Round of applause for Jmac, MAG, and all the other Pennsylvanians who carried the weight of the country on their shoulders in the last few days (admit it, you guys expected us to deliver. No pressure or anything 🙄)
We stayed up visualizing winning, doomscrolled in the middle of the night, checked our election ballot status repeatedly and stress ate ourselves through a whole bag of Dot’s pretzels and multiple cans of pringles. (It’s my weakness. So sue me.)
Didn’t I tell you Allegheny county would deliver for Biden/Harris? Didn’t I tell you that there weren’t enuf Trump nuggets in PA?
Was I overconfident? Maybe.
It was so damn stressful.
But we did it.
Now we can sleep.
Filed under: General |
The Confluence 
RD, thank you for your almost amazing reservoir of hopefulness throughout the last four years. And gratitude to the people of Pennsylvania, though we must admit that it was very close, and as of Tuesday night, it looked like we were in a dire situation. Much of that was because of the Republican legislature demanding that the mail-in votes not be counted until the end, otherwise we would have been ahead, and then sweated it out as the voting day Republican votes reduced our margin. But you did it in PA, and as we said, it all came down to that. It is not the Pennsylvania that I had been used to, where we won comfortably there; and I don’t know what has happened, but hopefully it will be easier next time.
Where was the race called for the general media?
I’m listening to msnbc. Biden is winning about 75% of all remaining mail in ballots. There are about 35000 ballots sequestered in Allegheny county. Background: the vendor that was printing and mailing ballots printed precincts out of sync for about 29,000 ballots. It turns out that the vendor was a Trumper. Flew a Trump flag at his company HQ. Allegheny county immediately fired the vendor and marked all 29000 ballots as invalid. All ballots had to be reissued for ballots printed on 9/28/2020 if they had the wrong precinct. My ballot was printed on that date but my precinct was correct so I wasn’t reissued a ballot. But the problem is that those ballots needed to be sequestered when they were returned. I’m guessing they did this in order to sort through any incorrect ballots that were sent in earlier. So now those ballots and some other ones are ready to be scanned. Probably will be scanned at about 5pm tonight.
Then there are the ballots that were postmarked on 11/3 but arrived 11/4-11/6. These ballots were also sequestered so as to prevent them from tainting the on time ballots. Here’s the rationale behind that: some Supreme Court justices had hinted that if some of the late ballots had the possibility of changing the outcome of the election, they could possibly be thrown out. If the state had lumped all the ballots together, the Trump campaign might have challenged them because it wouldn’t be known whether the additional late ballots would put Biden over the top. So the late ballots were sequestered and will be counted separately.
The count right now is based on ballots that were received on time and the 35000 ballots in Allegheny county that included the 29000 reissued ballots will be run this evening.
With Biden taking so many of the mail in ballots, it’s unlikely that Trump will be able to take the lead. Biden’s numbers are only likely to increase all day and the 35k from Allegheny will put a nail in it.
Thank you, PA!
Now we can all sleep.
Sweet dreams, everyone.
I am so happy today. I even danced a quiet jig in the empty women’s restroom at work…thank god those floors are solid concrete!
Yay Pennsylvania and Georgia! We still have work to do in Georgia, because if both senate seats become D, we have real opportunity to improve the lives of our country’s people!