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9 hours agoThat’s what makes this exceptionally stupid: ballots in Georgia are fully electronic.
You make your selections on a touchscreen voting machine. The machine records your selections. “Counting” is literally a matter of taking the output from the machine and telling a server to add up the totals.
The paper ballot is literally just a laser printer next to the machine that spits out a sheet of paper showing what the voter selected. The paper ballots are supposed to just be a backup in case there are problems with the machines.
Oh, I don’t disagree at all.
Like I said, Nate’s definitely increasingly treaded into questionable territory in the past few years and I don’t have a sense for whether it’s impacted the model since I’ve honestly not been paying close attention to the horse race this cycle.
I was mostly pointing out that while the dude has almost always been a bad take generator, the 2016 model very arguably outperformed its contemporaries despite the popular view that they blew it. I wouldn’t be shocked if Nate’s sponsors and general ideological drift has impacted the model this cycle (*especially given Peter Thiel’s involvement), but I don’t have a strong sense for whether that’s the case either. I also wouldn’t be particularly surprised if he sufficiently separated the stats from the dumb ideas to produce a reasonable model either. I just don’t have enough info to have formed an opinion there.