Pardon my ignorance but I just went to place a £2 bet (minimum) on Biden "Back All" at 1.07. Does that mean when Betfair DOES pay out, I will make a profit of 14p?
I'm German, I get a 404 on the original post - what is the exact wording of the bet?
That Biden does not get elected President, or that he gets elected by the EC but effectively not assumes the office of President (e.g. due to a putsch/other form of emergency law, a SC decision, being arrested, being assassinated, dying of coronavirus, the EC election being delayed/cancelled due to coronavirus...)?
“This market will be settled according to the candidate that has the most projected Electoral College votes won at the 2020 presidential election. Any subsequent events such as a ‘faithless elector’ will have no effect on the settlement of this market. In the event that no Presidential candidate receives a majority of the projected Electoral College votes, this market will be settled on the person chosen as President in accordance with the procedures set out by the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
This market will be void if an election does not take place in 2020. If more than one election takes place in 2020, then this market will apply to the first election that is held.
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Betfair takes its commission as a percentage of the profit that one has made in a given market rather as a percentage of a bet size, so it's always worth making a bet on a certain event. Usually by the end of an in-play sporting event, one will find that there is no liquidity available to bet for the likely winner or against the likely loser (and draw if applicable) at any price (their lowest price is 1.01 BTW).
In this case, there are clearly people who are still willing to bet against (lay) a Biden Presidency, at very long odds. This is presumably either because they believe that the price adequately compensates for the low probability of it not happening, or to hedge risk that they have accumulated taking other positions while trading in this market (more likely IMHO).
One other factor is the cost of carry - while money is tied up in a bet it can't be used for anything else, including other betting strategies that might have a higher expected profit. In this case, if one has already made a profit betting for a Biden Presidency at longer odds than 1.07, it might now be worthwhile to pay someone else the slight risk premium to take up ones position until settlement, so that one can lock in the profit and move onto other things.
Yeah, but that was close. Florida was determined by around 500 votes and determined the president. There was no winner declared by the AP.
This is a completely different situation.
Trump needs Pennsylvania AND Nevada AND Georgia AND Arizona to flip. All those states have margins of 10,000+ in Biden's favor. The election is over.
This is just a long ego-cushioning landing for reality for a large number of people. The baseless claims will be tossed and there will be more ugly accusations, but it's basically over other than a bunch of bellyaching.
So he'll need to undo 45,103 and counting PA votes, plus let's go with the smaller two[0] and say 14,746 votes and counting in AZ plus 12,425 votes and counting in GA. All of this based entirely on votes received on or before Election Day, not even counting late-arriving ballots.
It seems hard to see how he's going to have more than 72k ballots disqualified, all of which happen to be for his opponent.
537 votes on butterfly ballots in Florida this is not.
0. In Nevada, Biden has a 36,186 vote lead and counting, greater than his lead in both Arizona and Georgia combined.
This is what I keep going back to. We're not really in new territory. Challenges will be raised and either accepted or rejected. We'll know for certain whose is president soon enough. My guess is things won't change from what they are now, but I've been wrong many times when it comes to US politics.
This is very much different for a few reasons. First of all, the issue is purported wide-spread fraudulent activities, of which there is no evidence. Second of all, we're not talking a few hundred votes in a single county of a single state. We're looking at multiple routes to defeat for Trump by thousands or ten's of thounsands of votes.
Effectively what this is, is yet another misinformation campaign by our President who refuses to accept what is happening. That said, he's technically in his right to ask for recounts and file lawsuits.
This is actually a little more interesting than I originally assumed as the rules clearly state, "This market will be settled according to the candidate that has the most projected Electoral College votes won at the 2020 presidential election."
So they don't care about who actually ends up president. This is a pure bet on the voting results. I guess they think it prudent to wait and see if the Trump lawsuits hold any merit in the eyes of the courts.
Exactly, previous elections were fairly predictable in what states each candidate would win. In the past, elections had been predicted incorrectly. Some may not know this, but the Chicago Tribune (in)famously preprinted copies stating that Dewey had defeated Truman in part due to the state-of-the-art election predictions which were straw poles. Ironic that Gallop rose to prominence from this situation and now history repeats itself in a way (meaning that if the poles were correct this election would have been called on election day).
The bet is for "next president" not "declared election winner", and not "electoral college vote winner". Don't be surprised if it doesn't pay till inauguration.
Edit: Nevermind. Just read the rules and it does say it's based on the projected winner. This is very misleading and very bizarre.
Yeah when I first saw the betting market for "next president" and Kamala was 1000/1 I dreamt up scenarios of how a Biden win followed by some sudden illness between now and Jan could cause it and it raised an eyebrow over market settlement. Tho I also never looked into the actual rules
there about 6 more weeks of the election. Pennsylvania’s process is currently being requested for review by multiple states, because of the following:
“Pennsylvana's high court ruled Thursday that election officials cannot discard mail ballots solely because of questions about the authenticity of a voter's signature; that ballots postmarked by Election Day and received by Friday, Nov. 6 at 5 p.m. will be counted; that third parties cannot deliver people's ballots; and that counties can use dropboxes or other official addresses for voters to return ballots to, among other decisions."
So the author turned up a grand total of... 5 "dead" voters, in a state where biden has a lead of 148,635 votes. That's unlikely to make a difference. The comments to that post also said it was likely a data-entry/clerical error, which makes the story even worse.
>Basic argument is the house sets the rules. Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court had not right to extend the deadline.
I find this argument unconvincing. Laws set by the state legislature is normally bound by the courts. If we go with the literal interpretation, it would also mean that the legislature can enact a law saying "only white men can vote" and the courts wouldn't be able to do anything about it.
I’m not arguing one way or another, just stating what is going on. It’s amazing how much heat I’ve been getting for sharing the news.
The issue is the PA house didn’t break any laws with their voting laws. The PA Supreme Court did however change the intent of a law. Again, not arguing. Before the election the Supreme Court Requested separating the ballots so they could later reverse if necessary. They were split 4-4 on the issue last time, presumably it could be 5-4 this time. Hence betting markets are still up in the air.
Regarding “convincing” the Michigan data. point is it doesn’t need to be convincing to overturn an election, but should be reviewed. And it likely will.
Technically, the election isn't over until the votes are certified by each of the states. Probably smart not to pay out until the process has fully played out. Not that the election results will change but some of the bets were for over a million dollars.
[1]
https://ballotpedia.org/How_and_when_are_election_results_fi...
But what does it mean in practice? Do they say who they consider the authority for the projection? For instance to this day Biden is projected to win Arizona by Fox News and AP but not by other media organizations like CNN.
Book makers in general are pretty comfortable with low odds risk. It's kind of their business.
In this case I suspect the only reason they haven't settled the market is to avoid causing a scene with people laying bets against Trump, not because they genuinely believe there is any chance of it going the other way.
Traditional bookmakers have already paid out, including Paddypower who are part of the same group "Paddypowerbetfair".
The certification process is what gives you the projected electoral college votes. Many states aren’t even done counting the initial vote yet, let alone having recounted or certified so I don’t get how anyone could have a reasonable expectation of getting paid already.
> The certification process is what gives you the projected electoral college votes.
Not the way “projected electoral votes” has ever been used in the past in the context of US Presidential elections, but I will grant that the BetFair bets terms are imprecise enough that they could mean anything.
Projected Electoral College votes could still be based on post-certified results from the states. The projection they're talking about might be the projection of who the electors would vote for (so ignoring faithless electors who could be bribed), rather than the projection of who the electors would be.
It also fails to define what projection it is based on (so it could be ‘projected by Donald J Trump’ for all that is specified), and further says: “If there is any material change to the established role or any ambiguity as to who occupies the position, then Betfair may determine, using its reasonable discretion, how to settle the market based on all the information available to it at the relevant time. Betfair reserves the right to wait for further official announcements before the market is settled.”
The media industrial complex doesn’t declare the president. The electoral college does, and not for about a month. This simple fact seems to have been forgotten by the entire world.
It has not been forgotten by anyone. This election has gone much like every election in recent history: Once enough of the vote was counted to make the outcome clear, the media has projected a winner based on the results in each state and the laws of those states regarding the selection of electors.
But the outcome isn’t clear. A few states aren’t done counting votes, there will be recounts in others, and a few lawsuits alleging improprieties have been filed. These are all factual events that have nothing to do with Trump being a “sore loser” or whatever else nonsense.
I fully expect to be downvoted into oblivion, as usual on HN, where pointing out facts contrary to the desired narrative are unwelcome. Even dispassionately describing the political process is apparently partisan now.
Enough have finished to give Biden 270 electoral votes.
> there will be recounts in others,
Those aren't going to change results. At a state presidential level, a recount might adjust a margin of victory by ~1,000 votes. The margins in those states that have been called are above that level.
> a few lawsuits alleging improprieties have been filed
And several of them have failed summary judgement because the Republicans couldn't build enough of a case to sustain them.
The election happened a week ago. I think we can afford to wait a month for a proper investigation. More importantly, a pretty sizable portion of the population thinks there is something strange about the results.
Now, you can just stick your fingers in your ears and call 71 million people stupid, or you can recognize that for the health of the democratic system, it’s best to investigate any anomalies. This shouldn’t be a controversial opinion, but apparently in these hyper partisan times, it is.
I don't think 71 million people are stupid. They're being lied to - being told that these kinds of anomalies, which happen every election year, are unprecedented and we can't be confident in the result until they're fully investigated. (There's no reason investigations into problems can't continue after everyone acknowledges the result!)
If I were confident that a month of preemptive investigations would lead to greater confidence, I'd be all in favor. But this seems unlikely, because so many of the people pushing for investigations have already declared the only result they'll accept. What seems much more likely is a repeat of 2000, where trust in the electoral system is shattered, and a huge chunk of the losing party starts to argue that any election which didn't go their way was corruptly stolen from them.
In the past, the incidents of fraudulent voting occurs at roughly 1 vote per 10 million - 1 billion. (Vote-by-mail is at the high end of that range; in-person-vote is at the low end). In modern times--that is, since 2000--I'm not aware of a single election where fraud was sufficient to change the results of the election, and I'm including that 2018 North Carolina race in that list [1].
To allege that there was sufficient fraud to overturn the results of this election requires fraud to exist at over 1000× the rate it has normally existed. Consequently, the evidence needed to sustain this allegation should be 1000× as prevalent. However, the claimed evidence is no better than it usually is. You get the same, tired complaints about things like out-of-state mail ballots from people who forget that students and military (and indeed the sitting president!) are legal residents of states they do not presently physically reside in.
[1] The number of allegedly fraudulent ballots in that race is close to the margin of victory for the Republican candidate, but my guesstimate is that if the fraud hadn't happened, then the Republican still would have won, just by a very close margin.
I don’t know how past instances of fraud are relevant. This election had an immensely high percentage of mail in votes. By definition it is not like past elections.
Also, finding errors has already overturned numerous representative races. This is a factual thing. It’s not Donald Trump throwing a fit.
The people saying there are no legitimate issues to investigate are delusional and it’s dangerous for democracy.
Just in case you aren't aware, "one" isn't typically contained within the definition of "numerous".
And, that's not a story detailing fraud. A Republican put in the results incorrectly, a Democrat noticed the error, and it was corrected, changing the results of a local election from a Democrat winning to a Republican winning.
If the Democrats were really looking to perpetuate fraud, they could have just turned a blind eye to the error. But they didn't. Because this is America, and here, right matters.
> I don’t know how past instances of fraud are relevant. This election had an immensely high percentage of mail in votes.
And as I mentioned, historical fraud rates for mail-in votes is on the order of 1 in 10s of millions. This includes states that conduct their entire election by mail, e.g., Oregon.
> Also, finding errors has already overturned numerous representative races. This is a factual thing. It’s not Donald Trump throwing a fit.
Which ones? You're saying it so authoritatively, you should be be able to provide a precise, verifiable list to back up your claims.
That’s one local race with a tiny margin and reading the story shows no hint of malice and that the system worked:
“A Republican city clerk supervised a vote count that wrongly gave victory to a Democrat, after which a Democratic county clerk's staff caught the error and requested a correction from the Republican city clerk, handing the win to a Republican.”
This kind of thing happens every election and it’s rare that it has even this much impact at the local level. It’s never been anywhere near the level of impacting a lead like Biden has in multiple states.
Trump needs to invalidate a city’s worth of people in PA AND tens of thousands of AZ, GA, and NV votes to win. There’s not even the slightest evidence of fraud on that scale and the stuff they’re doing trying to invalidate military ballots might get them into triple digits but they need 5-6 digit changes.
Edit: here’s a great example - they’re litigating in Maricopa county over at most a couple hundred votes, and there’s no expectation that all of them will go their way. Trump is behind by 14k votes in Arizona so even if they got a total win they’d need to do this many dozens of times.
> Now, you can just stick your fingers in your ears and call 71 million people stupid
The _vast_ majority of those 71 million aren't claiming that there's a problem. Certainly, there are some conspiracy theorists amongst them, and I'd be comfortable calling them stupid, yes.
The outcome is quite clear. While there are still some votes left to count, there are not enough to shift the margin of victory for Joe Biden in the states that matter. The lawsuits are becoming an embarrassment and recounts never shift the totals significantly; given the fact that the morons on team Trump spent months telegraphing this move everyone was prepared for it and so I expect there was extra diligence in getting an accurate count -- a recount will not make major changes to the total. These are facts.
That's how "norms" work, though. It is almost certain that at least one candidate has been cheated out of the presidency, but he chose to not fight so soon after the civil war, to avoid enflaming tensions.
Nothing is official-official until December 13, so he has the right to pursue whatever remedies he wishes in the meantime, but the lack of trust he is fomenting right now, today, is harmful to America, and that's running counter to long-established norms.
Yeah, but the South got Reconstructed ended out of it. Basically, the United States turned a blind eye to Jim Crow to avoid getting close to another war.
The simple fact is that this has been the way for every other election in recent history. No, "the media industrial complex" doesn't determine the winner, but they are fully capable of declaring who is going to win based on the current vote totals.
Expecting anything other than the counts as they are at the end of canvassing to be certified is basically declaring sedition at this point.
The electoral college is chosen by the voters in each state, and enough electoral votes have been clearly decided in the preliminary counts that we know who the president will be.
It is possible that the preliminary counts will be changed before the official counts are declared, but ever since the mass adoption of optical scan ballots after the debacle of 2000, recounts just haven't moved the dial enough to affect the presidential election.
The losing side this year is extremely butthurt about having lost the election, and is filing lawsuits to contest it. However, these lawsuits are so without merit that they aren't even surviving summary judgement, which is an amazingly low legal bar to clear. Saying you had video evidence of a poll worker brutally murdering anyone who voted for Trump would be sufficient justification to survive summary judgement, to give you an idea of just how low a bar it is.
> This market will be settled according to the candidate that has the most projected Electoral College votes won at the 2020 presidential election. Any subsequent events such as a ‘faithless elector’ will have no effect on the settlement of this market. In the event that no Presidential candidate receives a majority of the projected Electoral College votes, this market will be settled on the person chosen as President in accordance with the procedures set out by the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
My guess would be that even though they view faithless electors as 'subsequent events' they still view the outcome of Trump's legal challenges as part of the election proper.
I'm guessing that just means "the number of electoral votes each candidate is projected to receive based on the certified election results, without regard for faithless electors."
Interesting. The entire site is geoblocked with this message
Why can I not access Betfair?
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I'm not aware of any legislative changes that occurred around that time that would cause this, does anyone have any other ideas?
> Paddy Power, BF [Betfair] acquirer, handles the betting for the BC Lottery; and as such is specifically precluded from offering bookmaking on its own.
But before this, BF had made the strategic decision of leaving all gray areas-- countries where it and/or betting wasn't specifically allowed. For one, jurisdictions where it was specifically allowed or applying to be-- could use such a violation as grounds for denial...US / NJ one example for sure. And in Canada sports betting is actually illegal, notwithstanding that the government will not go after individual players and hardly ever bothers any corporation.
At the end of 2015, Betfair merged with Paddy Power who help(ed) the British Columbia Lottery Corporation run the BC lottery so maybe there was a conflict of interest or inability to easily offer bookmaking services there at the same time?
Trump and his lawyers are learning something. The difference between civil and criminal lawsuits. You can badger average citizens with civil lawsuits all day, running them out of money until they can't fight anymore and just give up. Then, despite not actually having gone to court, you declare victory.
That does not work in a criminal court. You kind of need an actual crime. And proof of that crime. More than "I believe this to be true." No court in this land will take a case where the charge is "Can you see if they committed crime?"
No, that's your job as the person bringing the case.
While there may still be some votes to be counted and lawsuits to be settled, even without those, Biden has the most votes and electoral college people at the moment; even if the lawsuits are successful, they only cover a handful of votes, nowhere near the amount needed to flip the vote.
But, for betting purposes, I too would hold off with paying out until everything is properly finalized. What if one of the candidates suddenly keels or withdraws before the changeover? If the betting company has to reverse course, they could end up in court and end up paying tons.
foreigner here. it is crazy to see that americans do not know when is the official result of their own election and what is written in their own constitution.
That leads me to the second question. In europe we learn history at school and in books but most of my encounters with educated americans led them to recommend me some hollywood movies to learn about some specific events of their history.
I feel the television has a huge importance in this country and the fact that millions of americans consider it the source of truth even to declare who is the winner of the most important event of their lives strikes me as unbelievable.
That's not my lived experience here in New England. We were taught from history books in school. My friends still read now. We turn to researched-based election projections that are not directly tied to network news as we wait until the States certify their vote counts in due time.
As a British subject, it's not surprising though. We are taught a lot of things about Americans which turn out not to be true, that you learn history via movies is one of these things that gets said now and again.
I was chatting to someone the other day and asked if she'd been to America. No, she said, I can't stand Americans.
Do you know any Americans, I asked. Of course she didn't but she has been to Canada and asked if I had.
No, said I, I can't stand Canadians. She looked at me as if that was a ridiculous statement before realising I was being sarcastic. Go figure?
I live in the us and my experience is not only with 1 american but a majority of the americans I encountered (even ones educated at MIT or even in geopolitics at Georgetown), I feel that if we need to learn from movies we should all rewatch videodrome and think about the consequences of having partisan media.
Also I was not implying that you do not have books in america... But you can just see in this comment section (where most of the people are educated) that most of the replies hints that they do not understand the election process hence backing my statement.
The movies are obviously PC-Washing all history just like you removed your statues you are removing from your intellect everything that is not consensually approved and history has a lot that this new horde of censors of the good will not like. and the proof is that most the people reading this will downvote me using those censoring tools to destroy an opinion that they do not approve.
What is breathtaking is to read comments like "wasnt the election done?" purely because you want to win and hate the system when it doesn't play in your favor.
I mean, if your argument is that we have uninformed people in America, I certainly won't disagree.
That's different from the argument that "Americans don't understand civics because they watch movies instead of reading history books" which is frankly absurd and offensive.
I'm not convinced that the number of civically-uninformed people is particularly higher in America when compared to elsewhere in the world. If you have data to that effect, please share it.
For all intents and purposes the election is done. The votes have been cast and with most of them counted, Biden has won by a wide enough margin that sporadic concerns about voter fraud is not going to change it.
Americans who are pushing back against Trump's reticence to concede are not doing so not because they believe that TV decides who is elected, but because it's a bald-faced attempt at a coup. Trump has every right to challenge the results in court, but if there was actual evidence of widespread election irregularities, it would have been presented by now.
"I'm not convinced that the number of civically-uninformed people is particularly higher in America "
I am convinced it is the case and it is because you guys totally eliminated debate from the public landscape and even more the media landscape.
I was watching US election at the same time on a french channel vs an US channel. I was pretty sure the level of understanding and debate would be higher on the US channel (and I checked a few of them) but was astonished to see that actually there wasn't any real concrete and intelligent political analysis (ok just one on numbers using stats) or even one ounce of debate while on the french channel the debate invited experts, was intelligent, one side was conceiding things to trump and the others one fighting it using arguments rather than emotions.
It is just mindblowing as an outsider to see that you totally removed debate from the equation and that any kind of debate/analysis is perceived as criticism or even worse racism/[add any bad word there] if it concedes things to trump.
Let me get this straight: you're saying that Americans are too reliant on television for information, and to support your analysis you're watching cable news?
We can both agree that there should be more healthy debate, both in general and in the media. So far though your argument has been that Americans are less civically-minded, and your supporting evidence has been a few people you talked to who mentioned movies and watching American infotainment television.
This isn't a particularly useful or interesting conversation for me at this point, so I'm going to go back to work. Thanks!
Because in practically all previous elections (except for maybe 2000), the declaration of the media was the end of the process. We never had every vote counted by that point, but we did know who won based on the counts that had come in and math. This year the count was just slower due to so much mail-in balloting, which everyone was warned about. The "official" election was simply a rubber stamp.
This whole thing with lawsuits is just Trump throwing a tantrum that he lost.
it's largely because many US schools focus almost entirely on historical events, rather than functional interpretation and study of the constitution and legal system from the perspective of current modern society.
Both are necessary, our education system heavily leans to the historical side.
> I feel the television has a huge importance in this country and the fact that millions of americans consider it the source of truth even to declare who is the winner of the most important event of their lives strikes me as unbelievable.
Huh? What's the preferred european medium? Smoke signal?
Waiting for TV networks to call elections is not the same as having people watch TV in Europe. Getting angry at Fox News for calling Arizona is, for example, quite strange for me, because in my opinion, news networks shouldn't "call" the elections.
> Getting angry at Fox News for calling Arizona is, for example, quite strange for me, because in my opinion, news networks shouldn't "call" the elections.
I think you're misunderstanding what it means to "call" the election. Fox News calling Arizona for Biden didn't make Biden the winner of Arizona. It merely meant that Fox News was confident that Biden won the election in Arizona.
And yes, getting angry at Fox News for calling Arizona was strange.
They media makes election calls in Europe too. If you don't understand how election reporting works in either Europe or America maybe you shouldn't be trying to smugly lecture other people.
In case you don't believe me here is the BBC calling the general election for Boris before the votes were done counting:
from what I can tell is many schools stopped teaching what we used to call 'civics' classes. in that class you would learn things like this. so that people have a poor understanding is because they are reading the cliff notes of the cliff notes.
American here. This process is fairly normal and we will know the actual outcome once the electors vote. In many elections we know early on election day because the winners lead is really clear.
I also learned history from books and not movies. I would still recommend some movies to someone who wants to learn the basics in a couple hours, but movies always take liberties with the truth in order to tell a story.
A federation of states is a fairly convoluted way to organize a government. Unitary states are without a doubt, simpler. But, simplicity was never, and still isn’t, a top priority.
The priority was for the member states to have control over parts of the elections process.
Germany is a federation too and doesn’t have this problem. American elections are stuck with 18th century assumptions because the ruling parties have no incentives to fix them together.
I don’t know much about Germany’s elections, but from the Wikipedia page, it sounds like their constituent states have much less power to set election rules than states in the US.
Yes, but it is as-designed, and only affects our presidential elections. Sometimes the US acts as a single nation, and sometimes it acts as a federation of states. In this case it's the latter.
American media will only project the winner of an election once a sufficient number of votes are tallied that the outcome is clear. The alternative would be to wait for weeks until all ballots (absentee/mail-in, overseas/military, provisional, etc.) are counted.
For us, we wait until every vote is counted, so we usually only know the result for sure the next morning. We "only" have 10m people, but I would expect the amount of election workers to scale linearly with the amount of people, so I'd expect the duration to be fairly constant even with larger populations.
Let's say it takes ~12 hours to tally ballots for your country (results are available the next morning). We have ~330M people in the USA, so if it scales linearly, the full count would take ~16.5 days.
For what it's worth, most of the "long tail" time in counting votes in the US is due to special circumstances, like mail-in ballots which were damaged during delivery and need to be transcribed onto a new form before they can be run through the counting machines.
Either way, projections are a fairly simple statistical exercise. Once enough votes from a district have been tallied such that you are confident that the statistical error wouldn't change the outcome, you can project a winner for that district. That is, if you collect a statistically significant sample such that your error is +/-X%, and a given candidate is winning by more than X%, you can project them as the winner.
Most Americans consider the official certification of the election to be a formal ceremony, not an active part of the process. It's like pointing out that the UK Prime Minister is actually appointed at the Queen's sole discretion.
We don't teach our kids anything about how our government is structured, or why its put together that way, anymore. "Civics" is too boring and besides, diffuse, nameless feudalism is really what we want now anyway, so ignorant peasants will be in demand.
I am not an expert on the curricula of all 50 states, but I am not aware of any that do not include civics. Either as a separate course, or as a part of their social studies curriculum.
The electoral college is definitely well covered in every grade school social studies curriculum in the US.
Although, the median American learned those facts ~25 years ago at a time in their lives when they were too young to vote and politics was probably not an important part of their lives.
By comparison, movies are a lot more accessible, recent, and engaging.
That's a silly take IMO. I don't know where you're from but news outlet projections are taken as the de-facto actual result of the elections until the official counts are certified, often days or even weeks later. Note that these projections (in France and the USA) come from official, if only partial ballot counts.
The only actual decision the news outlets have to make is to decide when to call the win when they judge that the winner is statistically almost impossible to change.
In France for instance we get the first projections at 8PM sharp, once the last voting places close. Nobody, including the politicians involved, wait until the the final count to concede or celebrate their results.
The only "americanism" I can see here is this odd electoral college system that leads to absurd situations where ~100k people effectively decide the elections for everybody else, while hundreds of millions in non-swing-states effectively don't count. If there's something worthy of scorn and foreign arrogance, it's probably that.
that you want the electoral college of the united states to become the electoral college of the united new york and california is one belief that do not align with the idea of what is america. once again something you can learn in history books.
And no in france no media will declare a winner before being sure of it or they will withdraw it as soon as they see that the race isnt finished. again history should have taught them to be more prudent (gore/bush) but as they are partisan media they are just entitled to win.
I can't really come up with a reply to your comment that won't start a flame war. It's clear that the crux of the issue here is that you consider that at this very moment the American presidential race isn't "finished" and that it's partisan to say that it is. If you really believe that saying that Biden won the election is a partisan issue I don't think anything I could say would sway you at this point.
I would just like to point out that in 2000 Bush won Florida by 537 votes, currently Biden is ahead by over 10k votes in all the contested states, and even if the projections were wrong for any single one of them he would still win the electoral college. I do think the news outlets learned from 2000, otherwise they'd have called the race as soon as Pennsylvania and Georgia flipped. The situation is really not comparable to 2000 where the news networks called Florida for Gore before the last polling stations had even closed in the state[1].
Now if it turns out that there was indeed fraud then of course it could overturn everything, but not having any conclusive evidence of anything it makes sense for news outlets to proceed as usual I think. I mean even Fox News called the race at this point...
But even if we ignore these current events I still maintain that it's silly to expect the media (and all observers, including internationally) not to call the race when the numbers show that there's a clear winner. Maybe sometimes they'll get it wrong, but what's the alternative? Pretend that there's no winner for weeks waiting for the official count and you don't see the writing on the wall and precluding all analysis of the results? That would be rather silly.
I'm sorry, are you actually suggesting that US schools don't teach history or civics? Based entirely on your experience of Americans recommending movies to you?
It would be tempting to suggest that European schools fail to teach critical thinking, but I'll resist that urge, as it's obviously unfair. Your comment doesn't suggest to me a failure of European schools, the problem is likely much more specific.
It's a mess. School kids really should learn the US constitution, but somehow that doesn't sink in and the pop culture does. People honestly didn't think Alexander Hamilton was an important figure until "Hamilton" came out.
Then they rely on media to tell them everything. Usually that's fine when it's straight factual news, but there's been a lot of spin in the news recently.
IMO the clearest indicator of what’s going to happen is that Israel’s Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia’s MBS have both congratulated Biden.
These two leaders are Trump buddies. Their intelligence services are top of the world. They wouldn’t make the call unless their intelligence was crystal clear that Trump doesn’t have a chance.
Even Fox News is distancing themselves from Trump & co now, interrupting his (campaign team's) speech when they bring up election fraud - instead of doubling down on the accusations like they would be expected to.
Rats leaving the sinking ship, I'm guessing. They know it's over, and that the lawsuits are formalities at best (often dealing concretely with just dozens of lost ballots and the like, although Pennsylvania's lawsuit could still be interesting (they want the mail-in ballots received after the 3rd (but postmarked at or before the 3rd) to be dismissed. It won't change the election results at all though, those votes have already been kept separate and not yet considered, pending the lawsuit.
They're not basing their congratulations on any special intelligence. They're literally just looking at the same public numbers every one else has that show Biden with an insurmountable lead in >270 EC votes worth of states.
It doesn't help when major newspapers like the NY Times publish[1] (and then delete) garbage messages like:
> “The role of declaring the winner of a presidential election in the U.S. falls to the news media. The broadcast networks and cable news outlets have vowed to be prudent. He’s how it will work,”
I put money on Biden in the EU at a promised return rate of 1.6 with a Malta based company called betway. The bet was cancelled in the election night shortly after midnight EU, while polls were still open. Odds first went down to 1.57, then 1.53, then 1.50. I guess they saw "irregular betting patterns" and pulled an emergency brake.
No communication from them either. Took a few days to get my money back.
I tried to find info on this online but can't find anything and want to mention it in a post. Any chance you can expand on this or point me to a discussion on the topic?
I tried to find info on this online but can't find anything and want to mention it in a post. Any chance you can expand on this or point me to a discussion on the topic?
Betting is still opened and the odds are roughly 1 vs 10, meaning if you bet £1 on Trump and he makes it you will earn £10 back.
It's normal for betting to continue after the end of an event. Usually the odds are reaching 1 vs 98 toward the end, because the betting platform is limiting the multiplier to about that and because there's actually money to make there in the last few percents.
Things do happen in the last second and results do change after a match (goal in the last second in football, horse falling in horse racing, candidate disqualified, re-scoring). For this event it's relatively normal for the betting company to wait until the candidate is in the white house before redistributing the money.
What is unusual here is for the odds to be this close this late in the game. We're at a fairly late point in the election when the outcome is relatively settled, is there 10% chance for trump to win?
The money is real, indicating there are many people who think so. Yes you (and 9 other people) could bet £1 on Biden and hope to make £1.10 back, because there's one person on the other side willing to bet £1 on Trump hoping to make £10 back.
P.S. Betfair is not open to US users (not legal in the US). Don't try to open an account, you will be blocked when you try to open the account or when you try to credit it.
Some more information the reader may find of interest.
Betting exchanges have market makers and heavy automated trading, just like financial exchanges. The price is arbitraged and adjusted in real time between the different exchanges.
The two biggest exchanges after betfair are smarkets and bet365. The first closed the market and redistributed the money. The second didn't seem to accept betting on the US election.
It means that the betfair market is in free wheel, no more connected to the rest of the world, it can effectively show any price.
Trump's odds have actually gone up since the media called it. He's at 11% now. (Source https://electionbettingodds.com/ )
CNN flipped back Wisconsin to uncalled recently.
He's on pace to win Arizona. And has a non zero chance to have some of the late ballots thrown out in Pennsylvania.
Two of the swing states, have key ridings with a history of corrupt and stupid leadership. Its a bad combination that gives Trump a betting chance.
Example, former Mayor Kilpatrick in Detroit was sentenced to 28 years for blatantly obvious self enrichment schemes.
People betting on Trump now are, are hedging on the "count all votes" mantra, even if good intentioned, led to ballots counted, that should not have been, and he can prove that in court.
> Wisconsin is now marked as flip on the map on cnn's website
“Flip” is a state called in 2020 for the opposite party that won it in 2016; it's an indicator of changes in the electoral map. Wisconsin has been marked that way from when it was first called.
From the page you cited:
"Flipped seat" denotes a race where the 2020 projected winner is from a different party than the previous winner or incumbent.
You're probably right. I misread that. Sorry.
However a gap of only 20k votes. 99% votes in out of 3.2 mil So up to ~300K still left to count.
And still conceivable it could flip on recount if its close.
> However a gap of only 20k votes. 99% votes in out of 3.2 mil So up to ~300K still left to count.
No, 1% of 3.2 million is 32,000 not ~300,000.
So, to make up a 20K deficit, the remaining ballots would need to break about 4:1 for Trump. (And the realistic shift for a recount is small enough, that it isn't meaningfully different if you were only concerned with what it would take for it to be within that range, either.)
> And still conceivable it could flip on recount if its close.
Sure, if it was within a couple hundred votes, it might. But it isn't, and it won't be.
> And still conceivable it could flip on recount if its close.
No, no it will not. Here is the REPUBLICAN former governor of Wisconsin explaining why a recount won't change anything. The last two recounts changed the margin by 300 and 131 votes respectively. Nowhere close to the 20k required.
I just spoke to them. Wankers. They are basing it on the projected results, and are waiting for recounts. I asked what would happen if another recount was ordered in another state while the market was still in play, and they said "We'll take it into consideration" So basically, its going to come down to a judgement call by BetFair. They will pretty much be able to call it however they want, as they get to decide which states are still in play.
When I placed my bets, it was over the phone. I asked for "Donald Trump to Win" and the response was pretty much something like "Bet placed for Next president @ the odds"
The fine print will fuck you, but I expect a total shit-storm over this. IMHO I dont beleive the bets they are currently taking are in good faith, because I can't see any path for Trump to win, even if he wins the states still in play.
151 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 229 ms ] threadSurely not?
That Biden does not get elected President, or that he gets elected by the EC but effectively not assumes the office of President (e.g. due to a putsch/other form of emergency law, a SC decision, being arrested, being assassinated, dying of coronavirus, the EC election being delayed/cancelled due to coronavirus...)?
“This market will be settled according to the candidate that has the most projected Electoral College votes won at the 2020 presidential election. Any subsequent events such as a ‘faithless elector’ will have no effect on the settlement of this market. In the event that no Presidential candidate receives a majority of the projected Electoral College votes, this market will be settled on the person chosen as President in accordance with the procedures set out by the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
This market will be void if an election does not take place in 2020. If more than one election takes place in 2020, then this market will apply to the first election that is held.
10/03/2020 10:30am – Once voting (whether postal, electronic or at the ballot box) begins in the year 2020 for the US Presidential Election 2020, the election will be deemed to have taken place for the purposes of this market. We will then settle the market as per our rules regardless of whether the election process is fully completed in 2020 or beyond.
If there is any material change to the established role or any ambiguity as to who occupies the position, then Betfair may determine, using its reasonable discretion, how to settle the market based on all the information available to it at the relevant time. Betfair reserves the right to wait for further official announcements before the market is settled.
Betfair expressly reserves the right to suspend and/or void any and all bets on this market at any time if Betfair is not satisfied (in its absolute discretion) with the certainty of the outcome.
Additional candidates may be added to this market on request.
Please note that candidates in this market will not be partially settled and will remain in the market until it is fully settled. This is to allow customers to continue trading candidates that they have positions on and because each candidate is still a valid runner in this market.
Customers should be aware that:
Transmissions described as “live” by some broadcasters may actually be delayed.
The extent of any such delay may vary, depending on the set-up through which they are receiving pictures or data.
Please note, due to internal administrative procedures, the indicated start date/time of this market is subject to change. This will have no impact on settlement as detailed in our market specific rules. Any changes to the start time/date will be recorded in the market rules. 16:00 17/06/2020 –Market rules have been updated to reflect new information above..
If any candidate withdraws for any reason, including death, all bets on the market will stand and be settled as per the defined rules (Updated - 20/06/2020)
The start time has been changed to reflect the first polls opening on Election Day Updated 02/11/2020
In this case, there are clearly people who are still willing to bet against (lay) a Biden Presidency, at very long odds. This is presumably either because they believe that the price adequately compensates for the low probability of it not happening, or to hedge risk that they have accumulated taking other positions while trading in this market (more likely IMHO).
One other factor is the cost of carry - while money is tied up in a bet it can't be used for anything else, including other betting strategies that might have a higher expected profit. In this case, if one has already made a profit betting for a Biden Presidency at longer odds than 1.07, it might now be worthwhile to pay someone else the slight risk premium to take up ones position until settlement, so that one can lock in the profit and move onto other things.
This is a completely different situation. Trump needs Pennsylvania AND Nevada AND Georgia AND Arizona to flip. All those states have margins of 10,000+ in Biden's favor. The election is over.
> Trump needs Pennsylvania AND Nevada AND Georgia AND Arizona to flip.
isn’t quite right. He needs PA and any two of NV/GA/AZ.
It seems hard to see how he's going to have more than 72k ballots disqualified, all of which happen to be for his opponent.
537 votes on butterfly ballots in Florida this is not.
0. In Nevada, Biden has a 36,186 vote lead and counting, greater than his lead in both Arizona and Georgia combined.
Effectively what this is, is yet another misinformation campaign by our President who refuses to accept what is happening. That said, he's technically in his right to ask for recounts and file lawsuits.
So they don't care about who actually ends up president. This is a pure bet on the voting results. I guess they think it prudent to wait and see if the Trump lawsuits hold any merit in the eyes of the courts.
(Source: the U.S. Constitution.)
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/11/05/george-gal...
This market will be settled according to the candidate that has the most projected Electoral College votes won at the 2020 presidential election.
Edit: Nevermind. Just read the rules and it does say it's based on the projected winner. This is very misleading and very bizarre.
https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/3698/Who-will-win-t...
Reasons (regardless of whether you agree):
there about 6 more weeks of the election. Pennsylvania’s process is currently being requested for review by multiple states, because of the following:
“Pennsylvana's high court ruled Thursday that election officials cannot discard mail ballots solely because of questions about the authenticity of a voter's signature; that ballots postmarked by Election Day and received by Friday, Nov. 6 at 5 p.m. will be counted; that third parties cannot deliver people's ballots; and that counties can use dropboxes or other official addresses for voters to return ballots to, among other decisions."
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/blog/meet-pr...
Multiple Attorney Generals: https://www.dailywire.com/news/multiple-republican-ags-join-...
Basic argument is the house sets the rules. Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court had no right to extend the deadline.
Barr also authorized local governments to investigate voting irregularities BEFORE validation/certification ends: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/live-blog/202...
Such as statistical abnormalities: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1325592112428163072.html
Or Michigan’s mail in ballots: https://austingwalters.com/the-dead-vote-in-michigan/
So the author turned up a grand total of... 5 "dead" voters, in a state where biden has a lead of 148,635 votes. That's unlikely to make a difference. The comments to that post also said it was likely a data-entry/clerical error, which makes the story even worse.
>Basic argument is the house sets the rules. Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court had not right to extend the deadline.
I find this argument unconvincing. Laws set by the state legislature is normally bound by the courts. If we go with the literal interpretation, it would also mean that the legislature can enact a law saying "only white men can vote" and the courts wouldn't be able to do anything about it.
The issue is the PA house didn’t break any laws with their voting laws. The PA Supreme Court did however change the intent of a law. Again, not arguing. Before the election the Supreme Court Requested separating the ballots so they could later reverse if necessary. They were split 4-4 on the issue last time, presumably it could be 5-4 this time. Hence betting markets are still up in the air.
Regarding “convincing” the Michigan data. point is it doesn’t need to be convincing to overturn an election, but should be reviewed. And it likely will.
> This market will be settled according to the candidate that has the most projected Electoral College votes won at the 2020 presidential election.
So unrelated to the actual certification process.
Seems like an oddly vague phrasing for such bets.
In this case I suspect the only reason they haven't settled the market is to avoid causing a scene with people laying bets against Trump, not because they genuinely believe there is any chance of it going the other way.
Traditional bookmakers have already paid out, including Paddypower who are part of the same group "Paddypowerbetfair".
Not the way “projected electoral votes” has ever been used in the past in the context of US Presidential elections, but I will grant that the BetFair bets terms are imprecise enough that they could mean anything.
The rules are woefully ambiguous.
I fully expect to be downvoted into oblivion, as usual on HN, where pointing out facts contrary to the desired narrative are unwelcome. Even dispassionately describing the political process is apparently partisan now.
Enough have finished to give Biden 270 electoral votes.
> there will be recounts in others,
Those aren't going to change results. At a state presidential level, a recount might adjust a margin of victory by ~1,000 votes. The margins in those states that have been called are above that level.
> a few lawsuits alleging improprieties have been filed
And several of them have failed summary judgement because the Republicans couldn't build enough of a case to sustain them.
Now, you can just stick your fingers in your ears and call 71 million people stupid, or you can recognize that for the health of the democratic system, it’s best to investigate any anomalies. This shouldn’t be a controversial opinion, but apparently in these hyper partisan times, it is.
And those claims have no merit.
Any valid claims of anomalies will be investigated.
Claims without proof should be dismissed. This shouldn't be a controversial opinion, but apparently when one side is hyper partisan, it is.
If I were confident that a month of preemptive investigations would lead to greater confidence, I'd be all in favor. But this seems unlikely, because so many of the people pushing for investigations have already declared the only result they'll accept. What seems much more likely is a repeat of 2000, where trust in the electoral system is shattered, and a huge chunk of the losing party starts to argue that any election which didn't go their way was corruptly stolen from them.
To allege that there was sufficient fraud to overturn the results of this election requires fraud to exist at over 1000× the rate it has normally existed. Consequently, the evidence needed to sustain this allegation should be 1000× as prevalent. However, the claimed evidence is no better than it usually is. You get the same, tired complaints about things like out-of-state mail ballots from people who forget that students and military (and indeed the sitting president!) are legal residents of states they do not presently physically reside in.
[1] The number of allegedly fraudulent ballots in that race is close to the margin of victory for the Republican candidate, but my guesstimate is that if the fraud hadn't happened, then the Republican still would have won, just by a very close margin.
Also, finding errors has already overturned numerous representative races. This is a factual thing. It’s not Donald Trump throwing a fit.
The people saying there are no legitimate issues to investigate are delusional and it’s dangerous for democracy.
Source?
And, that's not a story detailing fraud. A Republican put in the results incorrectly, a Democrat noticed the error, and it was corrected, changing the results of a local election from a Democrat winning to a Republican winning.
If the Democrats were really looking to perpetuate fraud, they could have just turned a blind eye to the error. But they didn't. Because this is America, and here, right matters.
And as I mentioned, historical fraud rates for mail-in votes is on the order of 1 in 10s of millions. This includes states that conduct their entire election by mail, e.g., Oregon.
> Also, finding errors has already overturned numerous representative races. This is a factual thing. It’s not Donald Trump throwing a fit.
Which ones? You're saying it so authoritatively, you should be be able to provide a precise, verifiable list to back up your claims.
One such example:
https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/oakland/2020...
“A Republican city clerk supervised a vote count that wrongly gave victory to a Democrat, after which a Democratic county clerk's staff caught the error and requested a correction from the Republican city clerk, handing the win to a Republican.”
This kind of thing happens every election and it’s rare that it has even this much impact at the local level. It’s never been anywhere near the level of impacting a lead like Biden has in multiple states.
Trump needs to invalidate a city’s worth of people in PA AND tens of thousands of AZ, GA, and NV votes to win. There’s not even the slightest evidence of fraud on that scale and the stuff they’re doing trying to invalidate military ballots might get them into triple digits but they need 5-6 digit changes.
Edit: here’s a great example - they’re litigating in Maricopa county over at most a couple hundred votes, and there’s no expectation that all of them will go their way. Trump is behind by 14k votes in Arizona so even if they got a total win they’d need to do this many dozens of times.
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/arizona/2020/1...
The _vast_ majority of those 71 million aren't claiming that there's a problem. Certainly, there are some conspiracy theorists amongst them, and I'd be comfortable calling them stupid, yes.
Nothing is official-official until December 13, so he has the right to pursue whatever remedies he wishes in the meantime, but the lack of trust he is fomenting right now, today, is harmful to America, and that's running counter to long-established norms.
The reason his cases keep getting dismissed is there isn't any evidence of election fraud.
Expecting anything other than the counts as they are at the end of canvassing to be certified is basically declaring sedition at this point.
It is possible that the preliminary counts will be changed before the official counts are declared, but ever since the mass adoption of optical scan ballots after the debacle of 2000, recounts just haven't moved the dial enough to affect the presidential election.
The losing side this year is extremely butthurt about having lost the election, and is filing lawsuits to contest it. However, these lawsuits are so without merit that they aren't even surviving summary judgement, which is an amazingly low legal bar to clear. Saying you had video evidence of a poll worker brutally murdering anyone who voted for Trump would be sufficient justification to survive summary judgement, to give you an idea of just how low a bar it is.
> This market will be settled according to the candidate that has the most projected Electoral College votes won at the 2020 presidential election. Any subsequent events such as a ‘faithless elector’ will have no effect on the settlement of this market. In the event that no Presidential candidate receives a majority of the projected Electoral College votes, this market will be settled on the person chosen as President in accordance with the procedures set out by the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
My guess would be that even though they view faithless electors as 'subsequent events' they still view the outcome of Trump's legal challenges as part of the election proper.
> Paddy Power, BF [Betfair] acquirer, handles the betting for the BC Lottery; and as such is specifically precluded from offering bookmaking on its own. But before this, BF had made the strategic decision of leaving all gray areas-- countries where it and/or betting wasn't specifically allowed. For one, jurisdictions where it was specifically allowed or applying to be-- could use such a violation as grounds for denial...US / NJ one example for sure. And in Canada sports betting is actually illegal, notwithstanding that the government will not go after individual players and hardly ever bothers any corporation.
https://www.sportsbookreview.com/forum/sportsbooks-industry/...
That does not work in a criminal court. You kind of need an actual crime. And proof of that crime. More than "I believe this to be true." No court in this land will take a case where the charge is "Can you see if they committed crime?"
No, that's your job as the person bringing the case.
But, for betting purposes, I too would hold off with paying out until everything is properly finalized. What if one of the candidates suddenly keels or withdraws before the changeover? If the betting company has to reverse course, they could end up in court and end up paying tons.
That leads me to the second question. In europe we learn history at school and in books but most of my encounters with educated americans led them to recommend me some hollywood movies to learn about some specific events of their history.
I feel the television has a huge importance in this country and the fact that millions of americans consider it the source of truth even to declare who is the winner of the most important event of their lives strikes me as unbelievable.
The arrogance of this comment is simply breathtaking.
I was chatting to someone the other day and asked if she'd been to America. No, she said, I can't stand Americans.
Do you know any Americans, I asked. Of course she didn't but she has been to Canada and asked if I had.
No, said I, I can't stand Canadians. She looked at me as if that was a ridiculous statement before realising I was being sarcastic. Go figure?
Also I was not implying that you do not have books in america... But you can just see in this comment section (where most of the people are educated) that most of the replies hints that they do not understand the election process hence backing my statement.
The movies are obviously PC-Washing all history just like you removed your statues you are removing from your intellect everything that is not consensually approved and history has a lot that this new horde of censors of the good will not like. and the proof is that most the people reading this will downvote me using those censoring tools to destroy an opinion that they do not approve.
What is breathtaking is to read comments like "wasnt the election done?" purely because you want to win and hate the system when it doesn't play in your favor.
That's different from the argument that "Americans don't understand civics because they watch movies instead of reading history books" which is frankly absurd and offensive.
I'm not convinced that the number of civically-uninformed people is particularly higher in America when compared to elsewhere in the world. If you have data to that effect, please share it.
For all intents and purposes the election is done. The votes have been cast and with most of them counted, Biden has won by a wide enough margin that sporadic concerns about voter fraud is not going to change it.
Americans who are pushing back against Trump's reticence to concede are not doing so not because they believe that TV decides who is elected, but because it's a bald-faced attempt at a coup. Trump has every right to challenge the results in court, but if there was actual evidence of widespread election irregularities, it would have been presented by now.
I was watching US election at the same time on a french channel vs an US channel. I was pretty sure the level of understanding and debate would be higher on the US channel (and I checked a few of them) but was astonished to see that actually there wasn't any real concrete and intelligent political analysis (ok just one on numbers using stats) or even one ounce of debate while on the french channel the debate invited experts, was intelligent, one side was conceiding things to trump and the others one fighting it using arguments rather than emotions.
It is just mindblowing as an outsider to see that you totally removed debate from the equation and that any kind of debate/analysis is perceived as criticism or even worse racism/[add any bad word there] if it concedes things to trump.
We can both agree that there should be more healthy debate, both in general and in the media. So far though your argument has been that Americans are less civically-minded, and your supporting evidence has been a few people you talked to who mentioned movies and watching American infotainment television.
This isn't a particularly useful or interesting conversation for me at this point, so I'm going to go back to work. Thanks!
This whole thing with lawsuits is just Trump throwing a tantrum that he lost.
Both are necessary, our education system heavily leans to the historical side.
Huh? What's the preferred european medium? Smoke signal?
Waiting for TV networks to call elections is not the same as having people watch TV in Europe. Getting angry at Fox News for calling Arizona is, for example, quite strange for me, because in my opinion, news networks shouldn't "call" the elections.
I think you're misunderstanding what it means to "call" the election. Fox News calling Arizona for Biden didn't make Biden the winner of Arizona. It merely meant that Fox News was confident that Biden won the election in Arizona.
And yes, getting angry at Fox News for calling Arizona was strange.
In case you don't believe me here is the BBC calling the general election for Boris before the votes were done counting:
https://www.bbc.com/news/election-2019-50765773
I also learned history from books and not movies. I would still recommend some movies to someone who wants to learn the basics in a couple hours, but movies always take liberties with the truth in order to tell a story.
Right but this is a fairly convoluted way to do elections, no?
The priority was for the member states to have control over parts of the elections process.
What “problem” are you referring to?
American media will only project the winner of an election once a sufficient number of votes are tallied that the outcome is clear. The alternative would be to wait for weeks until all ballots (absentee/mail-in, overseas/military, provisional, etc.) are counted.
Is this actually not done in other nations?
For what it's worth, most of the "long tail" time in counting votes in the US is due to special circumstances, like mail-in ballots which were damaged during delivery and need to be transcribed onto a new form before they can be run through the counting machines.
Either way, projections are a fairly simple statistical exercise. Once enough votes from a district have been tallied such that you are confident that the statistical error wouldn't change the outcome, you can project a winner for that district. That is, if you collect a statistically significant sample such that your error is +/-X%, and a given candidate is winning by more than X%, you can project them as the winner.
Although, the median American learned those facts ~25 years ago at a time in their lives when they were too young to vote and politics was probably not an important part of their lives.
By comparison, movies are a lot more accessible, recent, and engaging.
The only actual decision the news outlets have to make is to decide when to call the win when they judge that the winner is statistically almost impossible to change.
In France for instance we get the first projections at 8PM sharp, once the last voting places close. Nobody, including the politicians involved, wait until the the final count to concede or celebrate their results.
The only "americanism" I can see here is this odd electoral college system that leads to absurd situations where ~100k people effectively decide the elections for everybody else, while hundreds of millions in non-swing-states effectively don't count. If there's something worthy of scorn and foreign arrogance, it's probably that.
And no in france no media will declare a winner before being sure of it or they will withdraw it as soon as they see that the race isnt finished. again history should have taught them to be more prudent (gore/bush) but as they are partisan media they are just entitled to win.
I would just like to point out that in 2000 Bush won Florida by 537 votes, currently Biden is ahead by over 10k votes in all the contested states, and even if the projections were wrong for any single one of them he would still win the electoral college. I do think the news outlets learned from 2000, otherwise they'd have called the race as soon as Pennsylvania and Georgia flipped. The situation is really not comparable to 2000 where the news networks called Florida for Gore before the last polling stations had even closed in the state[1].
Now if it turns out that there was indeed fraud then of course it could overturn everything, but not having any conclusive evidence of anything it makes sense for news outlets to proceed as usual I think. I mean even Fox News called the race at this point...
But even if we ignore these current events I still maintain that it's silly to expect the media (and all observers, including internationally) not to call the race when the numbers show that there's a clear winner. Maybe sometimes they'll get it wrong, but what's the alternative? Pretend that there's no winner for weeks waiting for the official count and you don't see the writing on the wall and precluding all analysis of the results? That would be rather silly.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia...
It would be tempting to suggest that European schools fail to teach critical thinking, but I'll resist that urge, as it's obviously unfair. Your comment doesn't suggest to me a failure of European schools, the problem is likely much more specific.
Then they rely on media to tell them everything. Usually that's fine when it's straight factual news, but there's been a lot of spin in the news recently.
These two leaders are Trump buddies. Their intelligence services are top of the world. They wouldn’t make the call unless their intelligence was crystal clear that Trump doesn’t have a chance.
Rats leaving the sinking ship, I'm guessing. They know it's over, and that the lawsuits are formalities at best (often dealing concretely with just dozens of lost ballots and the like, although Pennsylvania's lawsuit could still be interesting (they want the mail-in ballots received after the 3rd (but postmarked at or before the 3rd) to be dismissed. It won't change the election results at all though, those votes have already been kept separate and not yet considered, pending the lawsuit.
But at least frustrated Trumpists can process their fragile emotions by downvoting us and wasting their money on hopeless bets.
> “The role of declaring the winner of a presidential election in the U.S. falls to the news media. The broadcast networks and cable news outlets have vowed to be prudent. He’s how it will work,”
[1]: https://www.foxnews.com/media/new-york-times-deletes-tweet-r...
No communication from them either. Took a few days to get my money back.
https://www.wettforum.info/forum/bookie-section/buchmacherte...
Betting is still opened and the odds are roughly 1 vs 10, meaning if you bet £1 on Trump and he makes it you will earn £10 back.
It's normal for betting to continue after the end of an event. Usually the odds are reaching 1 vs 98 toward the end, because the betting platform is limiting the multiplier to about that and because there's actually money to make there in the last few percents.
Things do happen in the last second and results do change after a match (goal in the last second in football, horse falling in horse racing, candidate disqualified, re-scoring). For this event it's relatively normal for the betting company to wait until the candidate is in the white house before redistributing the money.
What is unusual here is for the odds to be this close this late in the game. We're at a fairly late point in the election when the outcome is relatively settled, is there 10% chance for trump to win?
The money is real, indicating there are many people who think so. Yes you (and 9 other people) could bet £1 on Biden and hope to make £1.10 back, because there's one person on the other side willing to bet £1 on Trump hoping to make £10 back.
P.S. Betfair is not open to US users (not legal in the US). Don't try to open an account, you will be blocked when you try to open the account or when you try to credit it.
Betting exchanges have market makers and heavy automated trading, just like financial exchanges. The price is arbitraged and adjusted in real time between the different exchanges.
The two biggest exchanges after betfair are smarkets and bet365. The first closed the market and redistributed the money. The second didn't seem to accept betting on the US election.
It means that the betfair market is in free wheel, no more connected to the rest of the world, it can effectively show any price.
Smarkets: https://smarkets.com/event/886736/politics/us/us-presidentia...
Two of the swing states, have key ridings with a history of corrupt and stupid leadership. Its a bad combination that gives Trump a betting chance.
Example, former Mayor Kilpatrick in Detroit was sentenced to 28 years for blatantly obvious self enrichment schemes.
People betting on Trump now are, are hedging on the "count all votes" mantra, even if good intentioned, led to ballots counted, that should not have been, and he can prove that in court.
See here:
https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/results/president?iid=poli...
No, it didn't.
> He's on pace to win Arizona.
He's been consistently behind the needed pace, which is why the needed pace keeps increasing.
> And has a non zero chance to have some of the late ballots thrown out in Pennsylvania.
Perhaps technically non-zero, but close enough, and he lost without the late ballots anyway, so getting some of them thrown out won't help him.
See here:
https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/results/president?iid=poli...
“Flip” is a state called in 2020 for the opposite party that won it in 2016; it's an indicator of changes in the electoral map. Wisconsin has been marked that way from when it was first called.
From the page you cited:
"Flipped seat" denotes a race where the 2020 projected winner is from a different party than the previous winner or incumbent.
No, 1% of 3.2 million is 32,000 not ~300,000.
So, to make up a 20K deficit, the remaining ballots would need to break about 4:1 for Trump. (And the realistic shift for a recount is small enough, that it isn't meaningfully different if you were only concerned with what it would take for it to be within that range, either.)
> And still conceivable it could flip on recount if its close.
Sure, if it was within a couple hundred votes, it might. But it isn't, and it won't be.
No, no it will not. Here is the REPUBLICAN former governor of Wisconsin explaining why a recount won't change anything. The last two recounts changed the margin by 300 and 131 votes respectively. Nowhere close to the 20k required.
https://twitter.com/ScottWalker/status/1324002777597677569
The fine print will fuck you, but I expect a total shit-storm over this. IMHO I dont beleive the bets they are currently taking are in good faith, because I can't see any path for Trump to win, even if he wins the states still in play.