10 ms·

Analysis of 2024 election results in Clark County indicates manipulation

225 points by beedeebeedee 2y ago

beedeebeedee 2y ago
This is of concern to the community given the apparent overlap with the technical expertise of a DOGE employee, Ethan Shaotran, and his prior work for a Musk sponsored hackathon where he created software that could spoof ballot tabulation. https://github.com/DevrathIyer/ballotproof/tree/master https://github.com/DevrathIyer/ballotproof/tree/master Apparently, Shaotran removed his name from the repo and is now listed as a private user, but it can be found in the archive of the devpost page linked from the repo: https://devpost.com/software/ballotproof-vision https://devpost.com/software/ballotproof-vision https://web.archive.org/web/20250204131222/https://devpost.com/software/ballotproof-vision https://web.archive.org/web/20250204131222/https://devpost.c... Info from: https://bsky.app/profile/cartwright776.bsky.social/post/3lhr4zni7ts2z https://bsky.app/profile/cartwright776.bsky.social/post/3lhr... Could this be used to spoof the results, and are there artifacts that could be discovered to directly link it or rule it out? Here is an image from the Election Truth Alliance analysis that shows a possible artifact: https://img1.wsimg.com/isteam/ip/9087f51c-d3bd-4002-9943-79706c6e82a3/somethingiswrong2024-04%20(3)-16ff714.png/:/cr=t:0%25,l:0%25,w:100%25,h:100%25/rs=w:1209,cg:true https://img1.wsimg.com/isteam/ip/9087f51c-d3bd-4002-9943-797... PDF of their analysis: https://electiontruthalliance.org/clark-county%2C-nv https://electiontruthalliance.org/clark-county%2C-nv
- Ancalagon 2y ago
  Who are these sociopaths man like why would you create that
  - caspper69 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - rcpt 2y ago
      Don't forget that DT's "mishandled documents" were actually top secret information about election security wrt Russia. Really would like to know what all those meetings between Vlad and Elon in 2024 were about. https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/12/politics/missing-russia-intelligence-trump-dg/ https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/12/politics/missing-rus...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- patcon 2y ago
  The repo seems to describe something doing the opposite, no? This is someone who wanted to ensure ballots were counted, not someone motivated to spoof them, right? EDIT: posted my concern on bsky https://bsky.app/profile/patcon.bsky.social/post/3lhrwuw6dy22j https://bsky.app/profile/patcon.bsky.social/post/3lhrwuw6dy2...
  - rcpt 2y ago
    There is nothing spooky or nefarious about the existence of that test suite. But that this skill set gets you into E's inner circle definitely goes onto the ever-growing pile of circumstantial evidence that something is not right.
    - smsm42 2y ago
      Your point is if you're interested in writing code to verify the validity of elections, that is evidence to the suspicion your employer sonehow corrupted the election? That does not sound like a sane line of reasoning.
      - rcpt 2y ago
        My point is that in the context of Elon and the 2024 election, where there is objectively a lot of suspicious activity, the fact that his inner circle contains people with expertise in generating ballots is also suspicious. Yes I will conceed that all this talk is circumstantial. It's like Lab Leak (even the desire to gaslight anyone who talks about it)
        smsm42 2y ago
        > where there is objectively a lot of suspicious activity, The word "objectively" does a lot of work here, and most of it is unpaid. Every election has irregularities, and every election has the losing side casting suspicions around. No, I literally mean every single one. We have search engines now. Just go and look up. It's literally every time. Sometimes, those suspicions turn true - there are really people who conduct fraud in elections, in various ways. Most often, though, those suspicions are thrown around by partisans unable to comprehend how their side, being obviously morally superior, the only sane side and widely popular, still lost the election. In other words, they are just junk. Without a substantial evidence base, any amount of them do not constitute any evidentiary base. Zero times millions is still the same zero. > people with expertise in generating ballots Did you ever actually see a real US election ballot? Generating something like that is beyond trivial. There are many official sites that just let you download a sample ballot. Even if that ballot is somehow modified from the actual one in subtle ways, the actual one is quite simple too. It may be a problem to get the paper exactly right if they check that, but having the code to generate a ballot does not help you there in any way. And also generating something like that would be pretty useless by itself, if you have electoral fraud in mind, because the problem is not producing the paper, it's getting it into the system and getting it counted and not getting caught while doing that. Summarily, this "expertise" does not enable you in any non-trivial way to perpetrate election fraud, and does not make any hard part of that any easier. Also, you can find people with such expertise - and better - at any design and print shop. They can reproduce any of it - and much more complex designs - without any problem, that's literally what they do all day. > Yes I will conceed that all this talk is circumstantial. No, "circumstantial" is way too generous a word for this. "Empty fantasies" is more fitting.
- jquery 2y ago
  I’ve been skeptical of claims that Musk rigged the election, despite Trump basically bragging that he did. I figured he was just trying to “own the libs” and make us get mad over nothing. Since Trump is extremely concerned about election security I’m sure he will send teams of people to investigate these anomalies.
- GuB-42 2y ago
  > Could this be used to spoof the results I don't really understand how would opens source software that checks the validity of ballots, or even generate fake ballots help in committing election fraud? The hard part is getting the fake ballot to the counting location, how the fake ballots is made, be it by machine or by hand is not particularly relevant, anyone can do that.
basementcat 2y ago
Link to ETA release and pdf https://electiontruthalliance.org/clark-county%2C-nv https://electiontruthalliance.org/clark-county%2C-nv
cycrutchfield 2y ago
[flagged]
- jemmyw 2y ago
  Don't know, this seems both important and of technical interest.
- loeg 2y ago
  Extraordinary claims like this need a lot more substantiation to be news. As-is, this is just some crazy person yelling at the clouds. We don't need to amplify that.
  - beedeebeedee 2y ago
    > Extraordinary claims like this need a lot more substantiation to be news That's the point of having this discussion (and not flagging, ridiculing and suppressing it). It will take some time and attention to scrutinize both the analysis and the software.
- z3c0 2y ago
  If Occam's Razor is of any value here, there are likely many more Trump voters on Hacker News than one might expect.
  - washadjeffmad 2y ago
    Applied correctly, either every credible outlet excepting this one with the capacity to monitor and detect election fraud was busy during one of the most contentious races in modern US history, or nothing was missed and the convenient outlier can be dismissed as that. The better explanation is probably that people who were annoyed by having to listen to dubious claims of voter and election fraud over the past four years are using this thread to give others a taste of their own medicine. I didn't flag, so whatever.
generalizations 2y ago
Is this going to be something we deal with after each election now? This just sounds like the 2020 election fraud conspiracies all over again.
- beedeebeedee 2y ago
  There was no evidence found of fraud during the 2020 election despite being contested and audited. This is evidence that is being discovered now, because the election was not contested by the losing candidate in 2024 and was not audited.
  - Izkata 2y ago
    > and audited Assuming it was actually audited. The one I'm most aware of (one of the Arizona counties) was called an audit, but it wasn't an audit - it was a recount.
- roenxi 2y ago
  When looking at the sheer amount of money and power concentrated in the US government it doesn't make a lot of sense that the elections are consistently free of fraud. It is a bit like the weird jump in scandals out of politics between the pre-internet era and now. It turns out that the press just didn't report on a lot of things. Voter fraud will be similar, as the data becomes more public and people start coordinating more effectively a lot of dross is probably going to get turned up.
- rcpt 2y ago
  I think it'd be great if the security of every election were vigorously tested.
- defrost 2y ago
  The 2020 fraud stories involved Asian source bamboo paper, unverified claims of dumping mail in ballots, claims of many multiple voting people, dead voters ressurected, ... lots of claims that collapsed for want of any evidence despite being the kinds of claims that should be provable. This is a simple statement of statistical pattern weirdness in the bulk voting record of a county. I'm in Australia, I have a geostatistical and epidemiology background using such things to find valuable mineral deposits and early signs of unusual diseases. The statements made here are far more convincing of actual fraud than the 2020 claims .. if this repeats across many county's then it becomes more and more certain. If it's no more than a blip in a single county then it's just one of those things, for it to be fraud there would have to be similar patterns in multiple counties in swing states. The future then is a right old bucket of worms.
beedeebeedee 2y ago
Newsweek article that provides more context for the Election Truth Alliance's analysis as well as other claims (and statements by Trump alluding to it) https://www.newsweek.com/2024-election-rigged-donald-trump-elon-musk-2019482 https://www.newsweek.com/2024-election-rigged-donald-trump-e...
- beedeebeedee 2y ago
  "He knows those computers better than anybody. All those computers. Those vote-counting computers," Trump told the crowd. "And we ended up winning Pennsylvania like in a landslide." https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-elon-musk-voting-machine-2017657 https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-elon-musk-voting-machi... Regardless of the ETA's analysis, or the DOGE employees ballot software, that comment by Trump on its own raises the suspicion that this should be investigated and not immediately flagged, downvoted and dismissed
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
quotemstr 2y ago
Articles like this are pure chutzpah. The same side that's alleging interference in 2024 suggested that to question election irregularities in 2020 was to reject democracy itself. I don't think the authors are going to convince anyone. "But there's evidence this time and there wasn't in 2020!" Well, the other side would argue the opposite. We're not going to get anywhere this way. Look: regardless of the the extent to which these alleged voting shenanigans are real, we need to fix the system. The legitimacy of the state is at risk. Just as Caesar's wife must be above reproach, our voting system must be above reproach. There are plenty of common sense things officials can take to bolster the public's faith in the system. For example, we should ban electronic voting machines. The real threat to democracy isn't election manipulation but officials who refuse to enact measures that would dispel even the appearance of manipulation.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Trasmatta 2y ago
  > The same side that's alleging interference in 2024 suggested that to question election irregularities in 2020 was to reject democracy itself. I don't think the authors are going to convince anyone. The people claiming election interference in 2020 had every chance to provide any piece of evidence, and they never could.
  - z3c0 2y ago
    I'm concerned by the turn of this thread. The claims of voter fraud in 2020 were tenuous claims based on mail-in ballots and other speculation. This is a claim based on statistical analysis -- something I'd think would click with the HN crowd, regardless if there's room for debate on the meaning of the stats.
- loeg 2y ago
  > The same side that's alleging interference in 2024 suggested that to question election irregularities in 2020 was to reject democracy itself. It is absolutely not the position of mainstream Democrats that the 2024 election was rigged, invalid etc. This ETA organization (founded December) is some fringe weirdo and doesn't represent dems.
aaron695 2y ago
[dead]
lanternfish 2y ago
I'm honestly not sure that their analysis passes muster. It seems that the main consideration is that Harris underperformed compared to down-ballot races and that the underperformance was ahistoric. However, the campaign was also ahistoric: she ran as a pseudo-incumbent under an unpopular presidency without as much of the name recognition incumbency usually offers. It seems extremely likely to me that this drop off in early voting numbers is indicative of an exceptionally weak campaign as opposed to widespread (consistent across all swing states) manipulation.
- z3c0 2y ago
  The main consideration is at the beginning: the stats largely resemble the patterns of verified instances of voter fraud, as in Russia and Georgia. It seems that you're suggesting some fairly obvious factors working against Harris weren't considered by an organization whose entire purpose is to sniff out voter fraud. Are you suggesting that they overlooked such an obvious detail, or that they're willfully ignoring it?
- defrost 2y ago
  Their specific claim is odd, it's that the record of every machine in the county showed an expected random pattern of votes for the first 300 or so votes .. ( "random" here means more chaotic and unpredictable ) after which there was a more correlated bias toward one candidate that had a stong early trend toward a particular outcome (consistent clumping with little bounce). The assertion is that this rarely seen in "real free voting data". In a single picture: https://img1.wsimg.com/isteam/ip/9087f51c-d3bd-4002-9943-79706c6e82a3/somethingiswrong2024-04%20(3)-16ff714.png https://img1.wsimg.com/isteam/ip/9087f51c-d3bd-4002-9943-797...
  - throw678937 2y ago
    I wouldn't know where I was supposed to draw that dotted line if it weren't already there. And I'd expect there to be less variance in vote percentages among machines that processed many votes than those that only processed a couple. But okay, that picture shows that Trump overperformed in the early vote among machines in Clark County that processed many votes (and that Harris overperformed among those that processed few.) Couldn't this effect emerge from the geographic distribution of voting locations? The points at the right of the scatterplot would tend to represent red rural precincts serving many early voters, while those on the left would represent urban areas denser with machines than they are with early voters. (And there are other considerations, such as that Trump voters may have been more likely to show up in person to early vote than to mail in votes. The vote totals by voting method would seem to show this—but, fine, they're under dispute here.) These analysts acknowledge the "deep red areas" explanation in their pdf, but they handwave it away in an unconvincing way: they say that the same effect doesn't occur for election day voting, only the early vote. But most voting in Nevada doesn't happen on Election Day. According to the data they present, every single voting machine in Clark County processed less than 150 election-day votes, with most well under 100. That is, they'd all be well to the left of the dotted line. So even in the vote-manipulation scenario, these analysts should expect to be seeing no separation effect for the election-day vote. Its absence tells us nothing.
8organicbits 2y ago
A word of caution with this one. > EIN Presswire provides this news content "as is" without warranty of any kind. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. If you have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article, kindly contact the author above. > NOTE: This content is not written by or endorsed by "WCIA/WCIX", its advertisers, or Nexstar Media Inc. This isn't news, it's a paid press release.
- cogman10 2y ago
  I'd also point out this https://www.einpresswire.com/ai/press-release-generator https://www.einpresswire.com/ai/press-release-generator This could literally be AI fantasy. Shame on whoever created this.
- loeg 2y ago
  I hit "flag" and I'd suggest everyone else do so as well.
  - beedeebeedee 2y ago
    I strongly disagree. It should be examined (their analysis, the artifacts they discovered, and whether or not they are similar to the artifacts that could be created from software similar to the repo that was shared below). It's worth asking this community to examine and discuss it. This is clearly related to the professional interests of this community, and this community is uniquely suited to bring insight to it.
    - loeg 2y ago
      It's an extreme and divisive claim on a pay-for-publish local TV channel website. The details are unpersuasive coincidence and no reliable 3rd party has substantiated the allegations. The originator of the claims is an organization that didn't exist three months ago. These are all reasons to be pretty skeptical before amplifying.
ARandomerDude 2y ago
I’m old enough to remember way back in 2023 when “election denier” was a nonstop slur for anyone right of center.
- tzs 2y ago
  By 2023 all of the 2020 election claims had been thoroughly investigated by numerous Republican officials and committees and they found no actual evidence. Anyone who still believed at that point in the claims the election was stolen is at best willfully ignorant. The analysis here is using publicly available data and they are pointing out statistical properties of that data that they say are highly indicative of manipulation. They are giving enough information for outside statisticians and others to reproduce their work. This is not at all comparable to most of the claims after the 2020 election. The closest comparable claims in 2020 were some of the claims based on some vote distributions in some districts not obeying Benford's law. Those didn't hold up because given the demographics of those districts Benford's law would not be expected to hold. (I wrote a web-based simple simulation using data from one of the states that the people basing claims on Benford's law were using in order to illustrate how much the distribution could differ from a Benford distribution. Anyone curious can find it here [1]. There's a link on that page to run it). [1] https://github.com/tzs/georgia-benford-simulation https://github.com/tzs/georgia-benford-simulation
- barryrandall 2y ago
  What's the political alignment of this group? All we have is a paid press release from a group founded in 2024, with an executive board consisting of "Jive, Lilli, and Nathan."
- LorenPechtel 2y ago
  What they are showing is that not in-person ballots favored Harris--which is no surprise as on average Democrats are more concerned with Covid than Republicans as evidenced by the latter having twice the demographic-adjusted death rate from it (and probably actually higher because it is a diagnosis not liked in many Republican areas and it's easy enough to "overlook" the sudden death was actually from a clot from Covid infection.) But this time around it's not going to face honest scrutiny in the courts so they won't have to admit they have nothing.
xyst 2y ago
[flagged]
- rcpt 2y ago
  The election is our nation's most sacred element. If it turns out that the party in power manipulated the results at all then, yes, there will be pitchforks.
  - NewJazz 2y ago
    Pitchforks will get you put in ~~a concenctration camp~~ CECOT.
    - rcpt 2y ago
      Has this been happening?
      - NewJazz 2y ago
        Has anyone rebelled violently en masse?
  - specialist 2y ago
    Yes but: Gore v Bush Aside: As you likely already know, Voter Action proved in court that Kerry won New Mexico. As in "got more votes" than Bush. They chose NM, to make their point about electronic voting, because NM's electoral votes (alone) wouldn't change the outcome. The chicanery in other states was much more blatant. eg Ohio. Alas, that lawsuit was abruptly ended when all the evidence was destroyed, despite the court ordered retention. (IIRC, that plantiff was Green Party candidate Codd.) So it goes.
    - rcpt 2y ago
      Somehow people are 100% ok with the right-wing ratfucking which has become typical. But the current accusations are a completely different level.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jandrewrogers 2y ago
This is a pretty inexperienced analysis. I happened to have detailed day-by-day voting and registration data for the 2024 Nevada election as it was happening. Harris losing Nevada was telegraphed in the data almost from the beginning. Forget the top line totals, the underlying structure of where and who was registering and voting in real-time made the outcome all but a foregone conclusion weeks before the actual election. Nevada was some of the easiest money on the prediction markets. Much is explained by an unusually robust turnout of low-propensity voters for Trump. They often don't care about the rest of the ballot, so it skews results albeit in a predictable way. (This is also the risk for Republicans; they are unlikely to show up for mid-terms and may sit on the sidelines again in four years.) Nevada has consistently clean election processes. I am only aware of a single anomaly over the last several Federal elections that was clearly inexplicable. It wasn't this election, that instance looked like a system failure rather than fraud, and it didn't change the outcome. Some other States are rife with anomalies that persist even with sophisticated analysis most cycles. If I was going to pick a State to look for Federal election irregularities, Nevada would be pretty low on my list. It is easy for amateurs to fool themselves into thinking they've found election fraud when really they just don't understand what is required to find a signal that holds up under sophisticated analysis. Same thing happened in 2020. I also used to live in Nevada and am pretty attuned to the local politics. There are local bellwether statistics that are traditionally pretty reliable for indicating how an election will break. Harris was upside down on these too. The tortured rationalization by Nevada election pundits like Jon Ralston to reinterpret those as "good actually" was uncritically repeated widely in the national media.
- rcpt 2y ago
  Maybe you can write this up with charts? Or at least put your data up publicly?
  - jandrewrogers 2y ago
    The data sources are public and downloadable from official sources. In the case of the State of Nevada, the total data set resolves to upwards of a hundred URLs that are not neatly organized anywhere, so there is a lot manual work to aggregate them and data engineer a single coherent data model. I stay out of the analysis business though I know a lot about it. A friend has been hardcore in the business for over a decade as a side-hustle and drags me into it every 2-4 years to help out with data sourcing and anomaly forensics, which are more my specialty. The workload during election season is insane but you can make a mountain of money from the campaigns if you have an excellent reputation for this kind of analytic work. Most people that try botch it. The polling used in the news media is mostly unserious. The campaigns use more sophisticated non-public voting models to predict outcomes and that has risen in stature with time versus polls. Even if the public may be surprised by the outcome a well-run campaign typically is not.
brchr 2y ago
It is possible to reproduce one of the key claims in this post -- the "Russian tail" in the early voting tallies -- straight from the raw data hosted on the Clark County, NV website. This code can be run in a Colab notebook: # Download and extract zip file import requests import zipfile import io # Get raw data from Clark County website zip_url = "https://elections.clarkcountynv.gov/electionresultsTV/cvr/24G/24G_CVRExport_NOV_Final_Confidential.zip" # Download the zip file response = requests.get(zip_url) zip_file = zipfile.ZipFile(io.BytesIO(response.content)) # Extract to the current working directory zip_file.extractall() # Close the zip file zip_file.close() import pandas as pd import matplotlib.pyplot as plt import numpy as np # Read the actual data, skipping the first three header rows and excluding downballot races df = pd.read_csv('/content/24G_CVRExport_NOV_Final_Confidential.csv', skiprows=3, usecols=range(21), low_memory=False) # Find the Trump and Harris columns trump_col = "REP" harris_col = "DEM" # Convert to numeric df[trump_col] = pd.to_numeric(df[trump_col], errors='coerce') df[harris_col] = pd.to_numeric(df[harris_col], errors='coerce') # Filter for early voting early_voting = df[df['CountingGroup'] == 'Early Voting'] # Group by tabulator and calculate percentages tabulator_stats = early_voting.groupby('TabulatorNum').agg({ harris_col: 'sum', trump_col: 'sum' }).reset_index() # Calculate total votes and percentages tabulator_stats['total_votes'] = tabulator_stats[harris_col] + tabulator_stats[trump_col] tabulator_stats['harris_pct'] = tabulator_stats[harris_col] / tabulator_stats['total_votes'] \* 100 tabulator_stats['trump_pct'] = tabulator_stats[trump_col] / tabulator_stats['total_votes'] \* 100 # Create subplots fig, (ax1, ax2) = plt.subplots(2, 1, figsize=(10, 8)) # Plot Harris histogram ax1.hist(tabulator_stats['harris_pct'], bins=50, edgecolor='black', color='blue', alpha=0.7) ax1.set_title('Distribution of Harris Votes by Tabulator (Early Voting Only)') ax1.set_xlabel('Percentage of Votes for Harris') ax1.set_ylabel('Number of Tabulators') # Plot Trump histogram ax2.hist(tabulator_stats['trump_pct'], bins=50, edgecolor='black', color='red', alpha=0.7) ax2.set_title('Distribution of Trump Votes by Tabulator (Early Voting Only)') ax2.set_xlabel('Percentage of Votes for Trump') ax2.set_ylabel('Number of Tabulators') plt.tight_layout() plt.show() This produces a figure identical (up to histogram bucketing) to the one at the end of the linked article.
- beedeebeedee 2y ago
  Thank you! I've run the notebook and reproduced the histograms of the early votes. I'm grateful for you sharing your work. For the other commenters who have dismissed the analysis without providing details, I would recommend that you reproduce this notebook and dig in. For others who don't know what the "Russian tail" is, here is the link within the PDF: https://www.rferl.org/a/georgia-election-manipulation-russian-tail/33183374.html https://www.rferl.org/a/georgia-election-manipulation-russia...
Blackstrat 2y ago
Much more honest and thorough mathematical analyzes were performed on the 2020 election, some by major academic organizations. They showed far more suspicious patterns than this. If Trump or his associates were going to "hack" the election, Clack County NV wouldn't be where they did it. That's the old Harry Reid machine. It would be conspicuous. Harris was a bad candidate. Her VP choice was worse. Her campaign skills were lacking. Democrats lost because they deserted the working class. I grew up in a union family that voted democrat. The current party no longer resembles that party. The republicans, at least under Trump, do. When Trump is gone, another Bush type could arise, and then again the middle class will be without a party. That's why Harris lost.
derangedHorse 2y ago
I'm writing this in response to the originator of this thread @beedeebeedee[1]. I'm posting it as a top-level comment because I believe it's applicable to the overall conversation. > According to the theory, in fair elections, turnout indicators typically follow a regular graphical representation that resembles a bell shape. If anomalies appear in the data -- for example, forms different from the bell shape or the bell "grows a tail" -- this indicates unfair elections. There is *no* respectable statistician who would *ever* draw a conclusion from data. You could say 'may indicate evidence of unfair elections,' but it is impossible to deem whether something occurred or not with 100% certainty. Now to address their "indicators." > While in cities the data representation mostly follows a bell shape, in the regions it is anomalously deviated All statistics is just a representation of data, it tells us nothing of logic. Logic is also based in axioms and it's important to identify what those are. Here the author is saying the data is "anomalously deviated" with the axiomatic assumption that all voters must follow the same distribution, but why should this assumption be held true? It ignores other logical factors that may sway these distributions. If I'm a candidate for a political position that would give a rural precinct free money, wouldn't that heavily affect that population's voting outcomes? Surely what's said in a political campaign can sway these things, yet there's nothing in the article that mentions that. > According to the theory, if a number of stations emerge where one candidate -- the "beneficiary" -- is unusually high, this might indicate falsification. There's a high risk of manipulation where increased overall voter turnout is reflected only in support of the "beneficiary." So the belief is that because there are 2 distributions for the number of precincts with a certain percentage of "yes" votes, that automatically "indicates falsification"? There needs to be more information than this to make a conclusion. What one holds as axioms are a matter of opinion. The only way to get something useful out of a counterargument to this is for a proponent to exhaustively list all the votes they think are legitimate, and for the opponent to show the same patterns can occur there as well. Similarly for a proponent to convince detractors, they'd have to show that other elections they see as legitimate *never* indicate those patterns. Otherwise this is just an opinion piece on data. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42996898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42996898
- beedeebeedee 2y ago
  Hi derangedHorse, thanks for your insight. The anomaly is that there appears to be a heavy shift in votes only in (1) early voting, and not in (2) mail-in ballots or (3) Election Day voting. Additionally, the anomaly only appears for all tabulators after 300 or more votes are cast. Here's the image that represents the anomaly in early voting: https://img1.wsimg.com/isteam/ip/9087f51c-d3bd-4002-9943-79706c6e82a3/somethingiswrong2024-04%20(3)-16ff714.png/:/cr=t:0%25,l:0%25,w:100%25,h:100%25/rs=w:1209,cg:true https://img1.wsimg.com/isteam/ip/9087f51c-d3bd-4002-9943-797... > There is no respectable statistician who would ever draw a conclusion from data. You could say 'may indicate evidence of unfair elections,' but it is impossible to deem whether something occurred or not with 100% certainty. The originators of the analysis are claiming that this indicates manipulation. Perhaps they should have given more qualifiers in that image of their analysis, but the data is alarming and it is an up-hill battle even to get their analysis noticed (other than the press release to WCIA, only Newsweek has mentioned it). We can say 'maybe' but given the current political and media environment right now, it is likely that that qualification would have doomed their analysis from getting any coverage at all. Here is a video from the group that discusses these issues and is worth watching because it speaks directly to your concerns and others: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOQ-GxJyJN4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOQ-GxJyJN4 Edit: I haven't fully absorbed their analysis, so I've gone back and they do make those qualifications to the data ("Data Suggestive of Vote Manipulation", etc) within the PDF: https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/9087f51c-d3bd-4002-9943-79706c6e82a3/Election%20Truth%20Alliance_Clark%20County%20N-a246330.pdf https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/9087f51c-d3bd-4002-9943-797... "The pattern above shows an inexplicable spike in vote distribution that is statistically unlikely based on typical human voting behavior." And while discussing alternate causes ("Deep Red" Areas) "While such a deviation in the data could potentially still emerge, this does not explain why the pattern is limited to Early Voting, as in that scenario it would be reasonable to expect the same deviation to appear in Election Day results. Instead, Election Day results indicate a normal, expected variation."
stefantalpalaru 2y ago
[dead]
amai 2y ago
Election machines are forbidden in Germany for good reasons.
drawkward 2y ago
FWIW, there is a much more damning piece of statistical evidence in the full report produced by the Election Truth Alliance. Link to the full report: https://electiontruthalliance.org/clark-county%2C-nv https://electiontruthalliance.org/clark-county%2C-nv At the end of the full report, there are two histograms of the vote shares earned by Harris and by Trump, respectively, overlaid by a gaussian ("normal") distribution. Election shares tend to follow gaussian distributions [1]. In Clark County, NV, the election shares have a strong discontinuity that favors Trump, but only in Early Voting results. This discontinuity only appears to exist on machines that tabulated a lot of results. Past elections that are suspected to have been fraudulent (a few in Russia and one in Uganda, prior to 2012) show these exact same types of discontinuities, whereas elections that are generally regarded as secure do not show these types of discontinuities [1]. Are there other potential explanations for these discontinuities? ("Russian Tails" as they are colloquially known [2].) Yes! Election Truth Alliance lists them out as any proper data scientist would. Furthermore, ETA lists and links their datasets, and invites anyone to use them. This is what a model data scientist should do. It seems that they are trying to get more data from more contested areas. What will they find? I don't know, but it seems that the more this phenomenon presents itself, then some of the alternate hypotheses can be ruled out. [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3478593/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3478593/ [2] https://www.rferl.org/a/georgia-election-manipulation-russian-tail/33183374.html https://www.rferl.org/a/georgia-election-manipulation-russia... *[Interesting that Elon wants to get rid of Radio Free Europe. -ed]
deckar01 2y ago
I was able to reproduce the vote skew / batch size correlation in early voting. The average batch size for mail voting was way higher (6 machines) and election day was lower (3x machines). The fact that the vote ratio is more distributed for mail voting with way more votes per machine is what highlights incongruity for me. Stats are not always intuitive though.
- deckar01 2y ago
  Edit: Mail voting is not more distributed. You can’t analyze the distribution of a set that small using its min and max, it has to be the full range like the other sets. Distribution approaches zero as bin size increases regardless of voting source. This no longer seems surprising.
  - beedeebeedee 2y ago
    Yeah, I was confused about that when I tried to replicate the study for all of the counting groups ('Mail', 'Early Voting', 'Election Day'). I'd like to know more about the data to understand how to compare the others with early voting.

225 points by beedeebeedee 2y ago

This is of concern to the community given the apparent overlap with the technical expertise of a DOGE employee, Ethan Shaotran, and his prior work for a Musk sponsored hackathon where he created software that could spoof ballot tabulation. https://github.com/DevrathIyer/ballotproof/tree/master https://github.com/DevrathIyer/ballotproof/tree/master Apparently, Shaotran removed his name from the repo and is now listed as a private user, but it can be found in the archive of the devpost page linked from the repo: https://devpost.com/software/ballotproof-vision https://devpost.com/software/ballotproof-vision https://web.archive.org/web/20250204131222/https://devpost.com/software/ballotproof-vision https://web.archive.org/web/20250204131222/https://devpost.c... Info from: https://bsky.app/profile/cartwright776.bsky.social/post/3lhr4zni7ts2z https://bsky.app/profile/cartwright776.bsky.social/post/3lhr... Could this be used to spoof the results, and are there artifacts that could be discovered to directly link it or rule it out? Here is an image from the Election Truth Alliance analysis that shows a possible artifact: https://img1.wsimg.com/isteam/ip/9087f51c-d3bd-4002-9943-79706c6e82a3/somethingiswrong2024-04%20(3)-16ff714.png/:/cr=t:0%25,l:0%25,w:100%25,h:100%25/rs=w:1209,cg:true https://img1.wsimg.com/isteam/ip/9087f51c-d3bd-4002-9943-797... PDF of their analysis: https://electiontruthalliance.org/clark-county%2C-nv https://electiontruthalliance.org/clark-county%2C-nv

Ancalagon 2y ago
Who are these sociopaths man like why would you create that
- caspper69 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - rcpt 2y ago
    Don't forget that DT's "mishandled documents" were actually top secret information about election security wrt Russia. Really would like to know what all those meetings between Vlad and Elon in 2024 were about. https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/12/politics/missing-russia-intelligence-trump-dg/ https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/12/politics/missing-rus...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
patcon 2y ago
The repo seems to describe something doing the opposite, no? This is someone who wanted to ensure ballots were counted, not someone motivated to spoof them, right? EDIT: posted my concern on bsky https://bsky.app/profile/patcon.bsky.social/post/3lhrwuw6dy22j https://bsky.app/profile/patcon.bsky.social/post/3lhrwuw6dy2...
- rcpt 2y ago
  There is nothing spooky or nefarious about the existence of that test suite. But that this skill set gets you into E's inner circle definitely goes onto the ever-growing pile of circumstantial evidence that something is not right.
  - smsm42 2y ago
    Your point is if you're interested in writing code to verify the validity of elections, that is evidence to the suspicion your employer sonehow corrupted the election? That does not sound like a sane line of reasoning.
    - rcpt 2y ago
      My point is that in the context of Elon and the 2024 election, where there is objectively a lot of suspicious activity, the fact that his inner circle contains people with expertise in generating ballots is also suspicious. Yes I will conceed that all this talk is circumstantial. It's like Lab Leak (even the desire to gaslight anyone who talks about it)
      - smsm42 2y ago
        > where there is objectively a lot of suspicious activity, The word "objectively" does a lot of work here, and most of it is unpaid. Every election has irregularities, and every election has the losing side casting suspicions around. No, I literally mean every single one. We have search engines now. Just go and look up. It's literally every time. Sometimes, those suspicions turn true - there are really people who conduct fraud in elections, in various ways. Most often, though, those suspicions are thrown around by partisans unable to comprehend how their side, being obviously morally superior, the only sane side and widely popular, still lost the election. In other words, they are just junk. Without a substantial evidence base, any amount of them do not constitute any evidentiary base. Zero times millions is still the same zero. > people with expertise in generating ballots Did you ever actually see a real US election ballot? Generating something like that is beyond trivial. There are many official sites that just let you download a sample ballot. Even if that ballot is somehow modified from the actual one in subtle ways, the actual one is quite simple too. It may be a problem to get the paper exactly right if they check that, but having the code to generate a ballot does not help you there in any way. And also generating something like that would be pretty useless by itself, if you have electoral fraud in mind, because the problem is not producing the paper, it's getting it into the system and getting it counted and not getting caught while doing that. Summarily, this "expertise" does not enable you in any non-trivial way to perpetrate election fraud, and does not make any hard part of that any easier. Also, you can find people with such expertise - and better - at any design and print shop. They can reproduce any of it - and much more complex designs - without any problem, that's literally what they do all day. > Yes I will conceed that all this talk is circumstantial. No, "circumstantial" is way too generous a word for this. "Empty fantasies" is more fitting.
jquery 2y ago
I’ve been skeptical of claims that Musk rigged the election, despite Trump basically bragging that he did. I figured he was just trying to “own the libs” and make us get mad over nothing. Since Trump is extremely concerned about election security I’m sure he will send teams of people to investigate these anomalies.
GuB-42 2y ago
> Could this be used to spoof the results I don't really understand how would opens source software that checks the validity of ballots, or even generate fake ballots help in committing election fraud? The hard part is getting the fake ballot to the counting location, how the fake ballots is made, be it by machine or by hand is not particularly relevant, anyone can do that.

basementcat 2y ago

Link to ETA release and pdf https://electiontruthalliance.org/clark-county%2C-nv https://electiontruthalliance.org/clark-county%2C-nv

cycrutchfield 2y ago

[flagged]

jemmyw 2y ago
Don't know, this seems both important and of technical interest.
loeg 2y ago
Extraordinary claims like this need a lot more substantiation to be news. As-is, this is just some crazy person yelling at the clouds. We don't need to amplify that.
- beedeebeedee 2y ago
  > Extraordinary claims like this need a lot more substantiation to be news That's the point of having this discussion (and not flagging, ridiculing and suppressing it). It will take some time and attention to scrutinize both the analysis and the software.
z3c0 2y ago
If Occam's Razor is of any value here, there are likely many more Trump voters on Hacker News than one might expect.
- washadjeffmad 2y ago
  Applied correctly, either every credible outlet excepting this one with the capacity to monitor and detect election fraud was busy during one of the most contentious races in modern US history, or nothing was missed and the convenient outlier can be dismissed as that. The better explanation is probably that people who were annoyed by having to listen to dubious claims of voter and election fraud over the past four years are using this thread to give others a taste of their own medicine. I didn't flag, so whatever.

generalizations 2y ago

Is this going to be something we deal with after each election now? This just sounds like the 2020 election fraud conspiracies all over again.

beedeebeedee 2y ago
There was no evidence found of fraud during the 2020 election despite being contested and audited. This is evidence that is being discovered now, because the election was not contested by the losing candidate in 2024 and was not audited.
- Izkata 2y ago
  > and audited Assuming it was actually audited. The one I'm most aware of (one of the Arizona counties) was called an audit, but it wasn't an audit - it was a recount.
roenxi 2y ago
When looking at the sheer amount of money and power concentrated in the US government it doesn't make a lot of sense that the elections are consistently free of fraud. It is a bit like the weird jump in scandals out of politics between the pre-internet era and now. It turns out that the press just didn't report on a lot of things. Voter fraud will be similar, as the data becomes more public and people start coordinating more effectively a lot of dross is probably going to get turned up.
rcpt 2y ago
I think it'd be great if the security of every election were vigorously tested.
defrost 2y ago
The 2020 fraud stories involved Asian source bamboo paper, unverified claims of dumping mail in ballots, claims of many multiple voting people, dead voters ressurected, ... lots of claims that collapsed for want of any evidence despite being the kinds of claims that should be provable. This is a simple statement of statistical pattern weirdness in the bulk voting record of a county. I'm in Australia, I have a geostatistical and epidemiology background using such things to find valuable mineral deposits and early signs of unusual diseases. The statements made here are far more convincing of actual fraud than the 2020 claims .. if this repeats across many county's then it becomes more and more certain. If it's no more than a blip in a single county then it's just one of those things, for it to be fraud there would have to be similar patterns in multiple counties in swing states. The future then is a right old bucket of worms.

beedeebeedee 2y ago

Newsweek article that provides more context for the Election Truth Alliance's analysis as well as other claims (and statements by Trump alluding to it) https://www.newsweek.com/2024-election-rigged-donald-trump-elon-musk-2019482 https://www.newsweek.com/2024-election-rigged-donald-trump-e...

beedeebeedee 2y ago
"He knows those computers better than anybody. All those computers. Those vote-counting computers," Trump told the crowd. "And we ended up winning Pennsylvania like in a landslide." https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-elon-musk-voting-machine-2017657 https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-elon-musk-voting-machi... Regardless of the ETA's analysis, or the DOGE employees ballot software, that comment by Trump on its own raises the suspicion that this should be investigated and not immediately flagged, downvoted and dismissed

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

quotemstr 2y ago

Articles like this are pure chutzpah. The same side that's alleging interference in 2024 suggested that to question election irregularities in 2020 was to reject democracy itself. I don't think the authors are going to convince anyone. "But there's evidence this time and there wasn't in 2020!" Well, the other side would argue the opposite. We're not going to get anywhere this way. Look: regardless of the the extent to which these alleged voting shenanigans are real, we need to fix the system. The legitimacy of the state is at risk. Just as Caesar's wife must be above reproach, our voting system must be above reproach. There are plenty of common sense things officials can take to bolster the public's faith in the system. For example, we should ban electronic voting machines. The real threat to democracy isn't election manipulation but officials who refuse to enact measures that would dispel even the appearance of manipulation.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Trasmatta 2y ago
> The same side that's alleging interference in 2024 suggested that to question election irregularities in 2020 was to reject democracy itself. I don't think the authors are going to convince anyone. The people claiming election interference in 2020 had every chance to provide any piece of evidence, and they never could.
- z3c0 2y ago
  I'm concerned by the turn of this thread. The claims of voter fraud in 2020 were tenuous claims based on mail-in ballots and other speculation. This is a claim based on statistical analysis -- something I'd think would click with the HN crowd, regardless if there's room for debate on the meaning of the stats.
loeg 2y ago
> The same side that's alleging interference in 2024 suggested that to question election irregularities in 2020 was to reject democracy itself. It is absolutely not the position of mainstream Democrats that the 2024 election was rigged, invalid etc. This ETA organization (founded December) is some fringe weirdo and doesn't represent dems.

aaron695 2y ago

[dead]

lanternfish 2y ago

I'm honestly not sure that their analysis passes muster. It seems that the main consideration is that Harris underperformed compared to down-ballot races and that the underperformance was ahistoric. However, the campaign was also ahistoric: she ran as a pseudo-incumbent under an unpopular presidency without as much of the name recognition incumbency usually offers. It seems extremely likely to me that this drop off in early voting numbers is indicative of an exceptionally weak campaign as opposed to widespread (consistent across all swing states) manipulation.

z3c0 2y ago
The main consideration is at the beginning: the stats largely resemble the patterns of verified instances of voter fraud, as in Russia and Georgia. It seems that you're suggesting some fairly obvious factors working against Harris weren't considered by an organization whose entire purpose is to sniff out voter fraud. Are you suggesting that they overlooked such an obvious detail, or that they're willfully ignoring it?
defrost 2y ago
Their specific claim is odd, it's that the record of every machine in the county showed an expected random pattern of votes for the first 300 or so votes .. ( "random" here means more chaotic and unpredictable ) after which there was a more correlated bias toward one candidate that had a stong early trend toward a particular outcome (consistent clumping with little bounce). The assertion is that this rarely seen in "real free voting data". In a single picture: https://img1.wsimg.com/isteam/ip/9087f51c-d3bd-4002-9943-79706c6e82a3/somethingiswrong2024-04%20(3)-16ff714.png https://img1.wsimg.com/isteam/ip/9087f51c-d3bd-4002-9943-797...
- throw678937 2y ago
  I wouldn't know where I was supposed to draw that dotted line if it weren't already there. And I'd expect there to be less variance in vote percentages among machines that processed many votes than those that only processed a couple. But okay, that picture shows that Trump overperformed in the early vote among machines in Clark County that processed many votes (and that Harris overperformed among those that processed few.) Couldn't this effect emerge from the geographic distribution of voting locations? The points at the right of the scatterplot would tend to represent red rural precincts serving many early voters, while those on the left would represent urban areas denser with machines than they are with early voters. (And there are other considerations, such as that Trump voters may have been more likely to show up in person to early vote than to mail in votes. The vote totals by voting method would seem to show this—but, fine, they're under dispute here.) These analysts acknowledge the "deep red areas" explanation in their pdf, but they handwave it away in an unconvincing way: they say that the same effect doesn't occur for election day voting, only the early vote. But most voting in Nevada doesn't happen on Election Day. According to the data they present, every single voting machine in Clark County processed less than 150 election-day votes, with most well under 100. That is, they'd all be well to the left of the dotted line. So even in the vote-manipulation scenario, these analysts should expect to be seeing no separation effect for the election-day vote. Its absence tells us nothing.

8organicbits 2y ago

A word of caution with this one. > EIN Presswire provides this news content "as is" without warranty of any kind. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. If you have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article, kindly contact the author above. > NOTE: This content is not written by or endorsed by "WCIA/WCIX", its advertisers, or Nexstar Media Inc. This isn't news, it's a paid press release.

cogman10 2y ago
I'd also point out this https://www.einpresswire.com/ai/press-release-generator https://www.einpresswire.com/ai/press-release-generator This could literally be AI fantasy. Shame on whoever created this.
loeg 2y ago
I hit "flag" and I'd suggest everyone else do so as well.
- beedeebeedee 2y ago
  I strongly disagree. It should be examined (their analysis, the artifacts they discovered, and whether or not they are similar to the artifacts that could be created from software similar to the repo that was shared below). It's worth asking this community to examine and discuss it. This is clearly related to the professional interests of this community, and this community is uniquely suited to bring insight to it.
  - loeg 2y ago
    It's an extreme and divisive claim on a pay-for-publish local TV channel website. The details are unpersuasive coincidence and no reliable 3rd party has substantiated the allegations. The originator of the claims is an organization that didn't exist three months ago. These are all reasons to be pretty skeptical before amplifying.

ARandomerDude 2y ago

I’m old enough to remember way back in 2023 when “election denier” was a nonstop slur for anyone right of center.

tzs 2y ago
By 2023 all of the 2020 election claims had been thoroughly investigated by numerous Republican officials and committees and they found no actual evidence. Anyone who still believed at that point in the claims the election was stolen is at best willfully ignorant. The analysis here is using publicly available data and they are pointing out statistical properties of that data that they say are highly indicative of manipulation. They are giving enough information for outside statisticians and others to reproduce their work. This is not at all comparable to most of the claims after the 2020 election. The closest comparable claims in 2020 were some of the claims based on some vote distributions in some districts not obeying Benford's law. Those didn't hold up because given the demographics of those districts Benford's law would not be expected to hold. (I wrote a web-based simple simulation using data from one of the states that the people basing claims on Benford's law were using in order to illustrate how much the distribution could differ from a Benford distribution. Anyone curious can find it here [1]. There's a link on that page to run it). [1] https://github.com/tzs/georgia-benford-simulation https://github.com/tzs/georgia-benford-simulation
barryrandall 2y ago
What's the political alignment of this group? All we have is a paid press release from a group founded in 2024, with an executive board consisting of "Jive, Lilli, and Nathan."
LorenPechtel 2y ago
What they are showing is that not in-person ballots favored Harris--which is no surprise as on average Democrats are more concerned with Covid than Republicans as evidenced by the latter having twice the demographic-adjusted death rate from it (and probably actually higher because it is a diagnosis not liked in many Republican areas and it's easy enough to "overlook" the sudden death was actually from a clot from Covid infection.) But this time around it's not going to face honest scrutiny in the courts so they won't have to admit they have nothing.

xyst 2y ago

[flagged]

rcpt 2y ago
The election is our nation's most sacred element. If it turns out that the party in power manipulated the results at all then, yes, there will be pitchforks.
- NewJazz 2y ago
  Pitchforks will get you put in ~~a concenctration camp~~ CECOT.
  - rcpt 2y ago
    Has this been happening?
    - NewJazz 2y ago
      Has anyone rebelled violently en masse?
- specialist 2y ago
  Yes but: Gore v Bush Aside: As you likely already know, Voter Action proved in court that Kerry won New Mexico. As in "got more votes" than Bush. They chose NM, to make their point about electronic voting, because NM's electoral votes (alone) wouldn't change the outcome. The chicanery in other states was much more blatant. eg Ohio. Alas, that lawsuit was abruptly ended when all the evidence was destroyed, despite the court ordered retention. (IIRC, that plantiff was Green Party candidate Codd.) So it goes.
  - rcpt 2y ago
    Somehow people are 100% ok with the right-wing ratfucking which has become typical. But the current accusations are a completely different level.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

jandrewrogers 2y ago

This is a pretty inexperienced analysis. I happened to have detailed day-by-day voting and registration data for the 2024 Nevada election as it was happening. Harris losing Nevada was telegraphed in the data almost from the beginning. Forget the top line totals, the underlying structure of where and who was registering and voting in real-time made the outcome all but a foregone conclusion weeks before the actual election. Nevada was some of the easiest money on the prediction markets. Much is explained by an unusually robust turnout of low-propensity voters for Trump. They often don't care about the rest of the ballot, so it skews results albeit in a predictable way. (This is also the risk for Republicans; they are unlikely to show up for mid-terms and may sit on the sidelines again in four years.) Nevada has consistently clean election processes. I am only aware of a single anomaly over the last several Federal elections that was clearly inexplicable. It wasn't this election, that instance looked like a system failure rather than fraud, and it didn't change the outcome. Some other States are rife with anomalies that persist even with sophisticated analysis most cycles. If I was going to pick a State to look for Federal election irregularities, Nevada would be pretty low on my list. It is easy for amateurs to fool themselves into thinking they've found election fraud when really they just don't understand what is required to find a signal that holds up under sophisticated analysis. Same thing happened in 2020. I also used to live in Nevada and am pretty attuned to the local politics. There are local bellwether statistics that are traditionally pretty reliable for indicating how an election will break. Harris was upside down on these too. The tortured rationalization by Nevada election pundits like Jon Ralston to reinterpret those as "good actually" was uncritically repeated widely in the national media.

rcpt 2y ago
Maybe you can write this up with charts? Or at least put your data up publicly?
- jandrewrogers 2y ago
  The data sources are public and downloadable from official sources. In the case of the State of Nevada, the total data set resolves to upwards of a hundred URLs that are not neatly organized anywhere, so there is a lot manual work to aggregate them and data engineer a single coherent data model. I stay out of the analysis business though I know a lot about it. A friend has been hardcore in the business for over a decade as a side-hustle and drags me into it every 2-4 years to help out with data sourcing and anomaly forensics, which are more my specialty. The workload during election season is insane but you can make a mountain of money from the campaigns if you have an excellent reputation for this kind of analytic work. Most people that try botch it. The polling used in the news media is mostly unserious. The campaigns use more sophisticated non-public voting models to predict outcomes and that has risen in stature with time versus polls. Even if the public may be surprised by the outcome a well-run campaign typically is not.

brchr 2y ago

It is possible to reproduce one of the key claims in this post -- the "Russian tail" in the early voting tallies -- straight from the raw data hosted on the Clark County, NV website. This code can be run in a Colab notebook: # Download and extract zip file import requests import zipfile import io # Get raw data from Clark County website zip_url = "https://elections.clarkcountynv.gov/electionresultsTV/cvr/24G/24G_CVRExport_NOV_Final_Confidential.zip" # Download the zip file response = requests.get(zip_url) zip_file = zipfile.ZipFile(io.BytesIO(response.content)) # Extract to the current working directory zip_file.extractall() # Close the zip file zip_file.close() import pandas as pd import matplotlib.pyplot as plt import numpy as np # Read the actual data, skipping the first three header rows and excluding downballot races df = pd.read_csv('/content/24G_CVRExport_NOV_Final_Confidential.csv', skiprows=3, usecols=range(21), low_memory=False) # Find the Trump and Harris columns trump_col = "REP" harris_col = "DEM" # Convert to numeric df[trump_col] = pd.to_numeric(df[trump_col], errors='coerce') df[harris_col] = pd.to_numeric(df[harris_col], errors='coerce') # Filter for early voting early_voting = df[df['CountingGroup'] == 'Early Voting'] # Group by tabulator and calculate percentages tabulator_stats = early_voting.groupby('TabulatorNum').agg({ harris_col: 'sum', trump_col: 'sum' }).reset_index() # Calculate total votes and percentages tabulator_stats['total_votes'] = tabulator_stats[harris_col] + tabulator_stats[trump_col] tabulator_stats['harris_pct'] = tabulator_stats[harris_col] / tabulator_stats['total_votes'] \* 100 tabulator_stats['trump_pct'] = tabulator_stats[trump_col] / tabulator_stats['total_votes'] \* 100 # Create subplots fig, (ax1, ax2) = plt.subplots(2, 1, figsize=(10, 8)) # Plot Harris histogram ax1.hist(tabulator_stats['harris_pct'], bins=50, edgecolor='black', color='blue', alpha=0.7) ax1.set_title('Distribution of Harris Votes by Tabulator (Early Voting Only)') ax1.set_xlabel('Percentage of Votes for Harris') ax1.set_ylabel('Number of Tabulators') # Plot Trump histogram ax2.hist(tabulator_stats['trump_pct'], bins=50, edgecolor='black', color='red', alpha=0.7) ax2.set_title('Distribution of Trump Votes by Tabulator (Early Voting Only)') ax2.set_xlabel('Percentage of Votes for Trump') ax2.set_ylabel('Number of Tabulators') plt.tight_layout() plt.show() This produces a figure identical (up to histogram bucketing) to the one at the end of the linked article.

beedeebeedee 2y ago
Thank you! I've run the notebook and reproduced the histograms of the early votes. I'm grateful for you sharing your work. For the other commenters who have dismissed the analysis without providing details, I would recommend that you reproduce this notebook and dig in. For others who don't know what the "Russian tail" is, here is the link within the PDF: https://www.rferl.org/a/georgia-election-manipulation-russian-tail/33183374.html https://www.rferl.org/a/georgia-election-manipulation-russia...

Blackstrat 2y ago

Much more honest and thorough mathematical analyzes were performed on the 2020 election, some by major academic organizations. They showed far more suspicious patterns than this. If Trump or his associates were going to "hack" the election, Clack County NV wouldn't be where they did it. That's the old Harry Reid machine. It would be conspicuous. Harris was a bad candidate. Her VP choice was worse. Her campaign skills were lacking. Democrats lost because they deserted the working class. I grew up in a union family that voted democrat. The current party no longer resembles that party. The republicans, at least under Trump, do. When Trump is gone, another Bush type could arise, and then again the middle class will be without a party. That's why Harris lost.

derangedHorse 2y ago

I'm writing this in response to the originator of this thread @beedeebeedee[1]. I'm posting it as a top-level comment because I believe it's applicable to the overall conversation. > According to the theory, in fair elections, turnout indicators typically follow a regular graphical representation that resembles a bell shape. If anomalies appear in the data -- for example, forms different from the bell shape or the bell "grows a tail" -- this indicates unfair elections. There is *no* respectable statistician who would *ever* draw a conclusion from data. You could say 'may indicate evidence of unfair elections,' but it is impossible to deem whether something occurred or not with 100% certainty. Now to address their "indicators." > While in cities the data representation mostly follows a bell shape, in the regions it is anomalously deviated All statistics is just a representation of data, it tells us nothing of logic. Logic is also based in axioms and it's important to identify what those are. Here the author is saying the data is "anomalously deviated" with the axiomatic assumption that all voters must follow the same distribution, but why should this assumption be held true? It ignores other logical factors that may sway these distributions. If I'm a candidate for a political position that would give a rural precinct free money, wouldn't that heavily affect that population's voting outcomes? Surely what's said in a political campaign can sway these things, yet there's nothing in the article that mentions that. > According to the theory, if a number of stations emerge where one candidate -- the "beneficiary" -- is unusually high, this might indicate falsification. There's a high risk of manipulation where increased overall voter turnout is reflected only in support of the "beneficiary." So the belief is that because there are 2 distributions for the number of precincts with a certain percentage of "yes" votes, that automatically "indicates falsification"? There needs to be more information than this to make a conclusion. What one holds as axioms are a matter of opinion. The only way to get something useful out of a counterargument to this is for a proponent to exhaustively list all the votes they think are legitimate, and for the opponent to show the same patterns can occur there as well. Similarly for a proponent to convince detractors, they'd have to show that other elections they see as legitimate *never* indicate those patterns. Otherwise this is just an opinion piece on data. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42996898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42996898

beedeebeedee 2y ago
Hi derangedHorse, thanks for your insight. The anomaly is that there appears to be a heavy shift in votes only in (1) early voting, and not in (2) mail-in ballots or (3) Election Day voting. Additionally, the anomaly only appears for all tabulators after 300 or more votes are cast. Here's the image that represents the anomaly in early voting: https://img1.wsimg.com/isteam/ip/9087f51c-d3bd-4002-9943-79706c6e82a3/somethingiswrong2024-04%20(3)-16ff714.png/:/cr=t:0%25,l:0%25,w:100%25,h:100%25/rs=w:1209,cg:true https://img1.wsimg.com/isteam/ip/9087f51c-d3bd-4002-9943-797... > There is no respectable statistician who would ever draw a conclusion from data. You could say 'may indicate evidence of unfair elections,' but it is impossible to deem whether something occurred or not with 100% certainty. The originators of the analysis are claiming that this indicates manipulation. Perhaps they should have given more qualifiers in that image of their analysis, but the data is alarming and it is an up-hill battle even to get their analysis noticed (other than the press release to WCIA, only Newsweek has mentioned it). We can say 'maybe' but given the current political and media environment right now, it is likely that that qualification would have doomed their analysis from getting any coverage at all. Here is a video from the group that discusses these issues and is worth watching because it speaks directly to your concerns and others: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOQ-GxJyJN4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOQ-GxJyJN4 Edit: I haven't fully absorbed their analysis, so I've gone back and they do make those qualifications to the data ("Data Suggestive of Vote Manipulation", etc) within the PDF: https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/9087f51c-d3bd-4002-9943-79706c6e82a3/Election%20Truth%20Alliance_Clark%20County%20N-a246330.pdf https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/9087f51c-d3bd-4002-9943-797... "The pattern above shows an inexplicable spike in vote distribution that is statistically unlikely based on typical human voting behavior." And while discussing alternate causes ("Deep Red" Areas) "While such a deviation in the data could potentially still emerge, this does not explain why the pattern is limited to Early Voting, as in that scenario it would be reasonable to expect the same deviation to appear in Election Day results. Instead, Election Day results indicate a normal, expected variation."

stefantalpalaru 2y ago

[dead]

amai 2y ago

Election machines are forbidden in Germany for good reasons.

drawkward 2y ago

FWIW, there is a much more damning piece of statistical evidence in the full report produced by the Election Truth Alliance. Link to the full report: https://electiontruthalliance.org/clark-county%2C-nv https://electiontruthalliance.org/clark-county%2C-nv At the end of the full report, there are two histograms of the vote shares earned by Harris and by Trump, respectively, overlaid by a gaussian ("normal") distribution. Election shares tend to follow gaussian distributions [1]. In Clark County, NV, the election shares have a strong discontinuity that favors Trump, but only in Early Voting results. This discontinuity only appears to exist on machines that tabulated a lot of results. Past elections that are suspected to have been fraudulent (a few in Russia and one in Uganda, prior to 2012) show these exact same types of discontinuities, whereas elections that are generally regarded as secure do not show these types of discontinuities [1]. Are there other potential explanations for these discontinuities? ("Russian Tails" as they are colloquially known [2].) Yes! Election Truth Alliance lists them out as any proper data scientist would. Furthermore, ETA lists and links their datasets, and invites anyone to use them. This is what a model data scientist should do. It seems that they are trying to get more data from more contested areas. What will they find? I don't know, but it seems that the more this phenomenon presents itself, then some of the alternate hypotheses can be ruled out. [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3478593/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3478593/ [2] https://www.rferl.org/a/georgia-election-manipulation-russian-tail/33183374.html https://www.rferl.org/a/georgia-election-manipulation-russia... *[Interesting that Elon wants to get rid of Radio Free Europe. -ed]

deckar01 2y ago

I was able to reproduce the vote skew / batch size correlation in early voting. The average batch size for mail voting was way higher (6 machines) and election day was lower (3x machines). The fact that the vote ratio is more distributed for mail voting with way more votes per machine is what highlights incongruity for me. Stats are not always intuitive though.

deckar01 2y ago
Edit: Mail voting is not more distributed. You can’t analyze the distribution of a set that small using its min and max, it has to be the full range like the other sets. Distribution approaches zero as bin size increases regardless of voting source. This no longer seems surprising.
- beedeebeedee 2y ago
  Yeah, I was confused about that when I tried to replicate the study for all of the counting groups ('Mail', 'Early Voting', 'Election Day'). I'd like to know more about the data to understand how to compare the others with early voting.