Biden Is Projected To Be The President-Elect. Here’s How It All Went Down.
More complicated than what to do with voters who refuse to wear masks is the issue of what to do with election officials who refuse. In Texas, right now, an election judge and her poll workers in Dallas are refusing to wear masks, despite a GOP chair asking them to do so. According to Lauren McGaughy of the Dallas Morning News, there’s no way to remove this judge unless both the Democratic and GOP chairs agree. And while the GOP chair has said he wants mask wearing to happen, removal doesn’t seem to be on the table.
Our Final Senate Forecast Gave Democrats A 3-In-4 Chance Of Flipping The Chamber
Democrats are favored to take control of the Senate in the 2020 elections, according to the final version of FiveThirtyEight’s Senate forecast. With the forecast set in stone as of early Tuesday morning, Democrats have a 75 in 100 chance of flipping the chamber. Republicans, meanwhile, have a 25 in 100 chance of keeping control — as likely as drawing a spade from a deck of cards.
However, as I wrote in our final forecast overview, “a ton of seats are still competitive; in 80 percent of our model’s simulations, Democrats wind up with anywhere between 48 and 55 seats.” And remember that’s a big range! The exact number of seats here matters, too, because it’s not just about control of the chamber. Winning 50 seats (plus the tie-breaking vice presidential vote) is a very different outcome for Democrats from winning 55 seats, as the size of their majority would affect how likely they are to pass their ambitious agenda. Not to mention, there are still a number of plausible outcomes in which Republicans retain control.
Since we were talking about the potential changes to absentee voting in a post-pandemic election, a reader just reminded me of one creative workaround to the “excuse” requirement: In Tennessee, one excuse you can use to vote absentee is observing a religious holiday. So a 27-year-old from Nashville started the Church of Universal Suffrage, an officially registered, nonprofit religious institution that observes every Election Day as a religious holiday.