Clark County Election Analysis

throwworhtthrow

Here are drop-off counts and percentages by state and county: https://smartelections.us/dropoff#e0e8218a-4b28-4e0c-b854-7f...

It's clear that drop-off varies a lot: ±30% by state, and even more by county. I'm sure if you looked at the vote data from every tabulator in every county in every state, you'll find more than one "squint and you'll kind of see it" pattern.

I'll need more evidence before I suspect anything bad happened to the vote. (IMO voter suppression efforts are potentially election-impacting, but vote manipulation less likely.)

andor

It's not the drop-off percentages that are interesting. It's the pattern that you can see in the scatter plot (section 3 of https://electiontruthalliance.org/clark-county%2C-nv):

Voting machines that saw more voters had a larger skew. Up to about 300 votes per machine, the results look pretty random and natural. From there on, the pattern changes drastically and shows unexpected clustering. It's unexpected because larger samples should slowly converge but still be normally distributed (law of large numbers). Instead of matching a bell curve, the distribution shows a "russian tail" (search for it on the page), a sign of vote manipulation.

All this is only for the early votes. If you compare the scatter plots and distributions of early votes vs. election day, they look completely different.

daft_pink

I think the issue with mail in and drop off and early voting is the way it allows political machines to manipulate and structure the outcomes.

You should listen to the radiolab podcast about the hassidic jews that simply showed up at the polling place, counted how many people voted and then bussed in enough people to assure that they could comfortably win to take over a school board that their students did not go to.

The issue with voting that doesn’t involve showing up at a polling place that day is that its not hard to fill in someone elses ballot if you get access to a lot of them or to tabulate who voted to figure out how many additional votes you need to manipulate the result. Etc etc.

I think if you’ve read the wisdom of crowds or lived in a machine politics city like Chicago or listened to that podcast, you can accept the idea that democracy is best when people show up at a polling place with an actual id and vote at the same time limiting everyone elses knowledge of the results or access to different ways to manipulate the process.

rbanffy

Who are these people and why should we trust their analysis?

defrost

Good question. Two observations:

* there are good reasons why they'd be shy about direct identification,

* "The analysis stems from CVR data Clark County posted on its website. This data is publicly available for download. Links and archived links are provided here, and listed in detail in the final section of this document."

which means that any data wonks (there are a few on HN) can download the same raw data and look to see if this pattern is present (as claimed) and unusual wrt to other election data dumps from prior years, other counties, other countries, etc.

drawkward

Thats a good question, but the argument presented merits more analysis if the data is presented accurately.

TaylorPhebillo

I'm sincerely unclear- is the analysis here that smaller samples (fewer ballots processed by a tabulator) have a higher relative standard deviation than larger samples?

ChrisArchitect

[dupe] Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42994293

NewJazz

So we can't just count the paper ballots used during early voting? Isn't there some way to do an audit?

defrost

and HN submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42994293

basementcat

Note the other submission was flagged. If you would like to discuss this, it may be better to leave a comment now before this is also flagged.

defrost

I'd suggest long term members with an interest in the data analysis argument simply vouch the other one.

I resubmitted here as it was [flagged][dead] and while it's a US political hot potato the actual content (patterns in numbers) is HN worthy.

Not the least as the raw data can be accessed by anyone and the claim can be verified or refuted and any significance discussed.

johnea

> I resubmitted here as it was [flagged][dead] and while it's a US political hot potato the actual content (patterns in numbers) is HN worthy.

Thank you for expressing that perspective. I agree...

drawkward

[flagged]