Allegations of Fraud in 2020 US Election

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

The head of the DoJ's election crimes department has resigned after Barr issued a memo directing the department to investigate allegations of fraud

 

[Explorer]

You don’t understand how these types of crimes work, are discovered, or the amount of effort and time it takes to investigate them. Read the article I posted about an actual historic example of wide scale voter fraud that took place in the 1982 Chicago election and was prosecuted. Rob Blagojevich (Disgraced Chicago politician caught trying to sell congressional seat in Chicago and served jail Time) recently shared that this type of activity occurred during his career in the mid-2000’s.

What is the harm in verifying the integrity of the 2020 election in a similar way that the FBI did in 1982?

For the 2016 election, Congress spent millions of dollars blindly knowing how it would turn out, hired special counsel, empowered the counsel with anything they need to complete the task and spent months investigating it. Why can’t the validity of this election be verified with a similar amount of commitment and ambition?

Why can't preemptive action be taken before the vote? It is surely pointless carrying on in the same old way every four years and justifying the spending of millions of dollars on post election fraud investigations, if the system is shot in the first place. Fix the system first, make it better, and save your dollars.

 

[BobTheCoward]

So we've all seen the meme:

[imgw=640]https://i.imgur.com/pie7Tdk.jpg[/imgw]

That is supposed to be the voting count in time in Wisconsin. Allegedly some 138 thousand votes were added for BIDEN in the middle of the night while ZERO were added for Trump. The "debunking" of that is that it was a news reporting glitch? While Wisconsin has allegedly a close to 90% voter turnout? Twenty percent more than ever in history?

The debunking of that is there is simply no evidence it occurred. Because a company's website showed a spike like that doesn't mean the state reported a spike like that.

 

[The Great Zaganza]

IF you think that the election was stolen from Trump via massive voting fraud in a manner that is impossible to prove given current technology ...

... then I suggest you move to the woods and become a hermit.
Because if what you think is true, we will never have fair elections ever again.

So why bother participating at all?

 

[Cain]

It's just inconceivable that Biden would edge a victory in states that have a history of voting Democratic when Trump trailed by so much for so long in all of the opinion polls.

 

[Firestone]

Feels like 10-15 years ago, when 9/11 truthers would come up with endless lists of "anomalies".

Difference is that today's morons, Trump and acolytes, have way more power and real world influence than Dylan Avery, Richard Gage, pdoh and the like.

 

[Dave Rogers]

The greater the sample size, the greater the refinement. That is pretty much with anything... But that is not what Benford's law is about, it works perfectly fine with one magnitude.

This is not just wrong, but trivially wrong. Benford's Law for the first digit breaks down completely as soon as the span of results falls below one order of magnitude; it cannot possibly succeed because not all leading digits are even present in the sample. It's well established that its applicability increases with the number of orders of magnitude spanned, so at the point of just one order of magnitude its applicability has decreased to the point where it's right on the verge of breaking down completely.

Benford's Law for the second digit is perhaps more credible. I'd note that the analysis originally presented as evidence for vote-rigging has only one instance of Benford's Law for the second digit, in which it presents one set of Biden data on an expanded Y-axis and one of Trump data on a compressed Y-axis to give the false impression of an obvious difference between them, and when the data is plotted on consistent Y-axes the Biden data shows only a very slightly greater variance than the Trump data. We can assume from the entire slant of the piece that the data has been chosen to show the most damning possible result in each case.

So we have one cherry-picked instance of a deviation from Benford's Law in the first digit in Biden data, compared with instances of Trump data that shows a different deviation from Benford's Law; and we have one cherry-picked instance of a very minor and unexceptional deviation from Benford's Law in the second digit in Biden data, which is dishonestly presented to give the appearance that it's much more severe than it actually is.

Overall, against a burden of proof required to cast doubt on the basic honesty of the electoral system, one minor statistical anomaly and one piece of blatantly dishonest spin is pretty pathetic.

Exactly how is this tool inappropriate for election results?

Your fallacy is: Reversed burden of proof. Explain how this tool is appropriate for election results, given that there is, taking the best possible interpretation for your claim, clearly no consensus among experts that this is the case.

Dave

 

[Dave Rogers]

Feels like 10-15 years ago, when 9/11 truthers would come up with endless lists of "anomalies".

Difference is that today's morons, Trump and acolytes, have way more power and real world influence than Dylan Avery, Richard Gage, pdoh and the like.

Hell, yeah. It feels just like the glory days of the 9/11 forum, when every week there'd be a new truther (though most of them were usually Pdoh socks) inventing a new law of physics about controlled demolitions, insisting that it was universally accepted, then showing how the collapses didn't agree with it. The methodology of the Benford's Law claim is precisely the same.

Dave

 

[Olmstead]

IF you think that the election was stolen from Trump via massive voting fraud in a manner that is impossible to prove given current technology ...

... then I suggest you move to the woods and become a hermit.
Because if what you think is true, we will never have fair elections ever again.

So why bother participating at all?

Pretty much. Senate elections? Fraud! House elections? Fraud! Every presidential election ever? Fraud!

You could launch the same investigation for every single election and focus on the smallest irregularities to vindicate your opinion. But most people have the decency not to try such a horrible tactic.

This investigation is a travesty because it didn't start with someone discovering irregularities and following up on them. It started with Trump losing, after which his campaign started a mindless search for something.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

I don't mind people alleging election fraud, as long as they're consistent. So, everybody arguing that Trump won the election is also arguing that the Republicans elected to the Senate didn't win those elections, right? Or was it literally just the part of the ballot containing the vote for president that was invalid?

And why, do you suppose, the Democrats rigged the election for president, but not for the Senate?

 

[Childlike Empress]

The "spike" in the meme is supposed to be from Michigan, not Wisconsin. My bad, but a similar "irregularity" seems to have happened in Wisconsin. The New York Times assures us that

In reality, Mr. Biden didn’t receive those votes. They were briefly added to his unofficial totals on an election map because of a typo in a small Michigan county that was caught and corrected in roughly half an hour.

“All it was is there was an extra zero that got typed in,” said Abigail Bowen, the elections clerk in Shiawassee County in Michigan, just northwest of Detroit. “It was caught quickly,” she added. “That’s why we have these checks and balances.”

When Ms. Bowen and her team sent the county’s unofficial vote counts to Michigan officials early Wednesday, they accidentally reported Mr. Biden’s tally as 153,710, when it should have been 15,371, she said. About 20 minutes later, she said a state elections official called her to ask if the number was a typo; Shiawassee County doesn’t even have that many residents. Ms. Bowen said she corrected the figure and the number was updated.

 

[shuttlt]

I think some of the things said by Democrats, especially by rank and file, in the street sorts of Democrats, have contributed to the destruction of American democracy.

And, of course, democracy has not been destroyed, but I think it's weaker than it was four years ago. I think the damage Trump is doing right now is greater than all of what anyone on the left did over the last four years.

You need to look at it from the other sides point of view. From their perspective, they have been called white supremacists, racists etc for 4 years. They've spent 4 years watching the media lie and work against them. They've spent 4 years watching Google, Facebook and Twitter lie and work against them. They've seen the FBI lying and working against them. They've listened to Hillary claim that the last election was illegitimate for 4 years. It is going to be very hard to put that genie back into the bottle. A boiler plate "togetherness" speech from Biden is if anything counter productive and feels like gaslighting. Maybe Trump is doing damage, but the effort to get rid of him has done a heck of a lot of damage as well.

Well, yes, and if Trump were only calling for an investigation I might give him a pass. That's not it, though. He's saying he won Wisconsin. He is saying there was fraud. He is making accusations, not calling for investigations.

Democrats make claims of cheating and worse when it suits them, and are outraged about people claiming cheating and worse when it suits them. I just don't care any more.

 

[Olmstead]

You need to look at it from the other sides point of view. From their perspective, they have been called white supremacists, racists etc for 4 years. They've spent 4 years watching the media lie and work against them. They've spent 4 years watching Google, Facebook and Twitter lie and work against them. They've seen the FBI lying and working against them. They've listened to Hillary claim that the last election was illegitimate for 4 years. It is going to be very hard to put that genie back into the bottle. A boiler plate "togetherness" speech from Biden is if anything counter productive and feels like gaslighting. Maybe Trump is doing damage, but the effort to get rid of him has done a heck of a lot of damage as well.


Democrats make claims of cheating and worse when it suits them, and are outraged about people claiming cheating and worse when it suits them. I just don't care any more.

I don't remember Hillary shouting fraud after the election and the Democrats launching a blind search for irregularities.

 

[Ambrosia]

Indeed. I've been aware of Benford's law for several years, I can't speak for the rest of you. It's one of those interesting and surprising bits of maths like the Monty Hall Problem that one remembers because of how unexpected it is.

We know EXACTLY how the Monty Hall problem works. It's pretty basic math. It's counterintuitive, which is why it throws up so much debate, but it boils down to pretty basic probability.

What? Of course we know how it works. It's a mathematical law that describes processes that fit particular criteria. In what sense don't we know how it works?

We do NOT know why Benfords Law works.

We know that it does work in some situations, and in those situations it's reliable enough to indicate an anomaly in the dataset it is being applied to.
It DOES NOT show why that anomaly is there, just that there is an anomaly.

In that regard it's very like the zipf distribution.
(The most common words used in any language in a sufficiently large volume of text of that language will appear proportionally according to *exactly* where they are ranked.)
We know that that works, it's exceedingly surprising that it does work, but we cannot explain why.

For a dataset to be ideal for Benfords law it should follow a power law and it should span multiple orders of magnitude. The further away you get from that ideal the less likely it is that Benfords law will apply. If you get far enough away from that ideal then you get to what is called "coin flip" territory. i.e. 50% of the time BL works and 50% it does not, and because we do not know why it works, we are unable to use it to definitively say whether or not there's an anomaly in the distribution of this data or not by using it.

Benfords Law is a black box that we do not yet understand. It's a tool we can use in some cases, and again, this case isn't one of them.

 

[Ambrosia]

accuracy is more appropriate.

No. confidence is more appropriate.

Exactly how is this tool inappropriate for election results?

From a 2011 paper linked earlier upthread.

Among other things, it ignores the fact that fraud itself is often implemented in a highly decentralized way by local and regional officials, each using their own schemes, heuristics, and procedures—thereby adding yet another stochastic element to the mix and, arguably, encouraging an even closer fit to [Benfords Law]

[...]

absent a clearly specified theory of how Benford’s Law applies to election data—formal or otherwise—it is unclear how to make it a part of any ‘‘criminal investigation.’’
Indeed, the argument that follows is that as presently developed, the Law is suspect at best if not irrelevant as a forensic indicator: Deviations from it are as likely to signal fraud when there is none as it is to fail to signal fraud when it in fact exists

There's lots of other papers discussing this and Benfords Law in general. If you're a numbers geek then it's a fascinating subject that's worth spending some time on.

If you're only interested in this because it might help the GOP case for election fraud however, you're going to wind up very disappointed.

As an aside when someone links scientific papers to support their case, it's always a good idea to actually read the paper and not just the abstract. It might help to inform your understanding of the subject being discussed.

 

[Childlike Empress]

You need to look at it from the other sides point of view. From their perspective, they have been called white supremacists, racists etc for 4 years. They've spent 4 years watching the media lie and work against them. They've spent 4 years watching Google, Facebook and Twitter lie and work against them. They've seen the FBI lying and working against them. They've listened to Hillary claim that the last election was illegitimate for 4 years. It is going to be very hard to put that genie back into the bottle. A boiler plate "togetherness" speech from Biden is if anything counter productive and feels like gaslighting. Maybe Trump is doing damage, but the effort to get rid of him has done a heck of a lot of damage as well.

True dat. The bizarre amount of "censorship" (yes, they are no state, spare me that talking point) of the quasi-monopoly internet platforms has outdone any "election-meddling", in harm and effect, that was alleged and disproved to have been done by "Russia" in 2016. That much is for certain.

 

[shuttlt]

I don't mind people alleging election fraud, as long as they're consistent. So, everybody arguing that Trump won the election is also arguing that the Republicans elected to the Senate didn't win those elections, right? Or was it literally just the part of the ballot containing the vote for president that was invalid?

I suppose those elections could be invalid as well. I don't think though that there is any rule that if you claim one election is fraudulent you have to claim all are. Many of the fraud claims seem to be isolated to particular counties, so I'm not sure that they would apply to every county.

And why, do you suppose, the Democrats rigged the election for president, but not for the Senate?

I'm only aware of one claim of fraud that is restricted to the president, the supposedly abnormal number of ballots that are blank down ballot. To say more one would need to know more about the specifics.

 

[shuttlt]

I don't remember Hillary shouting fraud after the election and the Democrats launching a blind search for irregularities.

You don't remember recounts? What are recounts except a blind search for irregularities? Also, I vaguely remember some kind of enquiry claiming Trump colluded with some foreign country to steal the election.

 

[shuttlt]

IF you think that the election was stolen from Trump via massive voting fraud in a manner that is impossible to prove given current technology ...

Who is claiming this? Massive voter fraud was proved in 1960 with 1960s technology.

 

[shuttlt]

Why can't preemptive action be taken before the vote? It is surely pointless carrying on in the same old way every four years and justifying the spending of millions of dollars on post election fraud investigations, if the system is shot in the first place. Fix the system first, make it better, and save your dollars.

The Republicans want election security, at least partly, because election security favours them. Democrats are opposed to election security, at least partly, because election security disfavours them. It is going to take an apocalyptic scandal to implement what you are talking about.