Rules are decided by each state on its own. You can blame the constitution for deferring election procedures to each state.
In PA, for example, the legislature (which is GOP I might add) forbid counting mail-in ballots until election day. That basically guarantees delays.
Have you been around for Gore vs Bush? I'm not sure why you're claiming this is one of the worst elections. Most close elections aren't called on election day. Almost every state continues counting past election day. It's just you're only hearing about the ones that are close.
Each state's legislature decides that, so naturally states will differ on deadlines for when mail can arrive. Also, the count dragging on is because counting hasn't finished on the sheer quantity of mail-in ballots received before election day, not after (which are insignificant in number).
Because while matter cannot move faster than the speed of light the universe itself is allowed to expand faster than the speed of light. Think of the spacetime fabric stretching so fast light cannot cover the increased distance. The universe is essentially creating more distance between objects.
Another way to think of it is velocity of an object is derivative of position in space over time. If space itself is moving your position relative to it isn't changing.
I haven't read the documentation, but I can respond to your questions given what you quoted.
1) It seems that way. Presumably, they will require affiliates to follow stricter rules. Even so, you would expect that these affiliates would try their hardest to take advantage of their speed advantage.
2) Pegged orders are essentially orders that the exchange manages for you. For example, if you peg an order at the inside bid, your order will follow the market as it moves around. Essentially, these orders will react with close to zero latency since the exchange itself is modifying them. It's unclear how these orders will be used to game the market, since their logic is so simple and predefined by the exchange.
In terms of time frame, it's just the evolution of technology. For example, processors are clocked in nanoseconds. When your limiting reagent is how quickly you can update based on changes in the world, you need lower latencies. That's one of the aspects of the system that IEX tries to solve, by adding a giant delay to everyone's orders, so that the jitter swallows any small advantage.
One of the concerns of changing the rules, however, is that once smart people start using the system, they will eventually find some new way to game it, landing us not far from where we started.
You're overestimating the effectiveness of computers in taking in data and finding patterns. If you throw data naively at an algorithm, you'll get garbage. It's especially difficult to make sense out of trading data because of the sheer size and percentage of noise.
For any given trading strategy, a ton of thought, testing, and domain knowledge goes into creating the algorithm. It is not a black box that writes itself.
That said, computers are far more effective at certain tasks, especially latency sensitive simple calculations, just as calculators are far better at doing arithmetic.
In PA, for example, the legislature (which is GOP I might add) forbid counting mail-in ballots until election day. That basically guarantees delays.
Have you been around for Gore vs Bush? I'm not sure why you're claiming this is one of the worst elections. Most close elections aren't called on election day. Almost every state continues counting past election day. It's just you're only hearing about the ones that are close.