No, the premise is that mailin ballots should have a roughly uniform D/R ratio, no matter what timeslice of a state you look at. Of course they skew, but the idea is that the first mailins counted should have basically the same ratio as the last. Which appears true in most states, but not some, for unknown reasons.
(The skew it proposes as normal, R later in time due to receiving R ballots on a later distribution, exposes an assumption it makes: that counting is in order of ballots received.)
They're not all counted at once. You watched the returns come in drop-by-drop in PA, and each was attributed to counties and precincts. You are not going to see a uniform D/R ratio between a drop from Carbon County and a drop from Allegheny County.
This is so basic --- you had to have not watched the PA returns come in at all to not know it --- that I read this twice, figuring that I had to have misunderstood what the thread was saying. But I don't think I am; I think this person believes that the mail-in process randomizes the ballots statewide.
Interesting enough, the mail-in ballot returns on a per-precinct basis were actually shockingly consistent, even over time, likely proving by this method that there wasn't any voter fraud.
The thing is though, if you look at the returns on a state level over time, what you are actually seeing is the results from all sorts of different types of votes in different places over time, so you won't see any consistent pattern. But if you break down the votes to the specific places then you see exactly what you'd expect to see.
> No, the premise is that mailin ballots should have a roughly uniform D/R ratio, no matter what timeslice of a state you look at.
Which is based on a series of assumptions that simply do not generally hold (the most central being that the entire statewide collection of mail-in ballots is homogenized before being counted.)
Having not thought for more than a few seconds about this, it sounds like a clearly invalid premise. People decide to mail their ballot for all sorts of reasons including seeing an ad, being telephoned by a campaign worker, seeing a movie on tv, being well organized or lazy, and on and on. Those catalysts are obviously not likely to be uniformly distributed between parties.
Philadelphia, Detroit, and a number of other cities are notoriously slow in counting their ballots.
This happens every election that I can remember, going back to 2000.
If I had to guess, the complexity of counting may increase in a non-linear way after a certain number of precincts.
I'm unconvinced the proportions should be consistent at the state level or any level really. There have been GOTV events that have thousands of attendees, then there's the "souls to the polls" event every time, I can't think of a way to slice it where I would be convinced by unbalanced batches.
> If I had to guess, the complexity of counting may increase in a non-linear way after a certain number of precincts.
I'd bet that the larger counties, while they have more ballot counting machines, probably don't have proportionally more. Expensive, specialized, maintenance-intensive, etc. Every county needs at least one, but beyond that I doubt there is a huge priority on having excess capacity.
Ballot counting machines are probably a case of over-automation. The polls station clerks are volunteers and are maybe doing their first election. Setting up a manual process is just way easier then dealing with complex computer reporting systems. As soon as some machine or computer is not cooperating they are stuck. With pen and paper the worst that can happen is that the pen is out of ink.
(The skew it proposes as normal, R later in time due to receiving R ballots on a later distribution, exposes an assumption it makes: that counting is in order of ballots received.)