What Happened This Week In Washington — And Georgia

Lanier County is reporting around 3,000 votes in, an estimated 95 percent of what’s expected there (for context, around 3,500 votes were cast in the presidential race in November). And so far, Ossoff and Warnock are running just ahead of Biden’s vote share in November — they’re at 30 percent of the vote, while Biden got 28.5 percent. Of course, this is a small, Republican county, so it’s not representative of the state as a whole.

In case you’re tempted to pay attention to the exit polls tonight: Don’t. The same problems that existed with the exit polls in November still apply today — namely, they had to be supplemented by phone polls of absentee voters, making them about as useful as a high-quality pre-election poll. The exit polls are also still preliminary, as they will be weighted to the final result after every vote is counted. These early waves could be unrepresentative.

That’s right, Amelia. Conspiracy theories about election fraud have been pervasive because not only are powerful figures like Trump repeating these claims, but also because there is mountain of misinformation out there. Given that volume, it’s hard to fact-check every claim, and hard for the average person to know what’s real. And even if someone does see a fact-check for one piece of misinformation they saw, they can easily dismiss it and turn to the dozens of other pieces of “evidence” they’ve seen.