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

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

#171

Post by zo1 »

save_ferris wrote: post #27
ve55 wrote: post #12

What I dislike about a lot of these potential fraud analysis techniques is that if a group that was performing fraud was aware of them, then they would simply perform the fraud 'properly' such that the given technique(s) don't show evidence (since they know what others are looking for and hoping to find, they simply ensure it isn't there). The same goes for similar techniques like Benford's law: once you know about t…

One very important point to consider in all of this is that the states administer their own elections and election processes directly. While this makes unifying the voting system practically impossible, it prevents a singular federal authority from directly interfering in the electoral process. I don't think we can safely assume that a president or any other federal authority should have the power to oversee any aspe…

Just because it's distributed or handled individually by each state doesn't necessarily mean it can't be compromised or interfered with.

If anything, I would argue that because it's distributed and handled by individual smaller units, each individual one is susceptible to interference within its own area. On a side note: There is a reason why people recommend "don't roll your own encryption". Some things such as security are hard problems, and just because you want to be "independent" doesn't mean you should come up with your own half-baked solution to the problem instead of using a secure and standardized one.

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

#172

Post by tptacek »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #163
tptacek wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Georgi…

Half a percentage of the AZ vote is over 16,000 votes. See why this crime doesn't make sense?

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

#173

Post by tptacek »

guscost wrote: post #164
tptacek wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

They're scanned. They're not counted. They're not allowed to count until the poll close.

(If you Google this you'll see a lot of other stories about why the counts from D-heavy areas were delayed; there were glitches).

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

#174

Post by zo1 »

maxerickson wrote: post #46
ve55 wrote: post #12

What I dislike about a lot of these potential fraud analysis techniques is that if a group that was performing fraud was aware of them, then they would simply perform the fraud 'properly' such that the given technique(s) don't show evidence (since they know what others are looking for and hoping to find, they simply ensure it isn't there). The same goes for similar techniques like Benford's law: once you know about t…

What 'modern improvements' can be made over paper ballots?

No one likes to hear these, but some simple ones to try:

1. Central database of all citizens. (Can be state-level if you want to do that). 2. Require voter-ID to link against 1 above. 3. Tick off people on the database as they've voted so they can't vote twice.

And just like that, most (but not all) of the "mail in ballot" concerns are rendered mute and we can all continue with trusting the election results.

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

#175

Post by spzx »

guscost wrote: post #170
spzx wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

Ah I misunderstood, I thought one can't repeat the scraping part. But what did they mean by "proprietary "Edison" data source which would ordinarily be impossible to access for people outside the press" then?

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

#176

Post by nl »

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…

I collected Florida ballot returns and early voting by party registration by date.

I allocated independent registrations 50/50 to each party, and ignored 3rd party registrations.

Obviously this isn't the same as actual votes, but it is instructive. The Democratic party had a large lead at the start from postal votes, but that shrunk as more early voting happened.

  Date         Likely Democratic lead
  24 Oct 2020     386,908
  26 Oct 2020     354,654
  27 Oct 2020     299,021
  28 Oct 2020     245,912
  29 Oct 2020     204,277
  1 Nov 2020     94,325
  2 Nov 2020     108,123
  3 Nov 2020     114,889
To me this indicates that the narrative of postal votes being vastly more from the Democratic party holds up.

In states (like PA) where postal votes weren't counted until after polls closed we'd absolutely expect to see a large Republican lead which would shrink as postal votes were counted.

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

#177

Post by adolph »

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…

Nice. You can get GitHub to do the scraping for you using GitHub actions. To better utilize git as a datastore, prettyprint it so each commit is a smaller diff.

https://simonwillison.net/2020/Oct/9/git-scraping/

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

#178

Post by tptacek »

spzx wrote: post #175
guscost wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ah I misunderstood, I thought one can't repeat the scraping part. But what did they mean by "proprietary "Edison" data source which would ordinarily be impossible to access for people outside the press" then?

Obviously, the bigger problem with trusting this Twitter rando is that they don't know how mail-in ballots are county, came up with weird broken premises, and then accused Wisconsin, Georgia, and Pennsylvania of perpetrating a gigantic fraud.

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

#179

Post by dragonwriter »

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…

> 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.

Which is based on a series of assumptions that simply do not generally hold (the most central being that the entire statewide collection of mail-in ballots is homogenized before being counted.)

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

#180

Post by guscost »

guscost wrote: post #164
tptacek wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Sibling reply since I've gotta get to bed:

> At least three election workers must be present at all times during this processing and officials are prohibited from doing any tabulation of results until polls close at 7 p.m. on Nov. 3. At that point, tabulation is simply pressing a button.

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