7 ms·

It 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 tha

It 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 ago
To 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 ago
  This 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.
  - matwood 6y ago
    The first couple days the big counties were counting 24/7. The managers were on TV talking about their teams, and you could watch live streams on many of the counting areas. The court is likely throwing nothing out. The no poll watcher lawsuit was already laughed out of court when the lawyers had to admit a 'non-zero' number of poll watchers were present the whole time [1]. Trump might be fine lying on Twitter constantly, but in court his lawyers would prefer to not commit perjury. [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fact-check-trumps-claims-poll-watchers/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fact-check-trumps-claims-poll-w...
    - guscost 6y ago
      There are many sworn affidavits being filed in court right now, from poll watchers claiming that they were kept too far away to validate a single ballot, or turned away entirely. We’ll see, it will definitely go to court.
      - matwood 6y ago
        Read the fact check. The too far away claim was decided days ago, and people were allowed to be within 6'. There were also live webcams setup. This has literally been one of the most transparent elections in history. Read through the lawsuits [1]. Most have already been rejected due to no proof. The others outstanding have to do with so few votes it doesn't matter or they actually go against Trump's interests, like stopping the count when he's behind. This is all theater at this point. Maybe they can have a few more press conferences at the garden center next to the sex shop. [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-campaign-lawsuits-election-results-2020-11 https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-campaign-lawsuits-elec...
        tptacek 6y ago
        Note also the extremely telling detail that Trump's WinRed links for fundraising the recounts and legal challenges allocate 60% of those funds to retiring his campaign debt.
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> With no shred evidence of voter fraud at any level I feel like this is actually the most suspicious thing here. In a country of over 300 million, in one of the most contentious elections in living memory, not one person was found to have committed voter fraud? It seems more likely that we're just terrible at detecting voter fraud rather than that there were literally zero instances of voter fraud anywhere. Which implies we might need some better measures to detect it. The thing they were trying to do with dead voters is promising but has the obvious problem that there could have been legitimate ballots submitted, or unintentionally illegitimate ballots, if the death was recent etc. But the general idea seems to hold. Maybe we should add a few percent fictitious entries to the voter rolls and then see if any of them votes next time. Anybody have any good ideas for how we could be detecting this, if it's happening? If it isn't happening then having some measures in place like this would be good to point to as affirmative evidence that it isn't rather than merely the absence of evidence that it is. And if it is happening, it would be good to know that too.
- tptacek 6y ago
  First, we do detect a small number of voter fraud cases. People have gone to prison for it. But your premise is also broken. You assume we should see regular attempts at voter fraud, given our enormous sample size. But voter fraud, on the "retail" level, is heavily penalized and extremely unlikely to impact outcomes. There are all sorts of crimes that could occur, but don't, because there's no point.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    > First, we do detect a small number of voter fraud cases. People have gone to prison for it. Fair enough, though now I'm wondering why I keep hearing "no shred of evidence of voter fraud" from so many people. > But voter fraud, on the "retail" level, is heavily penalized and extremely unlikely to impact outcomes. There are currently four states (AZ, GA, PA, WI) with less than 1% margin between the candidates. Georgia is at 0.2%. It wouldn't take a high percentage of fraud to flip a state. But let's suppose that retail voter fraud is rare. How are we even detecting wholesale voter fraud? What's the method to detect when someone with access to the voter rolls slips an extra crate of ballots into the count, or fills out and mails in thousands of ballots in the names of people who never asked them to?

tptacek 6y ago

To 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 ago
This 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.
- matwood 6y ago
  The first couple days the big counties were counting 24/7. The managers were on TV talking about their teams, and you could watch live streams on many of the counting areas. The court is likely throwing nothing out. The no poll watcher lawsuit was already laughed out of court when the lawyers had to admit a 'non-zero' number of poll watchers were present the whole time [1]. Trump might be fine lying on Twitter constantly, but in court his lawyers would prefer to not commit perjury. [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fact-check-trumps-claims-poll-watchers/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fact-check-trumps-claims-poll-w...
  - guscost 6y ago
    There are many sworn affidavits being filed in court right now, from poll watchers claiming that they were kept too far away to validate a single ballot, or turned away entirely. We’ll see, it will definitely go to court.
    - matwood 6y ago
      Read the fact check. The too far away claim was decided days ago, and people were allowed to be within 6'. There were also live webcams setup. This has literally been one of the most transparent elections in history. Read through the lawsuits [1]. Most have already been rejected due to no proof. The others outstanding have to do with so few votes it doesn't matter or they actually go against Trump's interests, like stopping the count when he's behind. This is all theater at this point. Maybe they can have a few more press conferences at the garden center next to the sex shop. [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-campaign-lawsuits-election-results-2020-11 https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-campaign-lawsuits-elec...
      - tptacek 6y ago
        Note also the extremely telling detail that Trump's WinRed links for fundraising the recounts and legal challenges allocate 60% of those funds to retiring his campaign debt.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago

> With no shred evidence of voter fraud at any level I feel like this is actually the most suspicious thing here. In a country of over 300 million, in one of the most contentious elections in living memory, not one person was found to have committed voter fraud? It seems more likely that we're just terrible at detecting voter fraud rather than that there were literally zero instances of voter fraud anywhere. Which implies we might need some better measures to detect it. The thing they were trying to do with dead voters is promising but has the obvious problem that there could have been legitimate ballots submitted, or unintentionally illegitimate ballots, if the death was recent etc. But the general idea seems to hold. Maybe we should add a few percent fictitious entries to the voter rolls and then see if any of them votes next time. Anybody have any good ideas for how we could be detecting this, if it's happening? If it isn't happening then having some measures in place like this would be good to point to as affirmative evidence that it isn't rather than merely the absence of evidence that it is. And if it is happening, it would be good to know that too.

tptacek 6y ago
First, we do detect a small number of voter fraud cases. People have gone to prison for it. But your premise is also broken. You assume we should see regular attempts at voter fraud, given our enormous sample size. But voter fraud, on the "retail" level, is heavily penalized and extremely unlikely to impact outcomes. There are all sorts of crimes that could occur, but don't, because there's no point.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  > First, we do detect a small number of voter fraud cases. People have gone to prison for it. Fair enough, though now I'm wondering why I keep hearing "no shred of evidence of voter fraud" from so many people. > But voter fraud, on the "retail" level, is heavily penalized and extremely unlikely to impact outcomes. There are currently four states (AZ, GA, PA, WI) with less than 1% margin between the candidates. Georgia is at 0.2%. It wouldn't take a high percentage of fraud to flip a state. But let's suppose that retail voter fraud is rare. How are we even detecting wholesale voter fraud? What's the method to detect when someone with access to the voter rolls slips an extra crate of ballots into the count, or fills out and mails in thousands of ballots in the names of people who never asked them to?