Here we are on election night 2020 at 11:37PM EST, and we don't have a winner! And a winner may not be determined until Friday, as the race has boiled down to the swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania (from the results I've seen), and those states' antiquated vote count methods make it so that they won't yield a conclusive winner tonight. Whatever happens tonight, though, it's pretty clear to me that there's a big loser: voting polls. Like the horse and buggy, Sony Walkmans, and Blockbuster Video stores, polling has become a thing of the past and just are not reliable in this day and age.
As I understand it, polling occurs similarly to how MJ cold-called people at home on their landlines back in the summer as part of her nursing program: you have a list of people who are registered, and a volunteer or polling worker calls them and tries to initiate a conversation about how the person who picked up is voting in the upcoming election. As someone who a.) does not have a registered landline, b.) never picks up the phone to a number that I don't recognize, I will never be someone who gets polled. Even if I did get a phone call about polling, I don't think I would engage with the caller about who I would vote for; it'd be a waste of time. I'd ask them to email me or do something easier, like just voting on an app or something where I could enter my selection with a click of a button. The people who are getting polled are a very select portion of the population who still respond to the old methods polling companies use, and it just doesn't work in presidential elections. For a 2020 election that will ultimately cost more than $14 billion (money that we probably could have spent on any of schools, hospitals, environment, infrastructure, disaster relief, campaign reform, HEALTHCARE, etc., etc.) it seems ridiculous to still be using ancient polling methods to gauge what the likely outcome will be (most had a 90% probability Biden would win, which seems laughable now in what is at best a dead heat for Biden) and also ANCIENT vote counting methods: stories about Wisconsin needing until 6AM tomorrow morning to count all the votes, Pennsylvania needing until Friday, etc.
Remember when fantasy baseball/ fantasy football was played by snail mail where players sent their selections of players to the commissioner each week by envelope and the commissioner tallied the results and then sent back the results each week back to the players? Sound terrible? Yea that feels like what the US polling and voting process is like right now. Welcome to 2000, except instead of Florida (which was projected to be a swing state, but went for Trump early in the night) and dimpled chads/ hanging chads it will be mail-in votes + early voting votes v. day-of voting. Yikes.
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