sinema now in lead”, as of tonight, the remaining outstanding votes still to be counted as of 6:00 P.M. November 8 are roughly as follows:
You can see that the combined total of votes still to be counted from the three big blue counties (Coconino, Maricopa, and Pima) dwarf the remaining votes still to be counted from all of the other counties. It looks like Sinema may have this one in the bag.
Because more and more states are moving to mail-in ballots, and people are using them more and more, they are transforming election night. Please keep in mind that mail-in ballots and provisional ballots can cause a huge number of ballots to be delayed for days, especially in large population centers that often run blue. This is why we may have no idea how a race is really going until days or even weeks, in the case of California, after the day of the election. This is also why with each passing day, as these mail-in ballots and other hand counted ballots have been tallied, the blue wave has looked stronger and stronger. This is also why things looked much bleaker in the case of the Florida Governor and Senate races on November 6 than they do now, and why Democrats especially should try to wait as much as possible for all the votes to come in.
The Joys Of Watching FiveThirtyEight.com On Election Night
A couple more things: On election night, as per usual, I had on MSNBC on television and I had my Kindle surfing the web. My Kindle alternated between visiting websites such as DailyKos, DemocraticUnderground, FiveThirtyEight, and a few news sites like CNN (You have to do something on the commercial breaks, right?). Anyway, I noticed a number of people apparently freaking out in the earlier part of the night because they were watching the regular updates at fivethirtyeight.com.
You see, Nate Silver and fivethirtyeight.com are generally really accurate, and before the polls closed, they were predicting about a 36 or 37 seat gain in the U.S. House for the Democrats. Yes, they had a range from say a low end of 10 to a high end of 60, but most people just looked at the number in bold in the middle that for about the week prior to the election seemed to hover around an average 37 seat gain.
Well, in the early part of the evening, a few House seats flipped from blue to red, and with each flip, fivethirtyeight.com updated their prediction. In no time at all, it seemed that their best guess of how many seats the Democrats would be getting had dropped down to about 25, and people knew that if it dropped much further, the Democrats might not take the house. I saw some posts on places like DemocraticUnderground.com where people were freaking out big time.
Fortunately, in addition to web surfing, I was watching MSNBC, and there was number guru Steve Kornacki, calm as a can be, with his giant needle showing the chance of the Democrats taking the House starting the night above 60% and never having it drop below that. Then, as the evening went on, that big needle just kept going up and up. You see, Mr. Kornacki had a theory that the main place that Democrats were going to get their flips were in districts that had voted for Hillary but had also voted for a Republican for the House in 2016. So, when a few Democratic House seats flipped to Republicans but were in districts that Trump had won in 2016, Kornacki did not bat an eye. He was watching to see what the Hillary districts would do, and as each Hillary district flipped from red to blue, one by one, he would say things like, “another Hillary district flips to blue!”.
FiveThirtyEight.com adjusted their totals as the night went on and as the House flips from Republicans to Democrats rolled in, but boy were some people freaking out on the web. I am sorry that some of you had to go through that. Here is a tip to possibly lower some people's stress levels: next election, consider locking the television knob on MSNBC. Rachel Maddow and Steve Kornacki are really good at keeping things positive, and they really know what they are talking about. I did not get upset until about 10:31 P.M. when I saw those awful, and fortunately wrong, Sinema numbers, and that was not MSNBC’s fault. I just kind of groaned and went to bed, hoping that the morning would be better.
You know what? Everything looked much better in the morning, and the Election Results have been getting better each day. Just remember—mail-in ballots have slowed the whole election process down. It took a little time for everyone to realize how much we stomped on the Republicans. :)
Thank you, everyone, for making our blue wave possible! :)