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Looking for Voter Fraud (In Old Elections) with Data Visualization

206 points by vitplister 6y ago

andrewem 6y ago
The adjective form of Democrat is Democratic. Perhaps as a German the author is unaware that usages like "all the democrat votes are ignored" are repeating the Republicans' deliberately insulting word choice. Edit: thanks to currymj below for the link to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_(epithet) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_(epithet)
- noodlenotes 6y ago
  "Democratic" is confusing because it could mean either "relating to democracy" or "relating to the Democratic party" whereas "Republican" almost always refers to the party. I don't blame anyone for using a less ambiguous word and this is the first I've heard of "Democrat" being an insult.
  - jki275 6y ago
    Nobody has ever heard of it other than people looking for something to be offended about.
  - Izkata 6y ago
    Likewise here; I switched to "Democrat" because of a confusing conversation I once had with someone some time ago.
- nl 6y ago
  > The adjective form of Democrat is Democratic. This doesn't seem to be widely supported. Vox.com (a left-leading outlet) uses "Democrat voters" frequently, eg: "...while 82 percent of Democrat voters named the pandemic the top issue.." https://www.vox.com/2020/11/4/21548770/exit-polls-election-trump-voters-economy-pandemic https://www.vox.com/2020/11/4/21548770/exit-polls-election-t...
  - currymj 6y ago
    it is absolutely true that “Democrat party” as opposed to “Democratic party” is a Republican shibboleth for some reason. Democrats themselves don’t seem to think about it much but there is a portion of conservative media that is very careful to always say “Democrat party”. see here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_(epithet) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_(epithet)
    - nl 6y ago
      Ha, I never knew. What strange behavior on their part.
- 1337shadow 6y ago
  Democratic: Pertaining to democracy; favoring democracy, or constructed upon the principle of government by the people. Democrat: A supporter of democracy; an advocate of democratic politics. One adjective for persons another for process. In some cases both would be correct but the meaning will differ. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/democrat https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/democrat https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/democratic https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/democratic Good, that's consistent with my French and Greek, sorry for checking but your comment really surprised me ! Didn't realize it was a joke until having already checked...
loraa 6y ago
At least no one brought up Russians this time.
dudus 6y ago
Did I miss something? Where was the chart for the 2020 election?
- nl 6y ago
  The title is "... in old elections .."
nl 6y ago
Am I the only centre-left type person in the world who thinks the Electoral College isn't a bad thing (in theory at least). In the Westminster 2-house system in Australia voters vote for representation from their seat. These seats have approximately the same number of people, but they also vote for an upper-house representative and the smaller states are over-represented in terms of population. This is because otherwise it becomes easy for a federal government to only govern for the very large populations in the cities, and that is bad for the country as a whole - places outside those large population bases are disenfranchised because no amount of voting would matter. The electoral college seems to do a similar thing. I don't think it's perfect, but in principle I don't see it as a bad things that people in say Montana have a means to influence the presidency.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- DC-3 6y ago
  Should the vote also be weighted to uphold the interests of other classes of people, like young vs old, or rich vs poor, or bricklayers vs hairdressers? I consider myself more defined by my age and profession than by my hometown but in an electoral college system it is only that latter fact that affects how a vote is weighted.
  - Terrario 6y ago
    But the country is not a union of people of different ages and professions, but of different states, technically. The electoral college is a form of protection for the naturally less densely populated agrarian states against the densely populated urban ones. Without the electoral college, the colonies would not have agreed to unite under a shared federal government.
    - nanny 6y ago
      >The electoral college is a form of protection for the naturally less densely populated agrarian states against the densely populated urban ones. This is commonly repeated, but it's BS. What "protection" does the electoral college give to Kansas, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Idaho, or Montana? Presidential candidates don't pay any attention to any of those "less densely populated agrarian states". In addition, dense states like NJ, NY, CT, and Mass don't get attention from candidates. California doesn't get any attention either, so what gives? The states that get the attention are the swing states with the highest number of electoral votes, simply because the electoral college incentivizes trying to swing a small number of voters in such states. Watch some of these videos from CGP Grey for more info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wC42HgLA4k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wC42HgLA4k
Glyptodon 6y ago
Always keep in mind that however distorted the electoral college is, that distortion is tremendously magnified by the cap on the size of the US house of Representatives and the fact that the Constitution specifies a lower bound for district population but no upper bound.
- tastyfreeze 6y ago
  I have been thinking that maybe states should get an equal number of electoral votes. We would get the protection of the electoral college and every state would have an equal say.
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    That would be less democratic (small d) than the current system. Do you have some reason that Wyoming should actually have an equal say with New York or Texas or Florida or California?
    - tastyfreeze 6y ago
      Because they are all states that should have an equal say in what president is elected. A republic of states is beholden to the states. Each state is beholden to its population.
      - TheDong 6y ago
        Federal law impacts all citizens. It doesn't just make laws concerning the states. Why should a man in wyoming's opinion on what federal laws I should live under count 70x as much as mine? Why should a minority of the country make a decision that impacts the majority of people?
        umvi 6y ago
        Well if you believe Wyoming should just be steamrolled by California's desires 100% of the time, why shouldn't Wyoming secede from the union? In fact, why should any "small states" join the union in the first place if they are just going to be steamrolled by California and New York?
ve55 6y ago
What I dislike about a lot of these potential fraud analysis techniques is that if a group that was performing fraud was aware of them, then they would simply perform the fraud 'properly' such that the given technique(s) don't show evidence (since they know what others are looking for and hoping to find, they simply ensure it isn't there). The same goes for similar techniques like Benford's law: once you know about them, you can improve your sophistication so that no conclusion can be made (There are some interesting exceptions here since most claims of fraud would have one believe that centralized or semi-centralized fraud is much harder to perform than decentralized/random fraud, in which case due to coordination issues, some of these techniques could still bear fruit). But, the obvious overlaying issue is that the system is broken from the bottom up: there is no authentication, authorization, or encryption. Rather than having random Internet bloggers attempt to detect fraud with the information and tools they have, the system should instead be made secure and robust from the bottom-up, starting with how votes are made, tallied, transported, and so on. Additionally the technologies used, voting machines used, counting methods used, and voting system itself (lacking any ranked-choice or similar options) are all severely lacking modern improvements. No single person should be counting votes and typing numbers into fields. We should at least try to use some of the multidisciplinary technology developed in the last five or so decades to try to patch this from the bottom-up so that the system is much more robust and auditable for the future, because things are only going to get weirder (honestly, the US election went very smoothly compared to how it gone have gone, imo - there is no better time to prevent future disasters than today).
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  Smart careful criminals are smart and careful. Most criminals are stupid or lazy.
  - crobertsbmw 6y ago
    What a fun thing to say.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
  The system is secure and robust, at least with regards to the mechanics of individual votings. Among the main factors is its distributed nature. You just can't run a scam with senior citizen volunteers in thousands of individual precincts. Then, there are observers. Famous case from this week's election was Republicans complaining that their two dozen(!) observers weren't allowed closer than 6 feet to the ballots. It would be impossible for fraud to happen on any regular basis and not coming to light. So the incidence of 0.00002% (https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/4/26/15424270/voter-fraud-north-carolina https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/4/26/15424270/v...) is somewhat informative. If it were possible to manipulate the vote tabulation in any meaningful way, the GOP wouldn't need to go to all the lengths it does w.r.t. gerrymandering, purging voter roles, coming up with new requirements for voting, or closing voting precincts.
JaceLightning 6y ago
Missing the 2020 US election! Do the 2020 election.
- santoshalper 6y ago
  I don't think enough data is available yet.
kart23 6y ago
The author says about turnout: "One clarification: The turnout number at the bottom is slightly wrong: You’d think that you can easily get these statistics for past elections, but I can’t find the turnout number anywhere. Instead I was able to get the population of the counties, so this is the number of votes divided by the population." Isn't this quite inaccurate? I think counties release registered voter numbers, so shouldn't we be instead comparing registered turnout, as votes/registered voters? (yes, some states do allow same-day registration, which might muck up numbers, but I still think its better than just going off population). But anyways, where do the population numbers come from? I imagine they're from the last census, which was in 2010. edit: yes, they are using the census yearly estimates. I suppose that's as accurate as you can get, but its still not a true turnout statistic.
- ekimekim 6y ago
  I'd argue registered voter turnout also isn't a true turnout statistic, as many people will not be registered due to apathy/feeling it doesn't matter/etc. The statistic you really want is votes / eligible voters, not registered voters. But that's a hard number to figure out in the US.
- Izkata 6y ago
  > I suppose that's as accurate as you can get Numbers for each state since 2000, every 2 years, available here: http://www.electproject.org/home/voter-turnout/voter-turnout-data http://www.electproject.org/home/voter-turnout/voter-turnout... What you want is probably the VEP number ("voting-eligible population", people who are of age and not disqualified for some reason, such as having committed a felony).
refurb 6y ago
The author’s analysis seems a bit one sided. He speaks of poor turn out in LA, because of the electoral college system which means additional democratic votes don’t matter. Then speaks about the same lack of Democratic turnout in Texas, because it always go Republican (again, due to the electoral college). But wouldn’t those same effect apply to Republicans as well? They don’t bother to vote in CA because there is a 0% probability they will affect the outcome. And in addition, there are likely Republicans in Texas who don’t vote because they know the state will go Republican. I would argue that if you dropped the electoral college, you’d see a massive change in how people vote and it’s not obvious that the popular vote would remain the same.
- joshuaheard 6y ago
  I saw the same thing. He says Democrats won't vote in California because they know they are going to win, and Democrats don't vote in Texas because they know they are going to lose. I think it would apply equally to both parties. I was surprised to see this article on HN, since most other statistical election fraud analyses I have seen are being dismissed as conspiracy theories. Facebook even censored one of them. I'm glad to see they are getting some serious consideration.
  - threeseed 6y ago
    The issue is that the US has not officially selected a President yet. So Facebook, Twitter etc are being prudent and not allowing misinformation until that is the case. And I've yet to see any fraud analysis that is coming from reputable sources i.e. not Gateway Pundit or 4chan so it makes sense to err on the side of caution.
    - mistermann 6y ago
      > So Facebook, Twitter etc are being prudent and not allowing misinformation Do these censors have the means to determine what is and is not "misinformation"? Do we have comprehensive insight into to what volume and types of censorship are (or are not) happening behind closed doors at the various social media companies? > And I've yet to see any fraud analysis that is coming from reputable sources i.e. not Gateway Pundit or 4chan Do we have comprehensive insight into to what volume and types of censorship are (or are not) happening behind closed doors at the various social media companies?
deleted 6y ago
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aceon48 6y ago
This is too high level. You would have to look at individual state levels, particularly swing states.
- Bedgeseb 6y ago
  https://github.com/cjph8914/2020_benfords https://github.com/cjph8914/2020_benfords
  - timtylin 6y ago
    The more I think about it, the more I believe Benford's Law can be violated too easily within more urban areas, especially when precinct sizes are artificially limited to a fixed size (500~1000 people) without geographically-induced truncations. As long as voter turnout is consistently above 10-20%, with the 2-party system you're simply not going to get the vote count number to span the several magnitudes needed to induce Benford's Law. (Exception of course for smaller/independent candidates, and perhaps if one of the major candidates really sucked and kept getting 10% of the votes)
  - mikexstudios 6y ago
    https://github.com/cjph8914/2020_benfords/issues/9 https://github.com/cjph8914/2020_benfords/issues/9 for more context.
Bedgeseb 6y ago
This shows Benfords law was broken in some cases. https://github.com/cjph8914/2020_benfords https://github.com/cjph8914/2020_benfords
gloryless 6y ago
This is damn interesting. I've seen a couple reads on the Russian elections but never seen it turned to the US. I think it would have to get a deeper analysis with more fine grained data but seems like it's got some solid indicators one could follow.
anonu 6y ago
I think arguably the electoral process makes fraud harder. If the goal was to tip the scales, in a popular vote you could basically do this anywhere across the country. But in an EV system, you would need to pick and choose 1 or probably more places (vulnerabilities) to attack to tilt things in your favor
- unityByFreedom 6y ago
  Great point. I don't know why some states all of the sudden want to trust the others' voting systems. One state could choose to go electronic with no paper trail, for example, and we all know that's a bad idea. Voter fraud does not happen on any sort of wide scale. Election fraud could.
  - metiscus 6y ago
    There are a few reasons I've heard. The one I hear most frequently is that the electoral college is outdated and should be replaced on that basis alone. The second one is that it is undemocratic and allows disproportionate representation to small state voters. The third one that I believe underlies the two previous is that when the popular vote has been contradicted by the electoral college, it typically has elected someone from the "wrong party" depending on who you ask. Looking at the states in the popular vote compact there is some truth to that.
  - js2 6y ago
    One of many bills introduced to address those concerns: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/1540/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/154...
    - unityByFreedom 6y ago
      Thank you for informing me about that. Still, the main problem with our elections IMO is the ease with which misinformation spreads online via social media. Dumping the EC does nothing to address that and it feels like a scapegoat. Like how we were diverted from caring about net neutrality and Comcast etc. to caring about FAANG monopolies.
guscost 6y ago
Here’s someone who did analysis of 2020 NYT time-series data, and is trying to make a case that the currently-contested states show odd patterns. Note that this would be circumstantial evidence at best, but still a little fishy when compared with the timeline: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1325592112428163072.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1325592112428163072.html I made a GitHub repo of this analysis ported to Python3, with a quickstart and a matplotlib script, if anyone wants to try it. If nothing else it’s kinda fun to tinker with the data: https://github.com/guscost/nyt-election-2020-analysis https://github.com/guscost/nyt-election-2020-analysis
- sanp 6y ago
  This is extremely poor analysis. All the "anomalies" are explained by the fact that the ballots came from Dem heavy areas...
  - function_seven 6y ago
    And even if you accept that some shuffling occurs in the mail system, it's not nearly enough to homogenize the entire mail-in ballot intake. Certain sorting centers (i.e. the first 3 digits of a collection of ZIP codes) are still going to have drastically different demographics than others. So as trays of mail arrive, and are stacked up in the tabulation centers, they're likely to stay clumped together. It is completely unsurprising that a very large batch of mail-in ballots, arriving in one transport, are going to show a high ratio of D/R votes compared to other batches of mail-in votes. Knowing where the voters in each batch live will explain the differences.
  - bootcampwhere 6y ago
    Even, "extremely poor" is generous. It's not so much an analysis as a lay person's take on a data analysis.
- tptacek 6y ago
  The premise of this analysis appears to be that mail-in ballots are a uniform sampling of Democrats and Republicans. But of course, in 2020, that's not at all the case; the Republicans made a campaign issue out of not voting absentee, and of attempting legally to reject absentee ballots under a number of conditions. As a result: mail-in ballots are sharply more Democratic than Republican this year. Further, any analysis that compares returns over time and holds Florida up as the model state to match against needs to account for the fact that Florida was able to begin counting ballots early, because they passed state laws to do so†. PA and WI were legally prevented from counting ballots until election day. The returns over time are going to be much different in FL than in PA. Here's another data point: you're about to see Biden's lead in New York open up and drive his popular vote victory even higher, because NY, which is a shitshow, is only now getting started counting all the mail-in votes. Obviously, the Democratic Party didn't launch a giant vote fraud operation in New York State, which they would have won even with a dead candidate. † Every state should be like Florida, in this regard.
WhatNewSoftware 6y ago
Hmm, have any of you heard of Benford's Law? https://imgur.com/a/gxuVAxc https://imgur.com/a/gxuVAxc Some people may be in for a rude awakening as audits happen. But I worry this information may not make it into various echo chambers.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
eluusive 6y ago
Complaining about populism and then desiring the popular vote. The fellow admits to not knowing statistics very well either. This analysis can show fraud, but it's not necessarily going to.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
fdschoeneman 6y ago
It's difficult to prove anything with this data but that's not it's value. It's value is in helping us figure out where to investigate.
bootcampwhere 6y ago
Great effort, interesting perspective. What a lot of people miss is the purpose of the election college and the fact that it is working exactly as designed, framing it as "voter suppression" is an unfortunate way to frame it. The founders anticipated most people living in cities and so used the college to give more weight to rural votes. It can be argued they miscalibrated but America would be much less conservative if we decided the presidency by popular vote. Change the system and you'll be handing the country over to city dealers, the fact that people that live in cities call themselves Democrats in cities DOES NOT mean there is voter suppression of democrats.
skunkworker 6y ago
Personally I'm curious how much voter fraud is committed by parents of college students who receive their students absentee ballots and decide to "fill them out" for them. It's the most intentional voter fraud that I'm aware of at the moment and non-conspiratorial. Things like this pop up on reddit occasionally. https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/9twaf9/gfs_dad_filled_out_her_mailin_ballot_forged_her/ https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/9twaf9/gfs_dad... https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/9ni5uf/family_filing_extra_ballots_in_my_name/ https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/9ni5uf/family_... https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/j7440r/parents_voted_for_me_against_my_will/ https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/j7440r/parents...
- klipt 6y ago
  Assuming college students are on average more liberal than their parents, parents fraudulently filling in votes for their children would benefit the GOP more than the Democrats.
  - Pyramus 6y ago
    To be precice [1]: age 18-29: 35:62 (Trump:Biden) vs 45-64: 49:50 [1] NYT Exit Polls https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/exit-polls-president.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/...
- fastball 6y ago
  I'd be very surprised (given the appeal to Reddit's political leanings) if all of those aren't examples of reddit's favorite past-time (creative writing). Like, come on, there is no possible way these people are actually dumb enough to even question whether or not someone voting for you is allowed, yet they all ask that question. Because if they didn't ask a dumb question like that, their creative writing sample wouldn't get to live in /r/legaladvice.
throwaway3846 6y ago
> https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/declaration-of-non-dependents/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/declaration-of-non-depende... > > Some cheating leaves barely a shadow of evidence. In other cases, the evidence is massive. Consider what happened one spring evening at midnight in 1987: seven million American children suddenly disappeared. The worst kidnapping wave in history? Hardly. It was the night of April 15, and the Internal Revenue Service had just changed a rule. Instead of merely listing each dependent child, tax filers were now required to provide a Social Security number for each child. Suddenly, seven million children — children who had existed only as phantom exemptions on the previous year’s 1040 forms — vanished, representing about one in ten of all dependent children in the United States. > The “seven million” figure appears to be accurate, as noted in a December 2000 National Tax Journal article by Jeffrey B. Liebman that drew its data from a 1990 Internal Revenue Service conference report: The same people claiming there is minimal voter fraud on the basis of the relatively few in number convictions for voter fraud probably would have also claimed in 1986, before the IRS rule change, that there was minimal IRS dependent tax credit fraud. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence unless you make a sufficiently thorough effort to actually collect the evidence (i.e., to detect voter fraud).
- Buttons840 6y ago
  This reminded me of a hypothetical situation I thought of. There's a town of 1,000 people. They have an election. One person wins by 100 votes. It is later found and proven that 99 of the votes for the winner were fraudulent. Who should win then? Who should be elected? Clearly a lot of fraud went one way. If we look at it probabilistically, then the other candidate (the one who didn't benefit from fraud) should win, because most likely there were other votes that were also fraudulent. And yet, by electing the other candidate, you are ignoring a couple votes that were never proven to be fraudulent, which begs the question: exactly whose votes were thrown away and what is the justification for throwing them away?
- altacc 6y ago
  That seems like a false equivalence as perhaps the requirement to add a SSN for children was precisely because there was evidence of the fraud. In US elections there are fraud monitoring systems in place and there's a lot more anti-fraud and ballot checking processes than using an honor system to count your dependents on a tax form. In general, especially legally, evidence is required to prove the merit of a claim, not to refute a claim. Proving a negative is often impossible, impractical or oppressive.
FeeJai 6y ago
Ok, so let's look what Merkel did what would never be possible in the US according to that post (and by the authors opinion proves that the US is so much more on the right than Germany): > In the 2008 financial crisis (and now again) the government paid part of workers’ wages to save jobs (Kurzarbeit) Trump went even further and sent checks directly to every taxpayer. > She stopped mandatory military service US got rid of the draft in 1973 under Nixon > Germany is getting out of nuclear power by 2022 > Germany is getting out of coal power by 2038 Neither is the business of the federal government in the US but instead of the states themselves, on top of that this is done in Germany by importing exactly that power from other European neighbours, an option the US does not have. > She ran a balanced budget That is considered as on the right in the US > Legalized gay marriage The US had that first nationwide, and individual states had it much earlier. On top of that, Merkel voted against that law in the German parliament (Bundestag) > Accepted a large number of refugees from war-torn Syria Since Syria is closer to Europe than to the US this is not surprising, the US accepts asylum from middle and south America instead. > Cut taxes (Solidaritätszuschlag) for the working class and middle class, while keeping them in place for the upper class Sounds like the tax reform of 2017 > If you did one of these things in the US, you would be considered a progressive leftist. Doing all of them would make you a radical. In Germany she is still considered center-right. -> While this is a nice visualization, the author had no idea about US politics and how it contrasts to German politics
- MagnumOpus 6y ago
  >> She ran a balanced budget >That is considered as on the right in the US Every "right wing" US government in the last generation implemented substantial unfunded tax cuts that raised deficits and national debt... Politicians often say one thing when in opposition and do the oppositie when in power. Beyond that, you point out that "they US does it too" - accepting refugees, accepting gay marriage, making taxation more progressive. All of these things were (and are being) done while being fought tooth and nail by the right wing in the US. You missed the point.
  - FeeJai 6y ago
    > Politicians often say one thing when in opposition and do the oppositie when in power. Totally agree, it's all talk and no do. Does not change the fact that intending to do so (or at least pretending the intent) would not make you a progressive leftist in the us as the author suggested.
lki876 6y ago
> The first conclusion has to be that I found no evidence of fraud in any of these elections. Given that people have been convicted of fraud and invalid votes are found, we have learned that either (1) this technique does not find evidence of fraud even when it happens or (2) the fraud that happens is marginal. (2) seems likely, but given the small margins in some swing states, even a relatively small numbers of fraudulent votes could determine the election.
- rootusrootus 6y ago
  What constitutes a small margin? Even in Georgia the margin is just over 10,000 votes. Fraudulently casting that many votes undetected would be a non-trivial task.
  - lki876 6y ago
    > What constitutes a small margin? I'm sure that within the context of the discussion and the number of votes cast, you can come up with a meaningful number. > Fraudulently casting that many votes undetected would be a non-trivial task. Non-trivial is a low barrier.
    - rootusrootus 6y ago
      > Non-trivial is a low barrier. Okay, I will clarify. Fraudulently casting 10K votes undetected is impossible. And hey, the only actual evidence we have is from a couple republicans who tried to bring fake ballots to a precinct in Philadelphia. Maybe the real fraud we should be investigating is how one candidate beat his predicted performance by several points two elections in a row. What are the odds of that?
lmilcin 6y ago
I think it is naive this is any kind of proof of anything. The fraud can happen in many ways. It might be a person leaning one way or another thinking they are working for a good cause. Actually, I think making it difficult for people from opposing party to vote is a kind of fraud, made in broad daylight. Proving absence of fraud is much more difficult than showing there aren't obvious signs of it. BUT, and here is important thing, this is really a question of burden of proof, and in this case it is on the accuser. In absence of proof it is assumed voting was legitimate. Also, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs.

206 points by vitplister 6y ago

The adjective form of Democrat is Democratic. Perhaps as a German the author is unaware that usages like "all the democrat votes are ignored" are repeating the Republicans' deliberately insulting word choice. Edit: thanks to currymj below for the link to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_(epithet) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_(epithet)

noodlenotes 6y ago
"Democratic" is confusing because it could mean either "relating to democracy" or "relating to the Democratic party" whereas "Republican" almost always refers to the party. I don't blame anyone for using a less ambiguous word and this is the first I've heard of "Democrat" being an insult.
- jki275 6y ago
  Nobody has ever heard of it other than people looking for something to be offended about.
- Izkata 6y ago
  Likewise here; I switched to "Democrat" because of a confusing conversation I once had with someone some time ago.
nl 6y ago
> The adjective form of Democrat is Democratic. This doesn't seem to be widely supported. Vox.com (a left-leading outlet) uses "Democrat voters" frequently, eg: "...while 82 percent of Democrat voters named the pandemic the top issue.." https://www.vox.com/2020/11/4/21548770/exit-polls-election-trump-voters-economy-pandemic https://www.vox.com/2020/11/4/21548770/exit-polls-election-t...
- currymj 6y ago
  it is absolutely true that “Democrat party” as opposed to “Democratic party” is a Republican shibboleth for some reason. Democrats themselves don’t seem to think about it much but there is a portion of conservative media that is very careful to always say “Democrat party”. see here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_(epithet) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_(epithet)
  - nl 6y ago
    Ha, I never knew. What strange behavior on their part.
1337shadow 6y ago
Democratic: Pertaining to democracy; favoring democracy, or constructed upon the principle of government by the people. Democrat: A supporter of democracy; an advocate of democratic politics. One adjective for persons another for process. In some cases both would be correct but the meaning will differ. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/democrat https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/democrat https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/democratic https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/democratic Good, that's consistent with my French and Greek, sorry for checking but your comment really surprised me ! Didn't realize it was a joke until having already checked...

loraa 6y ago

At least no one brought up Russians this time.

dudus 6y ago

Did I miss something? Where was the chart for the 2020 election?

nl 6y ago
The title is "... in old elections .."

nl 6y ago

Am I the only centre-left type person in the world who thinks the Electoral College isn't a bad thing (in theory at least). In the Westminster 2-house system in Australia voters vote for representation from their seat. These seats have approximately the same number of people, but they also vote for an upper-house representative and the smaller states are over-represented in terms of population. This is because otherwise it becomes easy for a federal government to only govern for the very large populations in the cities, and that is bad for the country as a whole - places outside those large population bases are disenfranchised because no amount of voting would matter. The electoral college seems to do a similar thing. I don't think it's perfect, but in principle I don't see it as a bad things that people in say Montana have a means to influence the presidency.

deleted 6y ago
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DC-3 6y ago
Should the vote also be weighted to uphold the interests of other classes of people, like young vs old, or rich vs poor, or bricklayers vs hairdressers? I consider myself more defined by my age and profession than by my hometown but in an electoral college system it is only that latter fact that affects how a vote is weighted.
- Terrario 6y ago
  But the country is not a union of people of different ages and professions, but of different states, technically. The electoral college is a form of protection for the naturally less densely populated agrarian states against the densely populated urban ones. Without the electoral college, the colonies would not have agreed to unite under a shared federal government.
  - nanny 6y ago
    >The electoral college is a form of protection for the naturally less densely populated agrarian states against the densely populated urban ones. This is commonly repeated, but it's BS. What "protection" does the electoral college give to Kansas, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Idaho, or Montana? Presidential candidates don't pay any attention to any of those "less densely populated agrarian states". In addition, dense states like NJ, NY, CT, and Mass don't get attention from candidates. California doesn't get any attention either, so what gives? The states that get the attention are the swing states with the highest number of electoral votes, simply because the electoral college incentivizes trying to swing a small number of voters in such states. Watch some of these videos from CGP Grey for more info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wC42HgLA4k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wC42HgLA4k

Glyptodon 6y ago

Always keep in mind that however distorted the electoral college is, that distortion is tremendously magnified by the cap on the size of the US house of Representatives and the fact that the Constitution specifies a lower bound for district population but no upper bound.

tastyfreeze 6y ago
I have been thinking that maybe states should get an equal number of electoral votes. We would get the protection of the electoral college and every state would have an equal say.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  That would be less democratic (small d) than the current system. Do you have some reason that Wyoming should actually have an equal say with New York or Texas or Florida or California?
  - tastyfreeze 6y ago
    Because they are all states that should have an equal say in what president is elected. A republic of states is beholden to the states. Each state is beholden to its population.
    - TheDong 6y ago
      Federal law impacts all citizens. It doesn't just make laws concerning the states. Why should a man in wyoming's opinion on what federal laws I should live under count 70x as much as mine? Why should a minority of the country make a decision that impacts the majority of people?
      - umvi 6y ago
        Well if you believe Wyoming should just be steamrolled by California's desires 100% of the time, why shouldn't Wyoming secede from the union? In fact, why should any "small states" join the union in the first place if they are just going to be steamrolled by California and New York?

ve55 6y ago

What I dislike about a lot of these potential fraud analysis techniques is that if a group that was performing fraud was aware of them, then they would simply perform the fraud 'properly' such that the given technique(s) don't show evidence (since they know what others are looking for and hoping to find, they simply ensure it isn't there). The same goes for similar techniques like Benford's law: once you know about them, you can improve your sophistication so that no conclusion can be made (There are some interesting exceptions here since most claims of fraud would have one believe that centralized or semi-centralized fraud is much harder to perform than decentralized/random fraud, in which case due to coordination issues, some of these techniques could still bear fruit). But, the obvious overlaying issue is that the system is broken from the bottom up: there is no authentication, authorization, or encryption. Rather than having random Internet bloggers attempt to detect fraud with the information and tools they have, the system should instead be made secure and robust from the bottom-up, starting with how votes are made, tallied, transported, and so on. Additionally the technologies used, voting machines used, counting methods used, and voting system itself (lacking any ranked-choice or similar options) are all severely lacking modern improvements. No single person should be counting votes and typing numbers into fields. We should at least try to use some of the multidisciplinary technology developed in the last five or so decades to try to patch this from the bottom-up so that the system is much more robust and auditable for the future, because things are only going to get weirder (honestly, the US election went very smoothly compared to how it gone have gone, imo - there is no better time to prevent future disasters than today).

alisonkisk 6y ago
Smart careful criminals are smart and careful. Most criminals are stupid or lazy.
- crobertsbmw 6y ago
  What a fun thing to say.
IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
The system is secure and robust, at least with regards to the mechanics of individual votings. Among the main factors is its distributed nature. You just can't run a scam with senior citizen volunteers in thousands of individual precincts. Then, there are observers. Famous case from this week's election was Republicans complaining that their two dozen(!) observers weren't allowed closer than 6 feet to the ballots. It would be impossible for fraud to happen on any regular basis and not coming to light. So the incidence of 0.00002% (https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/4/26/15424270/voter-fraud-north-carolina https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/4/26/15424270/v...) is somewhat informative. If it were possible to manipulate the vote tabulation in any meaningful way, the GOP wouldn't need to go to all the lengths it does w.r.t. gerrymandering, purging voter roles, coming up with new requirements for voting, or closing voting precincts.

JaceLightning 6y ago

Missing the 2020 US election! Do the 2020 election.

santoshalper 6y ago
I don't think enough data is available yet.

kart23 6y ago

The author says about turnout: "One clarification: The turnout number at the bottom is slightly wrong: You’d think that you can easily get these statistics for past elections, but I can’t find the turnout number anywhere. Instead I was able to get the population of the counties, so this is the number of votes divided by the population." Isn't this quite inaccurate? I think counties release registered voter numbers, so shouldn't we be instead comparing registered turnout, as votes/registered voters? (yes, some states do allow same-day registration, which might muck up numbers, but I still think its better than just going off population). But anyways, where do the population numbers come from? I imagine they're from the last census, which was in 2010. edit: yes, they are using the census yearly estimates. I suppose that's as accurate as you can get, but its still not a true turnout statistic.

ekimekim 6y ago
I'd argue registered voter turnout also isn't a true turnout statistic, as many people will not be registered due to apathy/feeling it doesn't matter/etc. The statistic you really want is votes / eligible voters, not registered voters. But that's a hard number to figure out in the US.
Izkata 6y ago
> I suppose that's as accurate as you can get Numbers for each state since 2000, every 2 years, available here: http://www.electproject.org/home/voter-turnout/voter-turnout-data http://www.electproject.org/home/voter-turnout/voter-turnout... What you want is probably the VEP number ("voting-eligible population", people who are of age and not disqualified for some reason, such as having committed a felony).

refurb 6y ago

The author’s analysis seems a bit one sided. He speaks of poor turn out in LA, because of the electoral college system which means additional democratic votes don’t matter. Then speaks about the same lack of Democratic turnout in Texas, because it always go Republican (again, due to the electoral college). But wouldn’t those same effect apply to Republicans as well? They don’t bother to vote in CA because there is a 0% probability they will affect the outcome. And in addition, there are likely Republicans in Texas who don’t vote because they know the state will go Republican. I would argue that if you dropped the electoral college, you’d see a massive change in how people vote and it’s not obvious that the popular vote would remain the same.

joshuaheard 6y ago
I saw the same thing. He says Democrats won't vote in California because they know they are going to win, and Democrats don't vote in Texas because they know they are going to lose. I think it would apply equally to both parties. I was surprised to see this article on HN, since most other statistical election fraud analyses I have seen are being dismissed as conspiracy theories. Facebook even censored one of them. I'm glad to see they are getting some serious consideration.
- threeseed 6y ago
  The issue is that the US has not officially selected a President yet. So Facebook, Twitter etc are being prudent and not allowing misinformation until that is the case. And I've yet to see any fraud analysis that is coming from reputable sources i.e. not Gateway Pundit or 4chan so it makes sense to err on the side of caution.
  - mistermann 6y ago
    > So Facebook, Twitter etc are being prudent and not allowing misinformation Do these censors have the means to determine what is and is not "misinformation"? Do we have comprehensive insight into to what volume and types of censorship are (or are not) happening behind closed doors at the various social media companies? > And I've yet to see any fraud analysis that is coming from reputable sources i.e. not Gateway Pundit or 4chan Do we have comprehensive insight into to what volume and types of censorship are (or are not) happening behind closed doors at the various social media companies?

deleted 6y ago

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aceon48 6y ago

This is too high level. You would have to look at individual state levels, particularly swing states.

Bedgeseb 6y ago
https://github.com/cjph8914/2020_benfords https://github.com/cjph8914/2020_benfords
- timtylin 6y ago
  The more I think about it, the more I believe Benford's Law can be violated too easily within more urban areas, especially when precinct sizes are artificially limited to a fixed size (500~1000 people) without geographically-induced truncations. As long as voter turnout is consistently above 10-20%, with the 2-party system you're simply not going to get the vote count number to span the several magnitudes needed to induce Benford's Law. (Exception of course for smaller/independent candidates, and perhaps if one of the major candidates really sucked and kept getting 10% of the votes)
- mikexstudios 6y ago
  https://github.com/cjph8914/2020_benfords/issues/9 https://github.com/cjph8914/2020_benfords/issues/9 for more context.

Bedgeseb 6y ago

This shows Benfords law was broken in some cases. https://github.com/cjph8914/2020_benfords https://github.com/cjph8914/2020_benfords

gloryless 6y ago

This is damn interesting. I've seen a couple reads on the Russian elections but never seen it turned to the US. I think it would have to get a deeper analysis with more fine grained data but seems like it's got some solid indicators one could follow.

anonu 6y ago

I think arguably the electoral process makes fraud harder. If the goal was to tip the scales, in a popular vote you could basically do this anywhere across the country. But in an EV system, you would need to pick and choose 1 or probably more places (vulnerabilities) to attack to tilt things in your favor

unityByFreedom 6y ago
Great point. I don't know why some states all of the sudden want to trust the others' voting systems. One state could choose to go electronic with no paper trail, for example, and we all know that's a bad idea. Voter fraud does not happen on any sort of wide scale. Election fraud could.
- metiscus 6y ago
  There are a few reasons I've heard. The one I hear most frequently is that the electoral college is outdated and should be replaced on that basis alone. The second one is that it is undemocratic and allows disproportionate representation to small state voters. The third one that I believe underlies the two previous is that when the popular vote has been contradicted by the electoral college, it typically has elected someone from the "wrong party" depending on who you ask. Looking at the states in the popular vote compact there is some truth to that.
- js2 6y ago
  One of many bills introduced to address those concerns: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/1540/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/154...
  - unityByFreedom 6y ago
    Thank you for informing me about that. Still, the main problem with our elections IMO is the ease with which misinformation spreads online via social media. Dumping the EC does nothing to address that and it feels like a scapegoat. Like how we were diverted from caring about net neutrality and Comcast etc. to caring about FAANG monopolies.

guscost 6y ago

Here’s someone who did analysis of 2020 NYT time-series data, and is trying to make a case that the currently-contested states show odd patterns. Note that this would be circumstantial evidence at best, but still a little fishy when compared with the timeline: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1325592112428163072.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1325592112428163072.html I made a GitHub repo of this analysis ported to Python3, with a quickstart and a matplotlib script, if anyone wants to try it. If nothing else it’s kinda fun to tinker with the data: https://github.com/guscost/nyt-election-2020-analysis https://github.com/guscost/nyt-election-2020-analysis

sanp 6y ago
This is extremely poor analysis. All the "anomalies" are explained by the fact that the ballots came from Dem heavy areas...
- function_seven 6y ago
  And even if you accept that some shuffling occurs in the mail system, it's not nearly enough to homogenize the entire mail-in ballot intake. Certain sorting centers (i.e. the first 3 digits of a collection of ZIP codes) are still going to have drastically different demographics than others. So as trays of mail arrive, and are stacked up in the tabulation centers, they're likely to stay clumped together. It is completely unsurprising that a very large batch of mail-in ballots, arriving in one transport, are going to show a high ratio of D/R votes compared to other batches of mail-in votes. Knowing where the voters in each batch live will explain the differences.
- bootcampwhere 6y ago
  Even, "extremely poor" is generous. It's not so much an analysis as a lay person's take on a data analysis.
tptacek 6y ago
The premise of this analysis appears to be that mail-in ballots are a uniform sampling of Democrats and Republicans. But of course, in 2020, that's not at all the case; the Republicans made a campaign issue out of not voting absentee, and of attempting legally to reject absentee ballots under a number of conditions. As a result: mail-in ballots are sharply more Democratic than Republican this year. Further, any analysis that compares returns over time and holds Florida up as the model state to match against needs to account for the fact that Florida was able to begin counting ballots early, because they passed state laws to do so†. PA and WI were legally prevented from counting ballots until election day. The returns over time are going to be much different in FL than in PA. Here's another data point: you're about to see Biden's lead in New York open up and drive his popular vote victory even higher, because NY, which is a shitshow, is only now getting started counting all the mail-in votes. Obviously, the Democratic Party didn't launch a giant vote fraud operation in New York State, which they would have won even with a dead candidate. † Every state should be like Florida, in this regard.

WhatNewSoftware 6y ago

Hmm, have any of you heard of Benford's Law? https://imgur.com/a/gxuVAxc https://imgur.com/a/gxuVAxc Some people may be in for a rude awakening as audits happen. But I worry this information may not make it into various echo chambers.

deleted 6y ago

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eluusive 6y ago

Complaining about populism and then desiring the popular vote. The fellow admits to not knowing statistics very well either. This analysis can show fraud, but it's not necessarily going to.

deleted 6y ago

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fdschoeneman 6y ago

It's difficult to prove anything with this data but that's not it's value. It's value is in helping us figure out where to investigate.

bootcampwhere 6y ago

Great effort, interesting perspective. What a lot of people miss is the purpose of the election college and the fact that it is working exactly as designed, framing it as "voter suppression" is an unfortunate way to frame it. The founders anticipated most people living in cities and so used the college to give more weight to rural votes. It can be argued they miscalibrated but America would be much less conservative if we decided the presidency by popular vote. Change the system and you'll be handing the country over to city dealers, the fact that people that live in cities call themselves Democrats in cities DOES NOT mean there is voter suppression of democrats.

skunkworker 6y ago

Personally I'm curious how much voter fraud is committed by parents of college students who receive their students absentee ballots and decide to "fill them out" for them. It's the most intentional voter fraud that I'm aware of at the moment and non-conspiratorial. Things like this pop up on reddit occasionally. https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/9twaf9/gfs_dad_filled_out_her_mailin_ballot_forged_her/ https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/9twaf9/gfs_dad... https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/9ni5uf/family_filing_extra_ballots_in_my_name/ https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/9ni5uf/family_... https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/j7440r/parents_voted_for_me_against_my_will/ https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/j7440r/parents...

klipt 6y ago
Assuming college students are on average more liberal than their parents, parents fraudulently filling in votes for their children would benefit the GOP more than the Democrats.
- Pyramus 6y ago
  To be precice [1]: age 18-29: 35:62 (Trump:Biden) vs 45-64: 49:50 [1] NYT Exit Polls https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/exit-polls-president.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/...
fastball 6y ago
I'd be very surprised (given the appeal to Reddit's political leanings) if all of those aren't examples of reddit's favorite past-time (creative writing). Like, come on, there is no possible way these people are actually dumb enough to even question whether or not someone voting for you is allowed, yet they all ask that question. Because if they didn't ask a dumb question like that, their creative writing sample wouldn't get to live in /r/legaladvice.

throwaway3846 6y ago

> https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/declaration-of-non-dependents/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/declaration-of-non-depende... > > Some cheating leaves barely a shadow of evidence. In other cases, the evidence is massive. Consider what happened one spring evening at midnight in 1987: seven million American children suddenly disappeared. The worst kidnapping wave in history? Hardly. It was the night of April 15, and the Internal Revenue Service had just changed a rule. Instead of merely listing each dependent child, tax filers were now required to provide a Social Security number for each child. Suddenly, seven million children — children who had existed only as phantom exemptions on the previous year’s 1040 forms — vanished, representing about one in ten of all dependent children in the United States. > The “seven million” figure appears to be accurate, as noted in a December 2000 National Tax Journal article by Jeffrey B. Liebman that drew its data from a 1990 Internal Revenue Service conference report: The same people claiming there is minimal voter fraud on the basis of the relatively few in number convictions for voter fraud probably would have also claimed in 1986, before the IRS rule change, that there was minimal IRS dependent tax credit fraud. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence unless you make a sufficiently thorough effort to actually collect the evidence (i.e., to detect voter fraud).

Buttons840 6y ago
This reminded me of a hypothetical situation I thought of. There's a town of 1,000 people. They have an election. One person wins by 100 votes. It is later found and proven that 99 of the votes for the winner were fraudulent. Who should win then? Who should be elected? Clearly a lot of fraud went one way. If we look at it probabilistically, then the other candidate (the one who didn't benefit from fraud) should win, because most likely there were other votes that were also fraudulent. And yet, by electing the other candidate, you are ignoring a couple votes that were never proven to be fraudulent, which begs the question: exactly whose votes were thrown away and what is the justification for throwing them away?
altacc 6y ago
That seems like a false equivalence as perhaps the requirement to add a SSN for children was precisely because there was evidence of the fraud. In US elections there are fraud monitoring systems in place and there's a lot more anti-fraud and ballot checking processes than using an honor system to count your dependents on a tax form. In general, especially legally, evidence is required to prove the merit of a claim, not to refute a claim. Proving a negative is often impossible, impractical or oppressive.

FeeJai 6y ago

Ok, so let's look what Merkel did what would never be possible in the US according to that post (and by the authors opinion proves that the US is so much more on the right than Germany): > In the 2008 financial crisis (and now again) the government paid part of workers’ wages to save jobs (Kurzarbeit) Trump went even further and sent checks directly to every taxpayer. > She stopped mandatory military service US got rid of the draft in 1973 under Nixon > Germany is getting out of nuclear power by 2022 > Germany is getting out of coal power by 2038 Neither is the business of the federal government in the US but instead of the states themselves, on top of that this is done in Germany by importing exactly that power from other European neighbours, an option the US does not have. > She ran a balanced budget That is considered as on the right in the US > Legalized gay marriage The US had that first nationwide, and individual states had it much earlier. On top of that, Merkel voted against that law in the German parliament (Bundestag) > Accepted a large number of refugees from war-torn Syria Since Syria is closer to Europe than to the US this is not surprising, the US accepts asylum from middle and south America instead. > Cut taxes (Solidaritätszuschlag) for the working class and middle class, while keeping them in place for the upper class Sounds like the tax reform of 2017 > If you did one of these things in the US, you would be considered a progressive leftist. Doing all of them would make you a radical. In Germany she is still considered center-right. -> While this is a nice visualization, the author had no idea about US politics and how it contrasts to German politics

MagnumOpus 6y ago
>> She ran a balanced budget >That is considered as on the right in the US Every "right wing" US government in the last generation implemented substantial unfunded tax cuts that raised deficits and national debt... Politicians often say one thing when in opposition and do the oppositie when in power. Beyond that, you point out that "they US does it too" - accepting refugees, accepting gay marriage, making taxation more progressive. All of these things were (and are being) done while being fought tooth and nail by the right wing in the US. You missed the point.
- FeeJai 6y ago
  > Politicians often say one thing when in opposition and do the oppositie when in power. Totally agree, it's all talk and no do. Does not change the fact that intending to do so (or at least pretending the intent) would not make you a progressive leftist in the us as the author suggested.

lki876 6y ago

> The first conclusion has to be that I found no evidence of fraud in any of these elections. Given that people have been convicted of fraud and invalid votes are found, we have learned that either (1) this technique does not find evidence of fraud even when it happens or (2) the fraud that happens is marginal. (2) seems likely, but given the small margins in some swing states, even a relatively small numbers of fraudulent votes could determine the election.

rootusrootus 6y ago
What constitutes a small margin? Even in Georgia the margin is just over 10,000 votes. Fraudulently casting that many votes undetected would be a non-trivial task.
- lki876 6y ago
  > What constitutes a small margin? I'm sure that within the context of the discussion and the number of votes cast, you can come up with a meaningful number. > Fraudulently casting that many votes undetected would be a non-trivial task. Non-trivial is a low barrier.
  - rootusrootus 6y ago
    > Non-trivial is a low barrier. Okay, I will clarify. Fraudulently casting 10K votes undetected is impossible. And hey, the only actual evidence we have is from a couple republicans who tried to bring fake ballots to a precinct in Philadelphia. Maybe the real fraud we should be investigating is how one candidate beat his predicted performance by several points two elections in a row. What are the odds of that?

lmilcin 6y ago

I think it is naive this is any kind of proof of anything. The fraud can happen in many ways. It might be a person leaning one way or another thinking they are working for a good cause. Actually, I think making it difficult for people from opposing party to vote is a kind of fraud, made in broad daylight. Proving absence of fraud is much more difficult than showing there aren't obvious signs of it. BUT, and here is important thing, this is really a question of burden of proof, and in this case it is on the accuser. In absence of proof it is assumed voting was legitimate. Also, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs.