The wife's been more into the election this year than any before. I'm not sure if it's just that she's got more time to get into it than before, or if it's because of the massive impact this election could have on our future.

We both voted in September, so the election hype, advertising, and punditry is moot. I can't change my mind in any meaningful way. Even if we had any inkling to consider alternative living arrangements should our candidates fail, there's no reality in which relocating would either matter or be possible.

So, I wait. I listen to her spin on about the articles she's reading. Sometimes I ponder how important that little news article is, or if it's even real. The hype of the social media tampering that has gone on has me tainted over media in general. I catch some headlines and read some of the start of some articles. But, again, my vote is cast, and I'm not going to grab a picket, so I'm not sure what difference it makes now.

I'm not looking forward to the frenzy of tomorrow, or the coming days and weeks. With the pandemic, so many people have voted early. According to some headlines, somewhere between 50% and 100% of the 2016 voters have voted early already. In many states, those ballots won't be counted, or at least announced, until after the polls close. With that many queued and not yet scanned ballots, it could take a long time to count them.

In my state, they're allowed to scan the ballots as they're received. They aren't allowed to share the counts, though. So far, if they've done it, they've kept a good lid on it. It's a pretty solid guess which way the state is going to go, though, since they haven't changed often since the Democrats and Republicans switched platforms in the 1930s. A couple blips in the 1950s and one in 1972, with Nixon, but otherwise going the "big government" way, of currently Democrat. It was close last time, though, with Clinton winning by just a couple percentage points, going 46% to 44%; closer if you count the fractions.

In so many of the polls and forecasts, it looks like a probable Biden win. To be fair, they said Clinton in 2016, too.

I'm not anticipating a run-away election tomorrow later today. Maybe in the days following, the states like mine with early counting and not a lot of delay allowed will comfortably pad the results for someone. They just overturned the pandemic relief in my state that allowed a little longer for the ballots to arrive; now if they're not received by election day, they'll be separated, and possibly counted later, if more lawsuits change it again. I suspect lots of similar law suits where races are close, and lawyers have chances of swaying the electoral outcome.

I hate election nights anyway. In 2004 Kerry conceded to Bush after 1% of the polls had closed, and none of the news outlets could agree on the outcome. Before that, in 2000 for Gore/Bush, there was Florida, where margin was less than a couple thousand votes, eventually leading to a Bush victory by hundreds of votes, but still scenarios with a Gore win. But that win came after SCOTUS decided to stop the legal ballyhoo, and before any of the speculations and scenarios could play out.

I expect 2020 could be as ugly. I'm fingers-crossed that there will be such margins in every state that whoever "wins," the margin of error or opportunity that could swing by recounts and exclusions or other legal tomfoolery won't be enough to make it happen. Like in my state, where they're collecting the late arrivals in the mail; I hope there are so few collected ballots, when compared to the margin of victory otherwise, that even if they all went toward the "loser," there wouldn't be enough ballots to sway the vote. Sure, nice to know for posterity and all, but if the winner has 100 extra votes, and there are 95 late ballots, it isn't enough...move on...

That's a sad bar. It'd be great if it was just because of counts at the ballots, and early or mailed voting wasn't going to be such a battleground. I just have doubts that it will be so smooth.

Just...ugh.