Comment by jandrewrogers
5 months ago
This is a pretty inexperienced analysis.
I happened to have detailed day-by-day voting and registration data for the 2024 Nevada election as it was happening. Harris losing Nevada was telegraphed in the data almost from the beginning. Forget the top line totals, the underlying structure of where and who was registering and voting in real-time made the outcome all but a foregone conclusion weeks before the actual election. Nevada was some of the easiest money on the prediction markets.
Much is explained by an unusually robust turnout of low-propensity voters for Trump. They often don't care about the rest of the ballot, so it skews results albeit in a predictable way. (This is also the risk for Republicans; they are unlikely to show up for mid-terms and may sit on the sidelines again in four years.)
Nevada has consistently clean election processes. I am only aware of a single anomaly over the last several Federal elections that was clearly inexplicable. It wasn't this election, that instance looked like a system failure rather than fraud, and it didn't change the outcome. Some other States are rife with anomalies that persist even with sophisticated analysis most cycles.
If I was going to pick a State to look for Federal election irregularities, Nevada would be pretty low on my list. It is easy for amateurs to fool themselves into thinking they've found election fraud when really they just don't understand what is required to find a signal that holds up under sophisticated analysis. Same thing happened in 2020.
I also used to live in Nevada and am pretty attuned to the local politics. There are local bellwether statistics that are traditionally pretty reliable for indicating how an election will break. Harris was upside down on these too. The tortured rationalization by Nevada election pundits like Jon Ralston to reinterpret those as "good actually" was uncritically repeated widely in the national media.
Another commenter posted a colab notebook and created a histogram that shows the "Russian tail". Please at least copy and paste it, and show where they have gone wrong with their statistical analysis, instead of making uncited and subjective judgments.
Maybe you can write this up with charts? Or at least put your data up publicly?
The data sources are public and downloadable from official sources. In the case of the State of Nevada, the total data set resolves to upwards of a hundred URLs that are not neatly organized anywhere, so there is a lot manual work to aggregate them and data engineer a single coherent data model.
I stay out of the analysis business though I know a lot about it. A friend has been hardcore in the business for over a decade as a side-hustle and drags me into it every 2-4 years to help out with data sourcing and anomaly forensics, which are more my specialty. The workload during election season is insane but you can make a mountain of money from the campaigns if you have an excellent reputation for this kind of analytic work. Most people that try botch it.
The polling used in the news media is mostly unserious. The campaigns use more sophisticated non-public voting models to predict outcomes and that has risen in stature with time versus polls. Even if the public may be surprised by the outcome a well-run campaign typically is not.
Ok but it sounds like you're sitting on top of something very important. And also that you've already done all the analysis? Seems like you should publish.
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