Quote by Nate Silver:

“Nate Silver said he found it “a bit concerning” that there have now been significant polling misses “in the same direction” not only in 2016 and 2020 but also in the 2014 midterms (though not in 2018).”
https://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/66057-focus-nate-silver-to-fivethirtyeight-critics-fk-you-we-did-a-good-job

Nate Silver to FiveThirtyEight Critics: 'F**k You, We Did a Good Job'
By Matt Wilstein, The Daily Beast
05 November 20

...Silver also pointed out that the only state where Biden led in the final polling averages and lost at this point was Florida, with North Carolina likely to follow. And Silver said he found it “a bit concerning” that there have now been significant polling misses “in the same direction” not only in 2016 and 2020 but also in the 2014 midterms (though not in 2018).

Maybe the polls were right. The only way to know if the vote totals, counted by computerized voting machines, are correct is to handcount 100% of ballots handmarked by the voter. Every US Senate race in the country should be 100% audited, counted by hand, to check on the accuracy of the vote count. Scanners are just as hackable as touchscreens. Our elections have been privatized by reliance on voting machine vendors who won't even disclose who owns them. It's past time to let voters have a look at the vote count of actual ballots to see for themselves who the people really voted for.

You didn’t hear this in the cable TV chatter: In the two years leading up to this election, Georgia’s GOP secretary of state quietly wiped away the voter registrations of 198,351 voters — based on false information.

Call it "The Great Purge" — overwhelmingly wiping away the voting rights of young voters and voters of color. In other words, voters who might be more likely to vote blue.

A technology glitch that halted voting in two Georgia counties on Tuesday morning was caused by a vendor uploading an update to their election machines the night before, a county election supervisor said.

Most election-tech equipment is the intellectual property of the companies that make it — meaning a contested election could get even more complicated.

"Keeping people from voting is suppression—whether it comes from literacy tests, men with guns, or just making things damn inconvenient. This is the raw logistics of democracy, the stuff that happens at the county and precinct level that determines the outcomes of American elections. So of course it goes awry. Like, all the time….One way to understand why people sometimes wait a long time to vote is by using a field of math called queueing theory. But to understand what causes the queues … ah, well, that fault lies along other lines..“Balking” is when people see how long a line is and decide not to bother; “reneging” is getting in line and then bailing out because the wait is too long….”

Instead of doomscrolling the horse race, you can feel just as bad watching these films about voter suppression. But you’ll be better informed. Don’t just get mad, vote. And then reform the system.

With voting in the 2020 election well underway across the country, Americans are anxious to make sure their choices are counted with as few problems as possible. Despite the mail-in and early voting processes appearing to go smoothly for the vast majority of people, there have been reports circulating on social media (as there have been in other election cycles) that have raised concerns.

Data circulating on the dark web could give hackers the ammunition they need to target voters and voting infrastructure ahead of election day, a new report claims.

On today's BradCast: Election 2020 is coming down to the wire, with the deadline for voting just days away and no small amount of chaos unleashed on the entire process by federal courts over the past several days. While the U.S. Supreme Court has invoked their so-called "Purcell Principle" in recent years, to prevent last-minute changes to even bad, suppressive election laws in order to avoid chaos, both SCOTUS and lower federal courts have been busy this week invoking invoking election chaos in several key battleground states. [Audio link to full show posted at bottom of summary.]

New York State law: 9 NYCRR 6210.19 (d) (1) expressly requires “[i]f the voter waiting time at an early voting site exceeds 30 minutes the Board of Elections shall deploy such additional voting equipment, election workers and other resources necessary to reduce the wait time to less than 30 minutes as soon as possible but no later than the beginning of the next day of early voting.”

NYTimes: How to Steal an Election: "“majority manufacturers” .. laid out two paths for stealing elections — steal the cast or steal the count...“Stealing the cast” on Election Day was a lot of work, much of it illegal and confrontational. “Stealing the count” was easier.

...In the 1876 election, while the Democrats decisively won the popular vote, Republican-controlled returning boards in disputed states used fraud, bribery and the U.S. Army to steal the count….To figure out who would win an election, wrote a furious Democrat watching Republicans inaugurate President “Ruther-fraud” B. Hayes, you needn’t predict the future: “You need only to know what kind of scoundrels constitute the returning boards.”

...perhaps all of this anxiety will focus our wandering attention back to neglected electoral practices, as it did after 1890. How elections work — once a powerfully unsexy topic — may well attract the vital interest of activists, donors and students once again"

[Comment: This interesting article talks about the history of “stealing the cast” - voter suppression, post office disruption, etc. It is silent on “Stealing the count” since the introduction of electronic voting machines and pollbooks. Since reform efforts after 1890 led to great reduction in voter fraud , it is almost non-existent today. On the other hand, election fraud in this electronic era is alive and well. Allegra Dengler]

Highlights:

• Reports of voter intimidation are popping up nationally in the form of emails, letters or poll watchers.

• New York's Attorney General Letitia James reminded voters of their rights, and what's illegal in New York when it comes to voter threats and intimidation.

• If you see prohibited conduct, you can call the Attorney General's Election Protection Hotline at 1-800-771-7755 or email election.hotline@ag.ny.gov.

The hacking group, Energetic Bear, is among Russia’s stealthiest. It appears to be casting a wide net to find useful targets ahead of the election, experts said.

Wednesday night, at a brief, hastily arranged press conference at FBI headquarters, four top US national security officials announced solemnly that they had evidence that two foreign adversaries, Iran and Russia, had obtained US voter data and appeared to be trying to spread disinformation about the election.

It was the latest—and most troubling—episode in a week that has seen near-daily events set off potential alarms about how the US will hold up on and approaching Election Day. In the final hours last Tuesday before the voter registration deadline in Virginia, an accidentally cut fiber-optic cable knocked out access to the state registration portal. The next morning, the New York Post published an odd, inconsistent, and poorly sourced story about Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian energy company Burisma that reeked of a ham-handed information operation. A day later came an extended outage of Twitter. Neither the Virginia cable cutting nor the Twitter outage was nefarious, though US officials continue to argue over the origins of the Burisma leaks

.This week, voters in states like Alaska and Florida began reporting threatening emails, purportedly from the white supremacist group Proud Boys, saying that the targeted Democratic voters should support Donald Trump—or else. National security officials soon confirmed that the emails appeared to originate with Iran—a revelation that led to Wednesday’s press conference.

FBI director Christopher Wray used the event to highlight how united and focused the nation’s security leadership is on protecting the election. “We are not going to let our guard down,” Wray said. Yet the emails and other episodes suggest that the presidential election is sure to be filled with more unexpected surprises and tense moments—and served as reminders of the myriad ways that the election could go wrong in the remaining weeks, days, and hours of the campaign.

Interviews and conversations with numerous election, law enforcement, and intelligence personnel over the last year have highlighted a dozen specific scenarios that particularly worry them as Election Day nears. The concerns roughly break down into two categories: technical attacks on data or access and online information operations.

Click here for a PDF of this information. Thanks to https://www.votingrightsalliance.org/forms-of-voter-suppression.

LOHUD: "Your absentee ballot will come with a return envelope, a security envelope and the ballot itself.

The instructions with your ballot will tell you to do the following, according to the state Board of Elections:

• Complete your ballot by filling in the bubble of your candidate of choice in each election. Make sure to pay attention to the instructions for each individual race on your ballot.

• Fold the completed ballot and put it in the security envelope. (The security envelope is the one with a place for your signature.)

• Sign and date the security envelope in the space designated for the voter's signature. (If you didn't require assistance to complete your ballot, you can ignore the other signature slot.)

• Seal the security envelope. (This is important!)

• Put the security envelope in the return envelope, which is the one that is addressed to your local board of elections. The return envelope should also be marked "Official Election Mail."

• Seal the return envelope.

• Return your ballot in the envelopes by mailing it in — make sure you apply a stamp! — or bringing it in person to your county board of elections office, an early voting site or an Election Day poll site.

Meet the deadlines”

Washington Post: "the anxiety level is through the roof…..There’s fear of neighbors: On Election Day, self-appointed guardians armed with assault weapons plan to take up positions outside local polling places. There’s fear of outsiders: A Ku Klux Klan group from out of state recently dropped racist fliers on the driveways of some homes with Biden signs on the lawns. And there’s fear of what’s coming Nov. 3: The county sheriff doesn’t have nearly enough deputies to keep eyes on all 149 polls....election officials in 3,141 counties must tally local ballots, a process that could be unusually lengthy this year, creating an opportunity for those who want to question or alter the outcome.”

The Atlantic: The Election That Could Break America

If the vote is close, Donald Trump could easily throw the election into chaos and subvert the result. Who will stop him?

Key Points:

"Legal teams on both sides are planning for simultaneous litigation, on the scale of Florida during the 2000 election, in multiple battleground states...Rival slates of electors could hold mirror-image meetings in Harris­burg, Lansing, Tallahassee, or Phoenix, casting the same electoral votes on opposite sides. ...This would be a genuine constitutional crisis, the first but not the last of the Interregnum. “Then we get thrown into a world where anything could happen,” Norm Ornstein says.

...Sixty-four days have passed since the election. Stalemate reigns. Two weeks remain until Inauguration Day...foley, who foresaw this impasse, knows of no solution. He cannot tell you how we avoid it under current law, or how it ends. It is not so much, at this point, a question of law. It is a question of power. Trump has possession of the White House. How far will he push boundaries to keep it, and who will push back? It is the same question the president has posed since the day he took office….

"The worst case for an orderly count is also considered by some election modelers the likeliest: that Trump will jump ahead on Election Night, based on in-person returns, but his lead will slowly give way to a Biden victory as mail-in votes are tabulated. ...The turbulence of that interval, fed by street protests, social media, and Trump’s desperate struggles to lock in his lead, can only be imagined. “Any scenario that you come up with will not be as weird as the reality of it,” the Trump legal adviser said….
"Suppose that caravans of Trump supporters, adorned in Second Amendment accessories, converge on big-city polling places on Election Day. They have come, they say, to investigate reports on social media of voter fraud. Counter­protesters arrive, fistfights break out, shots are fired, and voters flee or cannot reach the polls….

"Right now, the best we can do is an ad hoc defense of democracy. Begin by rejecting the temptation to think that this election will carry on as elections usually do. Something far out of the norm is likely to happen. Probably more than one thing. Expecting other­wise will dull our reflexes. It will lull us into spurious hope that Trump is tractable to forces that constrain normal incumbents.

If you are a voter, think about voting in person after all.

"In New York, a legal settlement this year between the state Board of Elections and the League of Women Voters requires counties to allow voters to fix certain mistakes before ballots are counted. "If there's an issue with your signature or you didn't seal your inner envelope or if you forgot to sign, those are all now curable issues in New York state," said Jennifer Wilson, deputy director of the League of Women Voters' New York chapter....In New York, each county handles the counting of absentees on their own, but days after Election Day."