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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

#181

Post by tptacek »

guscost wrote: post #180
guscost wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

Narrator: It wasn't simply pressing a button.

https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/software-glitch-causes-dela...

Again: we watched the ballots come in from Georgia. They came in county-by-county, in partisan-leaning lumps. There was a running joke on Twitter on Wednesday about people who have never been to Georgia suddenly acting like they knew where Clayton County was. It was a whole shared cultural experience!

I'm still struck by the fact that you'd have had to not be paying attention at all to not understand that the results weren't arriving uniformly from across the state, or that different locations in the state have different partisan leans. From what I saw, the whole country was basically transfixed by those two facts. We got nothing done! For like a week!

It's fine if you're not paying attention, but way less fine to build a narrative about voter fraud based on it.

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

#182

Post by nl »

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?

From my understanding most of the press data sources are just companies that wrote code to scrape the multiple state sources of data and/or interface with archaic fax systems that sent counts from counting centers to central locations. I believe in some cases they had observers who took totals off the counting machines themselves.

I believe the primary reason for them is that they got the data faster than the official websites.

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

#183

Post by acdha »

yongjik wrote: post #60
Terrario wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

California has 55 votes, Montana and DC only have 3 each. Is that not enough influence? Cali and NY make up almost a third of the electoral votes. Is it really fair for these two places to control and dictate the policies of a country spread as far and wide as the US? Hasnt the blue/red divide, not only in the country but within states themselves show that the desires and attitudes of people are heavily influenced by…

> California has 55 votes, Montana and DC only have 3 each. Is that not enough influence? No, California and DC always vote Democrat, and Montana always vote Republican. Individual Republicans in CA and Democrats in MT have zero voice - their voices literally don't matter. In fact, even Democrats in CA and Republicans in MT have zero voice - because these states' outcome is predetermined, no presidential candidate ha…

> California and DC always vote Democrat, and Montana always vote Republican. Individual Republicans in CA and Democrats in MT have zero voice - their voices literally don't matter.

This is only true if you hyper focus on the President (and ignore Bush/Reagan/Ford/Nixon in CA, Clinton in MT, etc.) - those voices are heard in the House and Senate, which have key impacts on what a President can actually do.

It’s also omitting the question of why those states vote the way they do. California now votes for Democrats not because the Republican Party forgot to campaign but because they pushed Proposition 187 through and convinced multiple generations of Latino voters that the GOP hated them. It is very easy to imagine, say, a world where George W. Bush put the state back in play after being successful in the effort to get the party shift away from the anti-Latino positions - call it the Trump opposite-world. That’s a big incentive but not enough due to where those states have considerable voice: the primaries. California might not be in question for the general but it definitely delivers a lot of votes for the primary winner, which affects their positions.

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

#184

Post by Izkata »

Terrario wrote: post #52
nanny wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The electoral college is a form of protection for the naturally less densely populated agrarian states against the densely populated urban ones. This is commonly repeated, but it's BS. What "protection" does the electoral college give to Kansas, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Idaho, or Montana? Presidential candidates don't pay any attention to any of those "less densely populated agrarian states". In addition, dense states…

> What "protection" does the electoral college give to Kansas, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Idaho, or Montana? Their collective voice along with the rest of the “heartland” is the backbone of the GOP. Trump and Bush both won without the popular vote because the electoral college amplified their collective voice. The electorate doesn’t make them win, it gives them better odds. The campaign focus on swing states should explai…

> The electorate doesn’t make them win, it gives them better odds.

Y'know, this line makes me wonder if reframing it would help some people understand better:

The electoral college is affirmative action for voting minorities.

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

#185

Post by majormajor »

tastyfreeze wrote: post #89
maxerickson wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So take a step back. Why would (the people of/in) California and Texas and so on choose to support such a republic? As it is you've defined a circle. "It's a republic so it should be run based just on the borders of the constituents".

Yes that is how it should be. Each state has different interests. By having electoral votes based on population we are not avoiding the problem of population centers directing the country. How is electing a president different than votes for a constitutional amendment? Each state gets one vote there.

Why do you believe "population centers directing the country" is a bigger problem than "arbitrary historical boundaries directing the country?"

If you replace the euphemism "population centers" with the word "people" you get "the problem of people directing the country"... which doesn't sound like a problem to me compared to the minority direction we have today.

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

#186

Post by majormajor »

umvi wrote: post #80
TheDong wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Federal law impacts all citizens. It doesn't just make laws concerning the states. Why should a man in wyoming's opinion on what federal laws I should live under count 70x as much as mine? Why should a minority of the country make a decision that impacts the majority of people?

Well if you believe Wyoming should just be steamrolled by California's desires 100% of the time, why shouldn't Wyoming secede from the union? In fact, why should any "small states" join the union in the first place if they are just going to be steamrolled by California and New York?

I would love small states to secede...

I think, though, that they would realize they need the big states to pay for shit, protect them, etc...

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

#187

Post by js2 »

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…

AK is even crazier. It doesn’t start counting its absentee ballots till a week after the election which is why it’s been stuck at 56% votes counted since Election Day.

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

#188

Post by guscost »

tptacek wrote: post #181
guscost wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

Narrator: It wasn't simply pressing a button. https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/software-glitch-causes-dela... Again: we watched the ballots come in from Georgia. They came in county-by-county, in partisan-leaning lumps. There was a running joke on Twitter on Wednesday about people who have never been to Georgia suddenly acting like they knew where Clayton County was. It was a whole shared cultural experience! I'm sti…

So you're saying one county, with ~80,000 delayed votes, ~60% of which were for Biden, completely eliminates Georgia as a counterexample here? I don't have a good spider-sense for this kind of number crunching so I'd have to do some math.

> It's fine if you're not paying attention, but way less fine to build a narrative about voter fraud based on it.

I have not been claiming there is anything to this theory, but it is fun to argue about. And I'm definitely not happy to see this argument get personal, but from my perspective, it is least fine of all to gaslight people with a nonsense fairy-tale that corruption and fraud do not exist.

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

#189

Post by perryizgr8 »

bfrog wrote: post #139
tastyfreeze wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes that is how it should be. Each state has different interests. By having electoral votes based on population we are not avoiding the problem of population centers directing the country. How is electing a president different than votes for a constitutional amendment? Each state gets one vote there.

Tax revenues which pay for federal services like the armed forces, led by the president, aren't equally contributed by each state. The day that happens is the day Wyoming's vote can be equal to California. It'd also be the day California succeeds from the union.

> Tax revenues which pay for federal services like the armed forces, led by the president, aren't equally contributed by each state.

That's irrelevant. If it were, Bill Gates' vote would be worth 1M times mine.

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

#190

Post by js2 »

tptacek wrote: post #142
guscost wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The mail-ins took longer to count, because unlike in Florida, they couldn't be counted early. So what you were watching as time went on was large tranches of mail-in ballots that took forever to count coming in from D-heavy areas (or from areas where Biden outperformed Clinton, and where the mail returns were, like everywhere, more D than the election day returns). So if I understand correctly, you're saying that t…

Here's another thing to look at: the Florida time series starts on election day. But vote counting Florida didn't start on election day . The state was allowed (because they are smart about this) to start counting 23 days in advance of e-day. The author of this thread is unaware of that, and has been fooled by Florida's efficiency into believing that vote returns are uniform everywhere. But that wasn't true in PA, wh…

NC also counted (er, tabulated) well in advance of Election Day.
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