Comment by lanternfish
5 months ago
I'm honestly not sure that their analysis passes muster. It seems that the main consideration is that Harris underperformed compared to down-ballot races and that the underperformance was ahistoric. However, the campaign was also ahistoric: she ran as a pseudo-incumbent under an unpopular presidency without as much of the name recognition incumbency usually offers. It seems extremely likely to me that this drop off in early voting numbers is indicative of an exceptionally weak campaign as opposed to widespread (consistent across all swing states) manipulation.
Their specific claim is odd, it's that the record of every machine in the county showed an expected random pattern of votes for the first 300 or so votes ..
( "random" here means more chaotic and unpredictable )
after which there was a more correlated bias toward one candidate that had a stong early trend toward a particular outcome (consistent clumping with little bounce).
The assertion is that this rarely seen in "real free voting data".
In a single picture: https://img1.wsimg.com/isteam/ip/9087f51c-d3bd-4002-9943-797...
I wouldn't know where I was supposed to draw that dotted line if it weren't already there. And I'd expect there to be less variance in vote percentages among machines that processed many votes than those that only processed a couple. But okay, that picture shows that Trump overperformed in the early vote among machines in Clark County that processed many votes (and that Harris overperformed among those that processed few.) Couldn't this effect emerge from the geographic distribution of voting locations? The points at the right of the scatterplot would tend to represent red rural precincts serving many early voters, while those on the left would represent urban areas denser with machines than they are with early voters. (And there are other considerations, such as that Trump voters may have been more likely to show up in person to early vote than to mail in votes. The vote totals by voting method would seem to show this—but, fine, they're under dispute here.)
These analysts acknowledge the "deep red areas" explanation in their pdf, but they handwave it away in an unconvincing way: they say that the same effect doesn't occur for election day voting, only the early vote. But most voting in Nevada doesn't happen on Election Day. According to the data they present, every single voting machine in Clark County processed less than 150 election-day votes, with most well under 100. That is, they'd all be well to the left of the dotted line. So even in the vote-manipulation scenario, these analysts should expect to be seeing no separation effect for the election-day vote. Its absence tells us nothing.
The main consideration is at the beginning: the stats largely resemble the patterns of verified instances of voter fraud, as in Russia and Georgia.
It seems that you're suggesting some fairly obvious factors working against Harris weren't considered by an organization whose entire purpose is to sniff out voter fraud. Are you suggesting that they overlooked such an obvious detail, or that they're willfully ignoring it?
More specifically, their claims are nonsense and (at best) wishful thinking.
You've download the raw data and confirmed for yourself that there's no "russian tail" pattern in the data?
This is literally numerology. I don't find it persuasive, no.
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You are missing most of their analysis. The surprising anomaly (the so called "Russian Tail") appears in early votes but not the Election Day votes or mail-in ballots. There analysis is worth reading again to catch what you missed. Another commenter has posted their colab notebook, so you can dig in if you want to see the details