PSA: On #ElectionDay I will go to bed on time (I am in the European time zone), have a good night of sleep and when I wake up I will make coffee and pancakes, sit around for a while before, around noon, I will finally open up the NYT, WaPo and Guardian pages. During the night, when the misinformation and radical takes saturate all frequencies, I will dream about a better world. I will not waste my precious time with consuming information that only upsets me, without me being able to do anything.
I am absolutely not saying you should do the same. I remember how I spent the first Obama Election Night at an illegal party in the former Hungarian (or was it Romanian?) embassy in East-Berlin where some people broke into and set up a sound system, lights and bars. It was a looooooong night :) But this time I will protect myself from too much weirdness and check the results once they're a bit more stable.
@jwildeboer that's a good plan! Maybe even switch off all electronic devices that could spoil the plan.
@jwildeboer it does seem more likely than not that we won't know the results Tuesday night or Wednesday morning.
The one thing I remember from watching the previous election night was that mass media make it intentionally look like a head-to-head race even when it is not that in practice.
When it is 1% of ballots counted for a district, one can _choose_ to say: we only counted 1%, it says nothing about the overall result, please wait. Or one can _choose_ to say: this party is WINNING for now, but keep watching!!!
1/
The majority of the votes was counted late and there was no reason to expect that early results were in any way relevant.
But the media treated election as sports event and creates the artificial suspense around it. It intentionally provoked the uneducated crowd to complain about the results.
"We were winning the entire night and in the last minute the results were changed!!!!"
Watching it was so extremely disappointing. Thus I am with you on the ignoring the election night.
@jwildeboer Ignoring the facts does not help either. I still remember the morning in November 2016 when I woke up to the radio news coming from my alarm clock stating that Trump had won. I’m afraid that this situation might repeat itself next week…
@jwildeboer I'm so jealous that you will be able to fall asleep that night. I will try to execute the same exact plan. I'll take some melatonin and hope it helps..