Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

probablydance.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 467 posts

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

#121

Post by soared »

guscost wrote: post #94

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 I made a GitHub repo of this analysis ported to Python3, with a quickstart and a matplotlib script…

It 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.

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

#122

Post by krastanov »

tptacek wrote: post #117
krastanov wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

edit: 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).

I 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).

Yeah, 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.

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

#124

Post by lettergram »

guscost wrote: post #94

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 I made a GitHub repo of this analysis ported to Python3, with a quickstart and a matplotlib script…

There’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/

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.

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

#125

Post by dragonwriter »

guscost wrote: post #94

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 I made a GitHub repo of this analysis ported to Python3, with a quickstart and a matplotlib script…

> 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.

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

#126

Post by adjkant »

guscost wrote: post #94

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 I made a GitHub repo of this analysis ported to Python3, with a quickstart and a matplotlib script…

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.

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

#127

Post by birken »

tptacek wrote: post #117
krastanov wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

edit: 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).

I 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).

You 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.

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

#128

Post by guscost »

tptacek wrote: post #111
guscost wrote: post #94

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 I made a GitHub repo of this analysis ported to Python3, with a quickstart and a matplotlib script…

The premise of this analysis appears to be that mail-in ballots are a uniform sampling of Democrats and Republicans. But of course, in 2020, that's not at all the case; the Republicans made a campaign issue out of not voting absentee, and of attempting legally to reject absentee ballots under a number of conditions. As a result: mail-in ballots are sharply more Democratic than Republican this year. Further, any analy…

Sure, but the analysis is supposedly showing even vote-by-mail trending toward R in other states, explained by the hypothesis that mail from more outlying areas tended to arrive later. The observed discontinuities in the contested states could be explained simply by the sequence in which these states processed their mail-in ballots (i.e. ballots mailed from cities were processed later), but the fact that so many of them changed in the middle of the night on election night, while not evidence of anything by itself, is what I referred to as being “a little fishy”.

As a counterexample, Kansas appears to have hit a batch from a metro area shortly before midnight on election night, too.

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

#129

Post by tptacek »

adjkant wrote: post #126
guscost wrote: post #94

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 I made a GitHub repo of this analysis ported to Python3, with a quickstart and a matplotlib script…

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. S…

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.
Post reply on HN