Looking for Voter Fraud (In Old Elections) with Data Visualization • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by aw1621107 » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 5:59 AM UTC

mistermann wrote: post #81

maxerickson wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Michigan case was dismissed by the judge: https://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/11/... As was the PA case: https://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2020/11/07/trump-campaign-pa... Has the Trump campaign taken further action beyond what is discussed in your link? I know they had a press conference at the Four Seasons in Pennsylvania, did anything come of that?

> Michigan case was dismissed by the judge ------------------------------------ Thor Hearne, an attorney for the Trump campaign, said he wanted an order directing Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to require "meaningful access" for campaign poll watchers to the counting of state ballots, plus access to videotaped surveillance of ballot drop boxes installed around the state after Oct. 1. Michigan Court of Claims Judge…

> The president’s campaign argued that his supporters weren’t being allowed to monitor the tallying of mail-in ballots, but U.S. District Judge Paul Diamond instead argued the two sides to come to an agreement.

Just a note on this; (part of?) the reason Judge Diamond asked the two sides to come to an agreement is because the plaintiffs admitted they already had observers in the room [0]:

> During the hearing, a lawyer for the campaign admitted that “they had several representatives in the room,” according to a statement by the bipartisan board. In fact, the Republicans had at least 19 observers in the room during the afternoon, according to the statement.

From a Twitter thread with quotes from the hearing livestream [1]:

> Diamond: "I’m asking you as a member of the bar of this court: are people representing the Donald J Trump for president, representing the plaintiffs, in that room?"

> Trump campaign lawyer: "Yes."

> Diamond: "I'm sorry, then what's your problem?"

[0]: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/trump-sues-to-halt...

[1]: https://twitter.com/kadhim/status/1324485343274557443

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

#192

Post by spzx » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 6:00 AM UTC

nl wrote: post #182

spzx wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 officia…

Thanks, now I understood that "this is based on ..." means "this script is based on ..." and I initially parsed that as "this information is based on ...".

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

#193

Post by nl » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 6:03 AM UTC

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 states piled up the ballots in the order they arrived, that would mean later arriving votes would be counted before early arriving votes.

Then if one party had a propensity to vote by mail earlier than the other we'd see a pattern where the proportion from that party would increase over time.

That's what we see.

Can we verify this any other way? Not completely, but in Florida survey data shows that the Democrats had an early lead of 462,000 before early (non-mail) voting started and by election day that had decreased to ~100K[1]

[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/524085-unprecedented-e...

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

#194

Post by Izkata » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 6:04 AM UTC

noodlenotes wrote: post #11

andrewem wrote: post #2

The adjective form of Democrat is Democratic. Perhaps as a German the author is unaware that usages like "all the democrat votes are ignored" are repeating the Republicans' deliberately insulting word choice. Edit: thanks to currymj below for the link to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_(epithet)

"Democratic" is confusing because it could mean either "relating to democracy" or "relating to the Democratic party" whereas "Republican" almost always refers to the party. I don't blame anyone for using a less ambiguous word and this is the first I've heard of "Democrat" being an insult.

Likewise here; I switched to "Democrat" because of a confusing conversation I once had with someone some time ago.

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

#195

Post by piva00 » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 6:07 AM UTC

guscost wrote: post #160

tptacek wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dead people will vote in every election that allows absentee ballots, because people die after they mail their ballot but before election day. Atomicity. It's a bitch. Every state has an electronic pollbook that tracks voter eligibility. Votes for dead people will arrive, but they should not as a rule be counted.

There are definitely a few dead people who register to vote after dying, and successfully vote, in every election too.

How many on average?

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

#196

Post by torvusbog » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 6:08 AM UTC

guscost wrote: post #157

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…

Well for example there are a more than a few definitely dead people who vote each election, that's pretty easy to show. But finding the, uh, living person who did the fraud is not always easy.

The "dead people" vote is a myth spawned as a result of technical issues, and is noted and discredited in voter fraud studies. State run voter rolls often didn't require DOB in past or continue to leave it optional in certain circumstances, causing the DOB to be represented as 0 AD, or 1970 AD, or some other spurious result. Even the Steve Bannon funded GAI study on voter fraud[1], which has been discredited, made this claim and refuted this data from the study. This is disinformation.

[1] http://www.g-a-i.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Voter-Fraud-...

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

#197

Post by alphabettsy » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 6:08 AM UTC

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…

There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud is what’s being said. It’s on the accusing party to provide that evidence and they haven’t. It also strikes me as strange that they’re targeting only the cities that they are. Detroit for example when it was actually Oakland and Kent Counties that most altered the outcome in Michigan for Trump.

Election officials have many ways to audit elections for example knowing exactly who voted in an election how and where.

To fill out and mail thousands of ballots you’d need to have them in the first place. Ballots are tracked from mailing to receipt and processing. How would you know who to pick so that there’s no conflict if they show up at the precinct to vote in person?

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

#198

Post by nl » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 6:08 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #118

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…

They're not all counted at once. You watched the returns come in drop-by-drop in PA, and each was attributed to counties and precincts. You are not going to see a uniform D/R ratio between a drop from Carbon County and a drop from Allegheny County. This is so basic --- you had to have not watched the PA returns come in at all to not know it --- that I read this twice, figuring that I had to have misunderstood what th…

> I think this person believes that the mail-in process randomizes the ballots statewide.

Oh god you are right. I hadn't even contemplated this.

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

#199

Post by js2 » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 6:09 AM UTC

cma wrote: post #113

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.

D.C. gets presidential votes I thought?

Yes it has three EC votes which is why it’s 538 and not 535 (435 reps + 100 senators) EC votes.

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

#200

Post by fastball » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 6:11 AM UTC

js2 wrote: post #86

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fraud obviously happens that doesn't come to light until later: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-philadelphia-judge-ele...

You found one in the 0.00002%. Notably, this occurred during a primary. It's still awful, but the GOP trusts the Democrats to run their own primaries and vice-versa. I wonder how this came to light years after. https://www.brennancenter.org/issues/ensure-every-american-c...

The problem with fraud is that it's a "victimless" crime, so there could be a lot of fraud going undetected that we just don't know to look for.