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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
by 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 agoThis is extremely poor analysis. All the "anomalies" are explained by the fact that the ballots came from Dem heavy areas...
- function_seven 6y agoAnd 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 agoEven, "extremely poor" is generous. It's not so much an analysis as a lay person's take on a data analysis.
- tptacek 6y agoThe 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.
- krastanov 6y agoedit: OP expanded their post and my comment below is now inconsequential and even misleading. While I do not find the analysis particularly strong, it does not have the premise you describe. It only has the premise that the mail-in ballots are randomly shuffled before their counting starts (which is also not a reliable claim).
- tptacek 6y agoI could be misreading it, but I don't think I am; for instance, the bit in the middle, about how the batches should be getting more Republican as time goes on and returns come in from rural counties (also: not how it works).
- krastanov 6y agoYeah, that one particular tweet becomes contradictory with the larger point they are making, but at face value [1] the larger point is that "each new batch of mail-in votes being reported as counted should have the same D/R ratio because they were shuffled before the counting started". It does not make a claim about what that ratio should be. [1]: Given the flimsiness of the arguments, taking it at face value might be giving it too much credit. My opinion is that this is nonsense. edit: your sibling comment about mail-in counts in PA also being explicitly not shuffled, but by county throws another wrench in their argument.
- birken 6y agoYou are right. The author is assuming the premise that all mail in ballots go to some central location, get shuffled together and thus should have a uniform count. The mail in ballots actually go to local precincts which count them and report them at different times. In fact there were times where mail-in ballots and in-person provisional ballots were being dumped at the same time because different precincts were at different stages of processing ballots at a given time. This analysis makes no sense and shows nothing unusual.
- sweettea 6y agoNo, the premise is that mailin ballots should have a roughly uniform D/R ratio, no matter what timeslice of a state you look at. Of course they skew, but the idea is that the first mailins counted should have basically the same ratio as the last. Which appears true in most states, but not some, for unknown reasons. (The skew it proposes as normal, R later in time due to receiving R ballots on a later distribution, exposes an assumption it makes: that counting is in order of ballots received.)
- soared 6y agoIt seems disingenuous to give a legitimate reason for an anomaly but then follow it with a claim that it’s fraud: > By 4am the D to R ratio was all thrown out of whack. That is because these ballots were not sampled from the real Wisconsin voter population, and they were not randomized in the mail sorting system with the other ballots. They inherently have a different D to R signature... than the rest of the ballots quite possibly bc additional ballots were added to the batch, either through backdating or ballot manufacturing or software tampering. Do we know that mail in ballots are randomly shuffled in the mail? I know some states specifically pull aside ballots cast after certain dates, which could easily explain the differences in the graphs.
- lettergram 6y agoThere’s actual real evidence on Michigan’s website(s). At the very least registered voters had inaccurate information in the system AND some dead voters attempted to vote. https://austingwalters.com/the-dead-vote-in-michigan/ https://austingwalters.com/the-dead-vote-in-michigan/ I found multiple entries, but on Twitter there were probably 10 or so I tried and they worked. Many were valid voters. EDIT: downvoted every time -_- Really people, you can view it on their website yourself.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Again, this should not happen, and it is observed almost nowhere else in the country, because all of the ballots are randomly shuffled...in the mail system and should be homogeneous during counting. No, they aren't. They aren't shuffled by time mailed (which may have significant D/R differences) and they aren't shuffled across counties of the state in places that have them mailed to the voters county election office and counted in that county with the results then reported to the state, the same as other ballots are.
- adjkant 6y agoIt seems reductively easy to see that the basic premise is incredibly flawed here: that ballots are uniformly shuffled in all states. Some very basic things that would cause those exact shifts in the data witnessed: 1. Mail vs Drop Box could very easily have a different ratio, which would easily explain a sharp shift if they counted them in different sets for some states when it's a plateau and a hard line jump. 2. Same goes for any sort of discrete shuffled sets - say they are boxed by the week through early voting, or by county early voting, etc. There's literally dozens of explanations for how you can end up with discrete shuffled sets. 3. If mail ballots are counted in roughly the order received, then any gradual shift may represent that one candidate may have early support fade or strengthen over the course of early voting. 4. All of this also ignores that the time series of reporting may not be from the same counties or mix of counties. Change that mix slowly and you also get a gradual shift. Basically, you need full insight into exactly how ballots are collected (and vary by state) in order to actually have the central hypothesis hold. With no shred evidence of voter fraud at any level and a very clearly biased author, I don't see this holding any merit. While I understand the idea of trying to consider all data, the resounding lack of any evidence should lessen our resources put towards these unlikely theories.
- tptacek 6y agoTo repeat myself because I think it's worth being clear about this: we have enough insight to know that the premise of ballots being randomized statewide does not hold, at all. The reason we were all hitting refresh on Wasserman and Cohn's feeds on Twitter was that each Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday batch was attributed to a specific county, and we had expectations about what returns in those counties would look like.
- guscost 6y agoThis pretty much adds up, and invalidates the whole analysis in my opinion. But I still believe that the first conspicuous batch of mail-in ballots being dumped in the witching hour, after poll watchers were told the counting was done for the night, is fishy, and I will not be surprised if the court considers it part of a larger pattern of behavior which causes ballots (legitimate but unverifiable, in many cases) to be thrown out.
- torstenvl 6y agoIf all the ballots were shuffled in the mail across the timespan in which they were counted, that would make sense. However, they are not, so the assumptions underlying the analysis do not hold. For one thing, many states did not begin counting these ballots until Election Day, per state law. For another, the entities performing the unofficial counts were not necessarily the entities receiving the ballots. The author clearly conflates these two points when he says that Milwaukee ballots heading to the county to be counted were received after the deadline. They were received by the precinct at the appropriate time, and then transported to the county for final tabulation - again, presumably, in compliance with state law. (EDIT: Notably, the video clearly shows the ballots being transferred by law enforcement, so it's patently dishonest to suggest that was the time they were received through the mail.) If a state performs constant counts and constant updates as they receive individual ballots from across the state, then you should get a more-or-less constant D:R ratio. If you count mail ballots in batches of updates from different counties and within counties from different precincts, then you will see the D:R ratio generally shift, with precincts and counties with higher populations (ergo higher batch processing times) coming later.
- unit_circle 6y ago> Around 3am Wisconsin time, a fresh batch of 169k new absentee ballots arrived. They were supposed to stop accepting new ballots, but eh, whatever I guess. > By 4am the D to R ratio was all thrown out of whack. That is because these ballots were not sampled from the real Wisconsin voter population, and they were not randomized in the mail sorting system with the other ballots. They inherently have a different D to R signature... Anyone who knows anything knows Milwaukee (not just as a city but as Wisconsin's largest city) votes blue. So as soon as those votes start getting counted the votes will shift blue. You _should_ see this bimodal distribution in vote counts.
- mquirion 6y agoThis is a really poor understanding of several things, including, for instance, how the USPS actually handled the ballots. This "randomly shuffled" thing is flat wrong. There's actually a lot of really good data about how many mail ballots were requested in each state and the return rate. Many of the states even have data about which party did a better job returning the ballots. https://electproject.github.io/Early-Vote-2020G/index.html https://electproject.github.io/Early-Vote-2020G/index.html Several of the "modelers" out there used such data to basically know by ~1am Wednesday morning that Biden would likely win PA, for instance. It was just a matter of time.
- spzx 6y ago>CulturalHusbandry @APhilosophae >The following information is provided via an anonymous data scientist and another anonymous individual who wrote a script to scrape the national ballot counting time series data of off the @nytimes website. >This is based on their proprietary "Edison" data source which would ordinarily be impossible to access for people outside the press. https://twitter.com/APhilosophae/status/1325592112428163072 https://twitter.com/APhilosophae/status/1325592112428163072 Why should we trust these anonymous people (including twitter thread OP)? They could just tamper with the data and we would have no way to know that. Take into account the pinned thread by @APhilosophae too, they are not impartial at all: https://twitter.com/APhilosophae/status/1325135291791839232 https://twitter.com/APhilosophae/status/1325135291791839232
- guscost 6y agoWell that's why I ported and ran the python script, and put it on GitHub, so you could re-scrape the NYT data too, it will just overwrite what's in the repo. I'm not vouching for any of the corresponding analysis, but the data seems real: https://github.com/guscost/nyt-election-2020-analysis https://github.com/guscost/nyt-election-2020-analysis
- spzx 6y agoAh I misunderstood, I thought one can't repeat the scraping part. But what did they mean by "proprietary "Edison" data source which would ordinarily be impossible to access for people outside the press" then?
- tptacek 6y agoObviously, the bigger problem with trusting this Twitter rando is that they don't know how mail-in ballots are county, came up with weird broken premises, and then accused Wisconsin, Georgia, and Pennsylvania of perpetrating a gigantic fraud.
- nl 6y agoFrom my understanding most of the press data sources are just companies that wrote code to scrape the multiple state sources of data and/or interface with archaic fax systems that sent counts from counting centers to central locations. I believe in some cases they had observers who took totals off the counting machines themselves. I believe the primary reason for them is that they got the data faster than the official websites.
- adolph 6y agoNice. You can get GitHub to do the scraping for you using GitHub actions. To better utilize git as a datastore, prettyprint it so each commit is a smaller diff. https://simonwillison.net/2020/Oct/9/git-scraping/ https://simonwillison.net/2020/Oct/9/git-scraping/
- nl 6y agoIf states piled up the ballots in the order they arrived, that would mean later arriving votes would be counted before early arriving votes. Then if one party had a propensity to vote by mail earlier than the other we'd see a pattern where the proportion from that party would increase over time. That's what we see. Can we verify this any other way? Not completely, but in Florida survey data shows that the Democrats had an early lead of 462,000 before early (non-mail) voting started and by election day that had decreased to ~100K[1] [1] https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/524085-unprecedented-early-voting-gives-democrats-hope-while-republicans-count-on https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/524085-unprecedented-e...
- zerocrates 6y agoHere's some more of their trenchant analysis: https://twitter.com/APhilosophae/status/1325148807546376193 https://twitter.com/APhilosophae/status/1325148807546376193 They're showing results from Prince William County in Virginia to say, a-ha, a huge number of people voted for Biden but didn't vote at all for a downballot race: clearly a sign of fraud, irregularities, malfeasance, perhaps even skullduggery! Except the image doesn't show the titles of those races: the second is obviously for President, and the first, with fewer votes, is... for the representative for the first Congressional district. There are three different Congressional districts that are partially within Prince William County. These aren't nefarious, suspicious Biden-only votes, they're just showing one race that's on everybody's ballot and comparing it to another that isn't. The count of reporting precincts also seems to have been edited for the listing of Presidential votes: it shows 44 in the image instead of the actual number of 94. You could chalk these things up to mistakes or misunderstandings, but judging by the content of the rest of this person's messaging I think it's pretty clear that assuming good faith isn't warranted here. (edited to fix Twitter link... I think)
- EricDeb 6y agoHere's a reuters article that fact checks the weird voter spikes: https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-fact-check-biden-vote-spikes-mi-wi/fact-check-biden-vote-spikes-and-county-recount-do-not-prove-democrats-are-trying-to-steal-the-election-in-michigan-and-wisconsin-idUSKBN27L2RL https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-fact-check-biden-vote-spi...
- trott 6y ago> https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1325592112428163072.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1325592112428163072.html Do you know why the scatter plots for SD and CA are showing a few fractional counts? Shouldn't they all be integers?