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

161–170 of 467 posts

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

#161

Post by Izkata »

kart23 wrote: post #23

The author says about turnout: "One clarification: The turnout number at the bottom is slightly wrong: You’d think that you can easily get these statistics for past elections, but I can’t find the turnout number anywhere. Instead I was able to get the population of the counties, so this is the number of votes divided by the population." Isn't this quite inaccurate? I think counties release registered voter numbers, s…

> I suppose that's as accurate as you can get

Numbers for each state since 2000, every 2 years, available here: http://www.electproject.org/home/voter-turnout/voter-turnout...

What you want is probably the VEP number ("voting-eligible population", people who are of age and not disqualified for some reason, such as having committed a felony).

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

#162

Post by jrumbut »

sweettea wrote: post #116
tptacek wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No, the premise is that mailin ballots should have a roughly uniform D/R ratio, no matter what timeslice of a state you look at. Of course they skew, but the idea is that the first mailins counted should have basically the same ratio as the last. Which appears true in most states, but not some, for unknown reasons. (The skew it proposes as normal, R later in time due to receiving R ballots on a later distribution, ex…

Philadelphia, Detroit, and a number of other cities are notoriously slow in counting their ballots.

This happens every election that I can remember, going back to 2000.

If I had to guess, the complexity of counting may increase in a non-linear way after a certain number of precincts.

I'm unconvinced the proportions should be consistent at the state level or any level really. There have been GOTV events that have thousands of attendees, then there's the "souls to the polls" event every time, I can't think of a way to slice it where I would be convinced by unbalanced batches.

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

#163

Post by AnthonyMouse »

tptacek wrote: post #150
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 im…

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.

> 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?

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

#164

Post by guscost »

tptacek wrote: post #156
guscost wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, that's probably a big factor. Counterexample: Georgia, which started processing mail-in ballots 15 days before e-day (as far as I can tell): https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/battleground-states-process-...

Georgia does limited preprocessing of ballots before e-day, to catch and report invalid ballots, but can't count until the day.

Apparently not this time:

> While county election officials were able to verify signatures and voter registrations upon ballot receipt, normally, absentee ballots can't be further processed or opened until Election Day. But this year, beginning 15 days before the 2020 general election, officials were allowed to open returned absentee ballots, remove those ballots from both the outer and inner secrecy sleeve envelope, and scan the ballots using a ballot scanner machine.

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

#165

Post by skunkworker »

User23 wrote: post #92
IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The system is secure and robust, at least with regards to the mechanics of individual votings. Among the main factors is its distributed nature. You just can't run a scam with senior citizen volunteers in thousands of individual precincts. Then, there are observers. Famous case from this week's election was Republicans complaining that their two dozen(!) observers weren't allowed closer than 6 feet to the ballots. It…

Chicago is famous for voter fraud, in the tens or even hundreds of thousands[1]. It's almost as if the USA has political machines that mastered electoral dipsy-doodle over a century ago. [1] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9GDrIH...

It seems like the "fraud" in that article was no more than people voting when they weren't on the voter registration rolls. Today because of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 and the Help America Vote Act of 2002 require states to provide provisional ballots.

While there probably was some "fraud", it looks like this is more of a process violation, and one barrier that fortunately has been eradicated.

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

#166

Post by spzx »

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…

>CulturalHusbandry @APhilosophae

>The following information is provided via an anonymous data scientist and another anonymous individual who wrote a script to scrape the national ballot counting time series data of off the @nytimes website.

>This is based on their proprietary "Edison" data source which would ordinarily be impossible to access for people outside the press.

https://twitter.com/APhilosophae/status/1325592112428163072

Why should we trust these anonymous people (including twitter thread OP)? They could just tamper with the data and we would have no way to know that.

Take into account the pinned thread by @APhilosophae too, they are not impartial at all:

https://twitter.com/APhilosophae/status/1325135291791839232

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

#167

Post by unit_circle »

torstenvl wrote: post #133
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…

If all the ballots were shuffled in the mail across the timespan in which they were counted, that would make sense. However, they are not, so the assumptions underlying the analysis do not hold. For one thing, many states did not begin counting these ballots until Election Day, per state law. For another, the entities performing the unofficial counts were not necessarily the entities receiving the ballots. The author…

> Around 3am Wisconsin time, a fresh batch of 169k new absentee ballots arrived. They were supposed to stop accepting new ballots, but eh, whatever I guess.

> By 4am the D to R ratio was all thrown out of whack. That is because these ballots were not sampled from the real Wisconsin voter population, and they were not randomized in the mail sorting system with the other ballots. They inherently have a different D to R signature...

Anyone who knows anything knows Milwaukee (not just as a city but as Wisconsin's largest city) votes blue. So as soon as those votes start getting counted the votes will shift blue. You _should_ see this bimodal distribution in vote counts.

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

#168

Post by skunkworker »

Personally I'm curious how much voter fraud is committed by parents of college students who receive their students absentee ballots and decide to "fill them out" for them. It's the most intentional voter fraud that I'm aware of at the moment and non-conspiratorial.

Things like this pop up on reddit occasionally.

https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/9twaf9/gfs_dad...

https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/9ni5uf/family_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/j7440r/parents...

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

#169

Post by chrisco255 »

birken wrote: post #137
sweettea wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the premise is that mailin ballots should have a roughly uniform D/R ratio, no matter what timeslice of a state you look at. Of course they skew, but the idea is that the first mailins counted should have basically the same ratio as the last. Which appears true in most states, but not some, for unknown reasons. (The skew it proposes as normal, R later in time due to receiving R ballots on a later distribution, ex…

Interesting enough, the mail-in ballot returns on a per-precinct basis were actually shockingly consistent, even over time, likely proving by this method that there wasn't any voter fraud. The thing is though, if you look at the returns on a state level over time, what you are actually seeing is the results from all sorts of different types of votes in different places over time, so you won't see any consistent patte…

Do you have the per precinct D/R ratio data?

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

#170

Post by guscost »

spzx wrote: post #166
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…

>CulturalHusbandry @APhilosophae >The following information is provided via an anonymous data scientist and another anonymous individual who wrote a script to scrape the national ballot counting time series data of off the @nytimes website. >This is based on their proprietary "Edison" data source which would ordinarily be impossible to access for people outside the press. https://twitter.com/APhilosophae/status/13255…

Well that's why I ported and ran the python script, and put it on GitHub, so you could re-scrape the NYT data too, it will just overwrite what's in the repo. I'm not vouching for any of the corresponding analysis, but the data seems real: https://github.com/guscost/nyt-election-2020-analysis
Post reply on HN