Allegations of Fraud in 2020 US Election

[Darat]

Darat, I replied to a post stating that the claims were piddly, I posted an example of one of the claims that isn't piddly, you then argued that all I was posting was a claim. It's like a mini-gish gallop.

No, it was as I said, I was missing the context of what you had posted so replied to your post based only on what it said.

And again your personal attacks are unwarranted.

 

[shuttlt]

I’m sure that at least 70 people believe they’ve been abducted by aliens or in the existence of Bigfoot.

What does it matter how many people are making a claim if none of those claims are supported by evidence?

These aren't random nobodies. These are poll watchers, who say they observed issues. If you then turn around and say, "yes.... but why should we take their word for it?"... what is the point of having poll watchers? It would be better to be honest and say "how we count these ballots and what we do with them is secret".

Why does evidence need to be provided to disprove a claim made without evidence?

I didn't say that evidence should be provided now. Again, I'm assuming that the process has been appropriately designed and implemented and hence it should be easy to provide evidence that the main claims are false should the need arise.

Also, there isn't no evidence... there are the statements of the poll watchers. That is pretty clearly evidence.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Also we're supposed to just ignore the fact that Trump has been whining about the Democrats stealing the election since before the election started.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

These aren't random nobodies. These are poll watchers, who say they observed issues. If you then turn around and say, "yes.... but why should we take their word for it?"... what is the point of having poll watchers? It would be better to be honest and say "how we count these ballots and what we do with them is secret".


I didn't say that evidence should be provided now. Again, I'm assuming that the process has been appropriately designed and implemented and hence it should be easy to provide evidence that the main claims are false should the need arise.

Also, there isn't no evidence... there are the statements of the poll watchers. That is pretty clearly evidence.

If poll watchers are so reliable, why didn't any of the Democratic watchers notice an anomaly?

No matter what is true, some subset of poll watchers was not doing a good job. Either Democrats were looking the other way while massive fraud unfolded under their noses, or Republicans are delusional and/or lying. This is a nakedly partisan accusation, one side is not operating in good faith.

Republicans have a well earned reputation for falsely claiming vote fraud and otherwise attempting to suppress voter turnout. These people came to Michigan for exactly that purpose, let's not be naïve about their intentions here. Efforts to recruit poll watcher on behalf on the Trump campaign explicitly cited the threat of the election being stolen by fraud.

“The radical left are laying the groundwork to steal this election from my father … We need every able-bodied man and woman to join Army for Trump’s election security operation.”

https://time.com/5902731/trump-poll-watchers/

The kind of kooks answering this call walked into the room already knowing in their hearts that election fraud was occurring.

All available evidence shows that Republican poll watchers were deliberately disruptive, belligerent, and conspiratorial. The party has completely squandered their credibility on such issues, over and over again, and there's no reason to pretend these claims aren't the obvious BS that they are.

Where are the reports of Democrat watchers disrupting polling in rural, more conservative districts? Why is it that there are only problems when conspiratorial Facebook boomers descend on blue cities looking for "fraud"?

 

[Darat]

It's great that a lawsuit has actually been filed. It's pretty funny watching lawyers, who have ethical obligations to not play games with a judge, get crucified when trying to advocate this flimsy JAQ-off of a complaint.

It might work on right wing media, but any lawyer who doesn't want to get their ass chewed out by a grumpy judge knows better than to spin this meritless trash.

One such exchange:



https://twitter.com/bradheath/status/1326347647154794496

You almost feel bad for the guy.

I know I am quite a geek about these things and reading court proceedings are probably not most people’s idea of entertainment, but the exchange above is far from the funniest part of the proceedings. At the start of the lawyers argument he undermines his own argument with the analogy he chooses to use to explain what the plaintiffs mean by “fill out”.

https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-.../11-10-2020-Trump-v-Montgomery-County-BoE.pdf

 

[No Other]

Just watched that; I hadn't seen it when I constructed the hypothetical upthread, but it's nice to see he's making the exact same point and demonstrating it with reference to the actual data that's in question.

Dave

It is great to see how different people use the same process and achieve results independently.

This is why evaluation is critical; we all preemptively think results will not be "biased" but many are not (Trump supporters think this will reveal a smoking gun but be careful what you wish for...) and this method will expose those who refuse to acknowledge what can be an outlier versus a pattern.

 

[BobTheCoward]

These aren't random nobodies. These are poll watchers, who say they observed issues. If you then turn around and say, "yes.... but why should we take their word for it?"... what is the point of having poll watchers? It would be better to be honest and say "how we count these ballots and what we do with them is secret".


I didn't say that evidence should be provided now. Again, I'm assuming that the process has been appropriately designed and implemented and hence it should be easy to provide evidence that the main claims are false should the need arise.

Also, there isn't no evidence... there are the statements of the poll watchers. That is pretty clearly evidence.

A) The poll watchers are making claims without evidence.

B) maybe the point is security theater

C) they seem to be random nobodies

 

[Meadmaker]

Link to a Detroit Free Press article describing activity at the TCF Center last week.

https://www.freep.com/story/news/lo...cf-center-detroit-ballot-counting/6173577002/

 

[Darat]

I appreciate you taking the time to read it. We will see. I kind of feel, and hope, that the security around elections should be up to positively refuting these claims rather than it simply being a case that they fail to prove them. We will see.....

You are asking for people to prove a negative and reverse the burden of proof and change the USA justice system at the same time.

Thankfully the USA justice system is based like my own country’s on the idea that the plaintiff/prosecution have to prove their claim/case.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

I know I am quite a geek about these things and reading court proceedings are probably not most people’s idea of entertainment, but the exchange above is far from the funniest part of the proceedings. At the start of the lawyers argument he undermines his own argument with the analogy he chooses to use to explain what the plaintiffs mean by “fill out”.

https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-.../11-10-2020-Trump-v-Montgomery-County-BoE.pdf

I think it's clear that the Trump machine was ready for a Bush v Gore type situation, where such piddly crap could be the difference in tipping a narrow win in a pivotal swing state. The lawyers are running into a brick wall now because the election margins simply were too broad for such tactics to be effective. It's too many votes in too many states to haggle about what "fill out" means or whether a couple boxes of absentee ballots should be invalidated.

Seems to me the lawyers are going through the motions for their client and taking their beating with stoicism, but there was never any real hope for success here.

 

[Darat]

You have different things going on here.
1. I believe they have something like 70 witnesses claiming similar things. Normally that would go a long way to at least asking the question of whether maybe rebuttal evidence might not be required.

2. As I said, the aim should probably be to have sufficient security such that claims like "they were adding names to the database, or registering ballots against different people" can be positively refuted rather than having the precinct folding their arms and saying "prove it". I hope that such evidence exists.

You haven’t checked to see if they do have the evidence? Surely that is the first stage, taking their claims on faith seems a rather strange way to consider if something has merit or not. If I said I had 70 witnesses to seeing Bigfoot would you simply accept that?

 

[TurkeysGhost]

You haven’t checked to see if they do have the evidence? Surely that is the first stage, taking their claims on faith seems a rather strange way to consider if something has merit or not. If I said I had 70 witnesses to seeing Bigfoot would you simply accept that?

Not just 70 affidavits seeing bigfoot, but 70 affidavits collected by the "Bigfoot is real" legal aid society, after calling for bigfoot watchers to descend on the town to finally catch the beast.

Trump declared a carnival in these cities for all his most delusional and belligerent followers, and wouldn't you know it, now we're awash in spectacular claims.

 

[Meadmaker]

Why would the size of it make a difference?

Just noting that it holds a lot of people.

Affidavits from six poll observers sounds very serious, but if you recognized that there were a total of at least 300 total Republican observers, it doesn't sound quite so serious.

In the article that I posted one thing that struck me is that as the race started tightening in Michigan, both Republicans and Democrats sent out the alarm for people to descend upon Cobo Hall to observe the election, to prevent nefarious activity being perpetrated by the other side.

That's going to end well. What sort of people do you suppose showed up, in what sort of mood ? They practically said, "We need Republicans to stop all the voting fraud going on in Detroit!" and "We need Democrats to show up to keep Republicans from disrupting the election!"

But in the end, the people counting the ballots just kept counting.

 

[No Other]

Good, we're getting somewhere. Now, how do we tell whether a set of election results falls into the category that Benford's Law can be applied to, or to the category that Benford's Law cannot be applied to? Because, of course, these things are never a black/white boundary; it's trivially simple to construct an example where the polling numbers just barely span an order of magnitude, but, because the distribution is weighted towards the centre, there are relatively few examples at either end of the distribution, and if the ends of the distribution happen to fall on values where the leading digit is 1, for example, we'll see a gross deviation from Benford's Law because there will be fewer 1's, 2's and 9's than expected.

Are you starting to see the problem? Benford's Law can be used to indicate the possibility of faked data, by noting that the distribution deviates from that expected, if and only if the data range is suitable; and the result of an unsuitable data range is that the distribution deviates from Benford's Law.

Now if you go back to the original claim, there's one example of Biden data that's flagged as suspect. The main deviation visible is that the proportion of 1's and 2's in the distribution is much lower than expected; but this is exactly what would be predicted by a data range too small for Benford's Law to be applicable. Meanwhile, some of the Trump data shown deviates just as much from Benford's Law, but this shows up as an excessive representation of 1's in the data, which is what would be expected from a small data range centred on a value with a leading digit of 1.

So we've established that some data ranges cannot be examined using Benford's Law, we've observed that these ranges will give the sort of deviations seen in the data presented, and there isn't enough information given in the claim to determine whether this is due to a data range that's too small. Overall, that makes the claim practically worthless in the absence of corroborating information.

Dave

I always thought of Benford's Law as nothing more than how a lineup is determined for baseball. The lead-off will always see more ABs than his on-deck teammate and historically you wanted your worse Batter at the end (however, that approach is taking a euphemistic "hit" lately).

It's perfectly logical to expect the number 1 to show up more frequently than any other number, my rub with Benford's Law is that there is too much interpretation in order to make a claim of fraud. The IRS uses this method to catch Tax Evaders... but then again, the IRS doesn't live in a world where they are frequently challenged, certainly not challenged in their ability to interpret the results correctly.

 

[Meadmaker]

In the Wayne County lawsuit, there are not seventy affidavits. At least, there weren't yesterday. Yesterday there were five.

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/n...-new-problems-tcf-counting-center/6223885002/

I don't know where the number 70 comes from.

 

[Darat]

That's a bit of a pointless question at a point where the lawsuit has only just been filed, we haven't seen the evidence and I don't think any of us are relevantly qualified lawyers. We will see.

The case you earlier linked to refers to the affidavits so the evidence has already been presented, had you not read the documents you linked to? This is why I’ve asked you previously if you have the evidence not just the claims.

These aren’t some TV court cases where the plaintiff will call to the stand the mysterious woman wearing a veil that is revealed to be a Ms H Rodham who will spill the beans on the 4 years she has worked to undermine the 2020 election.

And your “We will see” - was that the approach you took to the lawsuits claiming Obama wasn’t born a USA citizen?

 

[Meadmaker]

I always thought of Benford's Law as nothing more than how a lineup is determined for baseball. The lead-off will always see more ABs than his on-deck teammate and historically you wanted your worse Batter at the end (however, that approach is taking a euphemistic "hit" lately).
.

No.

Just no.

Benford's Law is a consequence of logarthims. 30% of the numbers are 1, because log10(2)=0.3. (approximately)

1 shows up more than 2, because on a page of log-scaled graph paper, the big space for 1 is bigger than the smaller space for 2, and the space for 9 is very small indeed, so not as many 9s show up.

 

[Nessie]

https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/presidential-advisory-commission-election-integrity/

"On May 11, 2017, President Donald J. Trump signed an Executive Order establishing the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. Vice President Mike Pence chairs the Commission, and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach serves as the vice chair."

https://www.npr.org/2018/01/03/5755...roversial-election-commission?t=1605109853130

"Trump created the commission in May 2017 after he continued to insist that as many as 5 million votes were cast illegally in the November 2016 presidential election where he bested Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. But there has been no evidence to back up that claim, and the president's assertions have been dismissed by election officials and experts. Trump won the Electoral College, giving him the White House, but he lost the popular vote to Clinton by almost 3 million votes."

"Kansas Republican Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who has long claimed there is widespread voter fraud by noncitizens despite providing no evidence of any such improprieties and only prosecuting a few fraud cases in Kansas."

 

[shuttlt]

If poll watchers are so reliable, why didn't any of the Democratic watchers notice an anomaly?

I think you've forgotten the platonic ideal of evidence that you are demanding. Do we know that the Democratic watchers didn't notice an anomaly? If they do, well then we have competing witnesses and somebody will need to unpick this.

No matter what is true, some subset of poll watchers was not doing a good job. Either Democrats were looking the other way while massive fraud unfolded under their noses, or Republicans are delusional and/or lying. This is a nakedly partisan accusation, one side is not operating in good faith.

Sure, I assume the Democrats run the count in such a way that these partisan questions can be answered with hard evidence. Regrettably that wasn't the case in Chicago in 1960 where somebody had broken half the seals on the ballot boxes and lost the documentation.

Republicans have a well earned reputation for falsely claiming vote fraud and otherwise attempting to suppress voter turnout. These people came to Michigan for exactly that purpose, let's not be naïve about their intentions here.

Riiiiight, so there is a conspiracy on the republican end, but it is unimaginable that there should be a democrat conspiracy.

All available evidence shows that Republican poll watchers were deliberately disruptive, belligerent, and conspiratorial. The party has completely squandered their credibility on such issues, over and over again, and there's no reason to pretend these claims aren't the obvious BS that they are.

All available evidence? No, that isn't true. There may be some claims, but again if there are competing claims then that needs looking into. I would hope that the ballot counting process would be secure enough and well evidenced enough that the poll watchers complaints will be moot.

 

[johnny karate]

These aren't random nobodies. These are poll watchers, who say they observed issues. If you then turn around and say, "yes.... but why should we take their word for it?"... what is the point of having poll watchers? It would be better to be honest and say "how we count these ballots and what we do with them is secret".

Their status as poll watchers doesn’t automatically grant their claims legitimacy.

They still need to provide evidence for their claims.

Have they?

I didn't say that evidence should be provided now. Again, I'm assuming that the process has been appropriately designed and implemented and hence it should be easy to provide evidence that the main claims are false should the need arise.

Please provide an example of one these claims and the method by which it could be disproven to the satisfaction of everyone who believes the claim.

Also, there isn't no evidence... there are the statements of the poll watchers. That is pretty clearly evidence.

The statements are merely claims.

Are claims evidence?