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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

#141

Post by dboreham »

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…

Having not thought for more than a few seconds about this, it sounds like a clearly invalid premise. People decide to mail their ballot for all sorts of reasons including seeing an ad, being telephoned by a campaign worker, seeing a movie on tv, being well organized or lazy, and on and on. Those catalysts are obviously not likely to be uniformly distributed between parties.

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

#142

Post by tptacek »

guscost wrote: post #140
tptacek wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not at all fishy. You could --- and places like DDHQ did --- scrape the SOS sites to know almost exactly where the ballots were coming in. The central premise of this analysis is not just that the mail-in process was partisan-neutral, but that it had the effect of randomizing the returns statewide. Of course, it did nothing of the sort. Again, what you really saw here was that the election day vote trended sharp…

> 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, where there was no preprocessing time at all. The clock started in PA on e-day, and the busiest, largest, most Democratic counties naturally took longer to count.

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

#143

Post by tastyfreeze »

TheDong wrote: post #112
tastyfreeze wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your vote counts just as much as the other people in your state. You are voting for who your state thinks the president should be. You have never voted for the president directly.

I'm aware of that fact. I'm hopeful the popular vote interstate compact[0] will get adopted by enough states to make it so each person's vote counts equally. What you suggested above is a way to weight citizen's vote's even less equally than they do now, which is what I was responding to. The situation we have now is bad too, imo, but better than each state having an equal vote, irrespective of population. [0]: https…

Popular vote destroys any shred of state sovereignty that remains. Why would states remain in the union if California and New York forever dictate the direction of the country? This is a dark path to tread.

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

#145

Post by mistermann »

maxerickson wrote: post #93
mistermann wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You can't prove a negative. The point of my links is that there are not cases in court in Michigan or PA.

The dismissals in your links were "interesting", at least based on the information contained within the links.

You also said:

"It's relatively difficult to pull off hoodwink when you've got adversarial observers standing there."

But this being 2020 and the topic politics, he who makes the first assertion wins.

Not that it matters really. Perception is reality, and the media has more control of the perception of Americans than any other entity. Welcome to a brave new world - enjoy your stay, citizen.

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

#146

Post by okaram »

js2 wrote: post #96
anonu wrote: post #67

I think arguably the electoral process makes fraud harder. If the goal was to tip the scales, in a popular vote you could basically do this anywhere across the country. But in an EV system, you would need to pick and choose 1 or probably more places (vulnerabilities) to attack to tilt things in your favor

I think arguably the electoral process makes fraud easier. If the goal was to tip the scales, in an electoral vote, the election is very close in the tipping point state, which is usually predictable ahead of the election. In 2016, you'd only have had to add 45K votes in PA. Conversely, if the vote were national, you'd have had to add 3M votes.

Maybe ... actually in 2016 you'd have needed PA,MI,WI (and actually know with certainty those would have been the tipping point states, for which MI,WI at least weren't supposed to be that close, if I remember correctly)

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

#147

Post by nl »

thristian wrote: post #31
nl wrote: post #6

Am I the only centre-left type person in the world who thinks the Electoral College isn't a bad thing (in theory at least). In the Westminster 2-house system in Australia voters vote for representation from their seat. These seats have approximately the same number of people, but they also vote for an upper-house representative and the smaller states are over-represented in terms of population. This is because otherw…

The Australian lower house is based on the British House of Commons, the Australian upper house is based on the American Senate. Since America already has a Senate to prevent the federal government from optimising for high-population cities, it doesn't need the Electoral College as a second factor.

This is somewhat true, but the power of the Presidency is much more than the power of the Prime Minister in Westminster systems.

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

#148

Post by AnthonyMouse »

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…

> 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 implies we might need some better measures to detect it. The thing they were trying to do with dead voters is promising but has the obvious problem that there could have been legitimate ballots submitted, or unintentionally illegitimate ballots, if the death was recent etc. But the general idea seems to hold. Maybe we should add a few percent fictitious entries to the voter rolls and then see if any of them votes next time.

Anybody have any good ideas for how we could be detecting this, if it's happening?

If it isn't happening then having some measures in place like this would be good to point to as affirmative evidence that it isn't rather than merely the absence of evidence that it is. And if it is happening, it would be good to know that too.

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

#149

Post by tastyfreeze »

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.

You dont get to vote on how federal revenues are spent. You already have representatives to do that job.

Why should an individual state get more say in who the president should be if we already have congress critters to argue budget?

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

#150

Post by tptacek »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #148
adjkant wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

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