Reddit can you debunk this? Some people with statistical backgrounds think they have uncovered UNDENIABLE evidence of voter fraud. (This post is not politically motivated.)

veavey · 1 year

Polls don't report randomly. I'm not specifically sure about the US not being a US American myself, but in Canada, for instance, advance polls tend to report quite early, smaller polls report more quickly than larger ones... how might this affect the results?

Edit: Additionally, what do these charts look like for places where no voter fraud is suspected? I know that people often use Benford's law to support voter fraud (which it can, of a certain type at least)-- however, when indiscriminately applied, it shows all sorts of elections up as frauds (which, I suppose, might be true, but just seems unlikely).

One more edit: Where are the datasets? It'd be nice to look at the datasets.

teraflop · 1 year

A candidate's cumulative score should gradually converge with reducing volatility towards his final result. This is an absolute mathematical law. [...] The mathematical law describing this process is call hypergeometric.

This is only true under the assumption that the sequence of votes is IID. That's a very strong assumption which is almost certainly not true for electoral data.

Just as a completely hypothetical example, suppose there's a positive correlation between voting for Romney and working full-time. And suppose people who work full-time tend to get to the polls later, which means their votes are counted later. Wouldn't this lead to exactly the effect you're observing?

The probabilities calculated using the hypergeometric distribution are meaningless unless there are no correlations of this type whatsoever, which is implausible. Not to mention that calculating p-values (which is essentially what these are) without correcting for multiple comparisons is a really good way to get results that look more significant than they actually are.

Drunken_Economist · 1 year

Nobody cares, Apostolate

[deleted] · 1 year

One big problem I can see with the analysis is that the statement:

"Counting votes in a ballot is like taking marbles fron an urn until you've got them all out."

Which is demonstrably not true. The data is not independent, you're much more likely to have smaller precincts/counties report their data long before the big one, just because they have so many fewer to count and report. So, if you have voting distributions that depend on the degree of urbanization or population density (which you definitely do) it takes this analysis and makes it largely not useful. Romney's support is definitely in urban and suburban centers, so you would definitely expect that his results would increase over time as the vote was counted.

Hawk_Irontusk · 1 year

I am a mathematician, and I have a few questions.

First, all your data seem to show is that Romney does better in larger precincts. Why is that hard to believe? You dismiss a demographic explanation out of hand without any real justification for doing so. That's not good data analysis.

Second, have you done similar analyses for other elections? Democratic primaries in 2008 perhaps? The fact that you see similar patterns in other Republican primaries from previous years indicates to me that nothing nefarious is going on here. If a pattern suddenly occurs out of thin air then you may be on to something, but as it stands you say that this is nothing new.

Third, even if you're on to something (which, in my opinion, is unlikely) this is absolutely NOT "undeniable evidence of voter fraud" as you claim. Stating your case that way is irresponsible.

pbump · 1 year

The core flaw in this argument is that like-sized precincts should vote similarly.

Precinct vote totals are not registered voter counts - they're vote counts. So it's whoever comes out. And precincts are generally meant to be of similar overall sizes - that's the point. Make it easy to provide needed resources. The precincts in a city will be geographically smaller than one in the suburbs.

If the vote results match the polling that precedes it (which they all have, within the margin of victory), either the vote hasn't been tampered or your conspiracy runs to the pollsters, too. In which case, stock up on aluminum foil.

[And to those who say "THEY MATCH THE TAMPERED VOTE TO THE POLLS": that wouldn't change the outcome of the race, making tampering pretty useless.]

Svennig · 1 year

It's difficult to say anything as, not being american, I don't know enough about the electoral mechanisms and thus don't entirely understand the points that have been laid out.

That said, you're making some huge assumptions which don't work.

Santorum has only 311-23 votes left to go from his current 0% to 12%. Probabilitity of him getting 0% out of 23 votes cast? Hypergeometry says 5%

This is wrong. You can't take a probability distribution of a superset (the final vote and the hypergeometric distribution it entails) and apply it to a subset (the individual counties) where there is a strong suspicion of systematic bias in the subset.

There are a few places where it seems like you make errors like this (and a general assumption of independence which, depending on the voting and vote counting and vote announcing scheme may not be appropriate)

FableForge · 1 year

Here's my layman two-sentence summary:

If Romney was going to end up anyway with, say, 23 marbles out of the 100 marble bag, then as you get closer and closer to emptying the bag, the chances of pulling a Romney marble stabilize like so.

The fact that the chances don't stabilize, but actually grow, smells of someone flipping the marbles as it became clearer and clearer that Romney needed more marbles that originally weren't there, like so.

Is that more or less the gist of it?

jcfowler · 1 year

My first question is, how is Romney rigging the exit polling to be consistent with the results?

TribbleTrouble · 1 year

NOTE: This is going to be a long post. I am going to submit and edit while I write, because it would be tragic to type a book and then lose it.

Okay, here is my attempt at an explanation for why your premise (and therefore conclusion) is basically flawed. If you care, I have a BS in Finance, and I am currently in my second semester of an MS Finance program. At this level, finance is at least 75% statistics and calculus.

Hypergeometric distribution information

Problem 1 - Nonrandom Variables First of all, note that for the hypergeometric distribution to be applicable, the value of the variables must be random. In the red/blue ball example, the variables are truly random: we are equally likely to pull a red as a blue, and the chance of pulling a red ball does not influence what the next ball will be. This is a stark contrast to this voting data. The most obvious reason why the votes are not random is that we know in advance that certain candidates are going to receive the majority of votes. If Romney won 35%, Santorum won 35%, and Gingrich and Paul each got 15%, then we know the probability of a vote going to a certain candidate, and it is not random.

Further, I would argue that when a particular vote goes to a candidate, that candidate is more likely to receive the next vote. Consider that Paul campaigns almost exclusively in certain districts where he has the best chances of winning (districts that often include college campuses). In these areas, we expect him to perform much better than average, and in areas where he has not campaigned we would expect him to do more poorly. Once again, the variables are not random, so a hypergeometric function cannot be used.

Problem 2 - There is a simple, logical explanation for the data This is actually related to the first problem, because the heart of the issue still that the variables are not random and so a hypergeometric function cannot be used The explanation is this - you chose to organize your data roughly from least-to-most urban, and Romney tends to perform better in more urban areas. This explains why he always "benefits" in the largest districts.

Please also note that these issues are why Ron Paul seems to be the "victim" of "fraud". Your model is assuming that the votes are random, and that each candidate should receive an even % of the vote. However, we know in advance (from polling) that Romney will win about 35% of the vote and Paul will win about 15% (or whatever, please stay with me here). So it should not surprise us that the model gives Romney a very remote chance of getting to 35% because the model thinks that, if the election were conducted 100 times, he would receive an average of 25%. This flawed model also overestimates Paul's chances of performing well, because it thinks he deserves an equal share of a random vote, instead of a smaller share of a nonrandom vote.

TL;DR The variables (votes) are not random, and so a Hypergeometric function cannot be used to analyze the data. The premise is flawed, so the conclusion is useless.

Also, think for a moment what you are suggesting - huge election fraud that has been going on for years. This data has been analyzed and analyzed again from Berkeley to MIT to Cambridge - if there was fraud that statistical analysis could reveal, then some academic would have published a paper years ago.

mhwalker · 1 year

There are many problems with this analysis. The most blatant is the dismissal of demographics. Are the demographics of 50-person precincts different from 70-person? Maybe not. But are the demographics of 22-person precincts different from 370-person precincts? Almost definitely. Small precincts are rural and large precincts are urban. Does Romney poll better in rural areas or in cities? Better check before you dismiss demographics.

Next problem: in your very first table, the division of precincts into deciles is wrong. The first decile has a little over half as many votes as the last decile. This immediately leads me to question whether things have been calculated correctly. I also find the standard deviations suspiciously low. Obviously, without looking at the precinct by precinct results I have no way of knowing whether they're actually correct.

Final (major) problem: This idea of hypergeometry only works if the votes are counted randomly. When you're combining votes in groups, in a way I would argue strongly correlates with demographics, it's no longer random, so the hypergeometry result no longer holds.

TL;DR It's demographics.

ClownFundamentals · 1 year

This entire argument rests on the assumption that a small precinct is likely to predict the voting behavior of a large precinct. There's literally no reason to believe this: why should a small farming precinct's voting patterns have anything to do with the voting patterns of the city next door? Once you get rid of that assumption, and realize that larger precincts tend to finish counting their votes later in the day, all you've "proved" is that people in cities vote very differently from people in the country.

Here's something to chew on: Union, SC, one of your "untampered" counties looks just like the "tampered" Sumter, SC, except that it's Ron Paul shooting up at the end instead of Mitt Romney. Does this mean that Ron Paul was doctoring votes in Union? Cherokee, SC looks identical as well, except it's Newt Gingrich doctoring votes this time!

Let's not even discuss the inherent biases when your "source" is a politically motivated forum. As someone else pointed out when this exact subject was posted to /r/statistics:

At the minimum I'd want to know something about which precincts are counted when, and how that relates to the demographics of the average Romney and Paul voters. I'd also want to see the entire set of returns across all counties, not just a handful cherry-picked by a Paul supporter.

I'm reasonably sure that what you're seeing here is a demographic effect. Precincts with more people (the precincts on the right hand side of the x-axis in those graphs) tend to be urban/suburban precincts. The reason for this is because these areas have denser populations, but you can't make precincts too geographically small to compensate for this because (1) you still need to find a public building within the precinct for everyone to go and vote in, and (2) you can't have too many precincts because you can't find the poll workers to staff them all. This means that urban/suburban precincts tend to have more voters than rural precincts.

Urban areas also tend to have more moderate and liberal voters than rural areas, and the liberal/moderate wing of the Republican party is more supportive of Romney than the other candidates. This is why I think this is simply a demographic effect. I see the first message in the thread claims that demographics can't be the explanation, but no explanation is actually given. I'd be interested to hear why people in that other thread don't think demographics can explain this.

tl;dr The most likely explanation is that Ron Paul voters are voting in small precincts that report sooner, and that Mitt Romney voters are voting in large precincts that report later.

PS: "This post is not politically motivated" ... except when it is

barongavin · 1 year

You mention that demographics are not at play, but don't provide any evidence, then casually dismiss the point. Are you sure about your assumption that 50-vote precincts are the same as 70-vote precincts? Again, I'm not an expert, but it certainly sounds like you are hand-waving for parts of this analysis.

masstermind · 1 year

*EDIT: I just want to add that to anyone reading this thread, please don't believe the BS that the OP is trying to pedal here. There's no evidence of election fraud, and his title that this is "UNDENIABLE" fraud is misleading and irresponsible. *

This will unfortunately get buried, but here it goes...

While I have don’t have nearly the in depth knowledge of statistics to be able to comment on the statistical accuracy of your analysis, I do believe that you have a major logical flaw in your theory, if I understand if correctly.

To explain this logical flaw, I’d like to tweak your marbles in a bag analogy a bit. Instead of picturing this situation as 100 marbles in a bag, let’s instead say that there are 100 bags with an average of 100 marbles each. Some bags only have 10 marbles, and others have 1000, but the total number of marble is 10,000.

Shifting away from the analogy and back to real life, the bags with more marbles are the larger precincts, which are located primarily in urban centers. For a variety of reasons, GOP primary voters in these larger/urban precincts are more likely to vote for Romney, and here is why:

There is a greater percentage of “pro-business Republicans” in urban areas than rural areas, and Mitt Romney is seen as the “pro-business” candidate.
There are more transplants in urban areas, many of whom come from the northeast, where Mitt Romney is by far the most popular candidate.
There is a higher percentage of Democrats and Independents, who is an open GOP primary, are likely to vote for the more moderate candidate, which is considered to be Mitt Romney.
There is a lower percentage of “social conservatives” in urban areas, and Mitt Romney is seen to be the least socially conservative candidate.

So, my point is, that where you were so quick to dismiss a demographic explanation, you should not have been. There are completely logical reasons why Mitt Romney would have a greater percentage of the vote in larger precints.

Oh, and for the record, I am a progressive Democrat who absolutely detests Mitt Romney.

pktron · 1 year

You're ignoring the obvious solution, which is what most political blogs expect. That is that the first counties and precincts are the ones with smaller populations, which tend to be rural, which tend to be more socially conservative and vote for candidates that aren't social moderates (i.e. Romney).

EDIT: Basically, you are sorting things in a biased manner, as there tends to be a known and well-explained correlation between political behavior and population and/or how rural a precinct or county is.

Manfromporlock · 1 year

Please everyone stop calling this "voter fraud."

When voters vote, and then their votes are changed, lost, or not counted, it's election fraud.

Voter fraud is when unqualified people vote, when voters vote more than once, when voters impersonate other voters, and so on.

Election fraud is a very serious issue.

Voter fraud is largely a myth, a myth that is being used to make it harder for real voters to actually vote (eg, with ID requirements and so on).

lessmiserables · 1 year

I used to be a vote inspector back in the hanging chad days. Demographics are, indeed, a highly variable factor. There is a significant difference in who is voting for whom in the morning, lunchtime, rainy days, 5 o'clock, and close. Our voting patterns (mostly rural, lower middle class) were much different than our counterparts in the suburbs and the city.

From what I can tell none of this has been normalized in the analysis. If it has, I apologize, but if not this data is flawed for the conclusion.

zazu2006 · 1 year

I know a bit about stats. I just graduated with a degree in actuarial science so I have had several classes in time series analysis and regression analysis as well as probability distributions and such. I think that you are making too many assumptions when it comes to the independence of the data. This is a BIG (I see this in professional papers all the time and it kills me) problem when analyzing data. Smaller precincts are not good estimators of larger ones for a number of reasons. It would be extremely hard to prove and you would have to look at several elections historically to get a better sense about the politics of each precinct to really have anything to go off of. This is my opinion and not rigorously mathematically gone over because I don't care that much so you can take it or leave it.

barongavin · 1 year

Demographics are not at play^[Citation ^needed]

alogicalfallacy · 1 year

This entire conspiracy seems pretty rooted in an ecological fallacy. In other words, that what happens at one scale won't necessarily happen at another.

In order for this "analysis" to be correct, all counties regardless of size must function similarly. This just isn't the case and, frankly, is why no one is taking these ideas seriously.

[deleted] · 1 year

ASSUMPTION 1: The %of votes counted is directly proportional to time.

ASSUMPTION 2: Chance of a person voting for a particular candidate is proportional to what hour of the day they prefer to vote.

ASSUMPTION 3: Votes are counted as either first in, last out (stack); or first in, first out (queue). I assume the electronic systems would be a FIFO/queue.

Could it just be that Romney voters are more likely to have obligations during the day, and couldn't get off work until 5 p.m.?

bohknows · 1 year

I'm not saying you're wrong, but there is historical precedence for voting numbers to look more linear than they "should." I remember Nate Silver (really smart guy who started with high level baseball stat analysis, and now runs fivethirtyeight, a stat-based political blog) discussing this when talking about Iranian elections a few years ago.

Here is a summary of this story. Silver even says that it's not proof that there was a clean election, but that it seems that linear progression of voting results happens a lot more than one would think.

Physeos · 1 year

This will get buried, but I will try anyways.

As an engineer with a degree that focuses primarily on probability theory, this is why too little knowledge is dangerous. 98% of the comments on here are from people who know enough to sound like they know something, but not enough to actually be right.

One of the unspoken rules of statistics is that when it comes to studying human behavior, good luck!

Without studying the subject extensively since it's not within my knowledge base I can only offer somethings to look for if there was voter fraud.

Homoscedasticity - Basically do larger polling stations have less/more variance then smaller polling stations? Assuming similar demographics at similarly sized stations then the data when ordered by polling size should look more like a line than a triangle. This may not hold for multiple reasons, one of which could be uneven vote rigging.
Autocorrelation - This gets pretty technical, but do similar sized polling stations reflect a similar outcome throughout the reporting process. If larger polling stations were at 45% for Romney and then later 60% it would show a possible alteration of the true data. Again, there are other explanations for this, like region.

NightSlatcher · 1 year

I'd love to hear a professional's take on this, but the idea that Romney is stealing votes directly from Ron Paul immediately makes me suspicious. Not trying to troll or anything, but the Ron Paul crowd can be pretty excitable when it comes to conspiracy theories in which they're victimized. Like I said, I'd love to hear someone else weigh in though, I'm not trying to discredit this.

Edit: To those from the Paul camp that have downvoted, I guess I should clarify: It seems like a really bad idea to siphon votes from the candidate who has the most supportive/die-hard voter base, they'd notice it much easier than Gingrich's or Santorum's people. Plus he only gets around 10% in most of the contests, why not siphon from someone with 30%?

calibos · 1 year

You apparently only know enough about statistics to be dangerous.

Your first mistake is to assume that each draw (vote) is independent from time point zero onward. Why is that an assumption you can make? Let's imagine a scenario with only 3 types of voters: farmers who vote early in the morning after feeding the animals but before they start their other work, the unemployed who vote in the afternoon after sleeping in but before their friends/family get off work, and office workers who only vote after work. If any biases for certain candidates exist in these groups, you will see the vote tallies fluctuating as each group comes in over the course of the day.

Beyond demographics, political engagement may play a role in when votes are cast. Someone following the election closely and strongly committed to a candidate may vote early, before work or on their lunch break. Someone less committed may have forgotten about it or remained undecided about whether they were going to cast a ballot or not. They may only go out to vote after being reminded by their more politically engaged coworkers and friends.

The second mistake is to assume that voters in small precincts are equally likely to vote for a given candidate as voters in a larger precinct. It is no surprise to any follower of politics that urban voters have very different priorities and voting preferences than rural voters. It is expected that these precincts will vote differently.

Furthermore, a small dedicated group of individuals can have a much larger impact on a small precinct. If a group of 15 rabid Ron Paul supporters turn out in a 188 vote precinct, they account for nearly 10% of the vote there! That is a huge factor in the final tally for that precinct, but a statistical blip in the statewide tally.

Basically, your assumptions are flawed and you are misapplying the statistics. If you were to pool results for the whole state or pool precincts by some shared characteristics (urban/rural, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, etc...) then you may be able to make better inferences, however there is no good way to separate biases in voting time from your analysis. I think using these data to try to identify these biases and their possible causes rather than using them to try to infer foul play is a more valid use. Only after you have identified and controlled for biases can you use these data to look for fraud.

autobahn · 1 year

Wouldn't "undeniable evidence" mean something more than "the statistics don't seem right"?

I would say that this is indeed politically motivated based on the language used here.

It bears further investigation, but undeniable evidence to me would be a document stating they are doing this, or something that compared actual ballots to the final vote count, or an eyewitness account or source with firsthand knowledge of election fraud.

porkbyproduct · 1 year

Undeniable

I don't think you know what that word means.

THE_UPVOTER111 · 1 year

Like almost everybody else on this thread (except the guys who know something about stats and say these numbers are unreliable), I know nothing about stats, but those numbers and graphs sure look like lots of numbers and graphs, and you had me at "Ron Paul being secretly held down by the man!" Who needs calm, resigned acceptance of your candidates non-viability when you have good ol' statist-ish riddled conspiracy theories? Do more math, Rain Man! We're bound to win a state somehow!

joet10 · 1 year

6) Demographics are not at play, though this is the 'debunk' most often brought up by people new to the thread.

Did you show any evidence for why they aren't in play?

igg14 · 1 year

lol @ calling statistics a "mathematical proof" and assuming independently identically distributed voters while completely ignoring demographics.. and cherry-picking data for the graphs to boot.

vipermagic · 1 year

I absolutely hate the style in which you presented your argument.

(guys, get a grip, his a fake)

Now. Think, Winnie, think.

Checkmate.

jjm214 · 1 year

I have to point out that the graphics that are a more compelling display of your theory have extremely low vote numbers for the most part. Obviously these would have a relativly high percent error

10over6 · 1 year

This "study" is silly garbage. Basically every single "rule" he assumes in creating his fancy charts is both a) nonsensical and b) statistically unsound.

What the F--- does it mean to "gain" or "lose" a vote in this context? These "gained" and "lost" votes are the lynchpin of this person's argument, but they don't make any conceptual sense.

On top of that, there is no reason at all in the world to assume that small precincts should have the same vote proportions as larger ones; that's a BIG assumption and should be proved with rather than assumed.

Then there's "rules" 5 and 6, which essentially posit that every voter who doesn't vote for Ron Paul will cast their vote at random.

In short, this isn't even statistics. It's numbers selectively arranged in a meaningless manner, so as to produce a graph that gives the appearance of statistics.

1 year

[deleted]

top_counter · 1 year

As a stats major who passed a few actuarial exams, first please please stop saying "proof". In stats we find evidence, not proof.

Second, you need to explain exactly what your numbers mean and how they are derived before any stats geek can help you out. Your first visual (http://i.imgur.com/znxHc.jpg) is a perfect example. I need to know exactly what those columns mean and how they were calculated. Only the second and third columns are obvious. Standard deviation is the most confusing. I get the gist of what you're saying, but that is in no way sufficient for mathematical analysis.

Also, as mentioned by another math geek here, it's possible that precinct size affects voter distribution. While I initially presumed that urban areas contained the larger precincts, a Google search reveals that this may not be true. However, precincts are likely to be manipulated by gerrymandering which could well correlate moderate/liberal districts w/ large size (or vice versa). That's a possible explanation that needs to be debunked by an analysis of precinct data.

Lastly, consider how many counties (and precincts) we are analyzing. If we analyze 1000 counties, we are likely to get some exceptional results. If something was so rare that it only happened once in a thousand tries, we would expect to find it once, for example. Data mining is a possible debunk angle, perhaps the strongest.

virtu333 · 1 year

Anyone who's taken stats 101 can see the underlying problem here, and that is the randomness involved. The OP's data/calcs assumes a correlation where there might not be any

[deleted] · 1 year

The mathematical law describing this process is call hypergeometric.

HURRR

I hope nobody actually believes this baseless pile of conspiracy theorism, especially since the only "source" is a link to a Ron Paul forum. Come on.

earthbridge · 1 year

SO essentially, this post is complete garbage statistically, making a huge number of wacky assumptions and basic errors. The fact that it claims to be non political and yet is taken from a Ron Paul form is also fishy.

Edit: OP now says its debunked, disregard this.

stuckit · 1 year

It's not voter fraud. It is election fraud.

People in charge making changes.

Eist · 1 year

Maybe I'm missing something, but vote counting is not like drawing marbles from a bag. It is not random. Larger centers, where, perhaps younger people live and are more likely to vote Paul, and perhaps, to a lesser extent, Romney are counted first. This is because the ballot is taken, then the votes immediately go to the counting station. This may be a walk around the block. In very rural areas, this may take hours.

In small precincts, it is more homogeneous because there is less variance in demographics.

Basically vote counting based on when they are counted is not random, as described in the piece.

brenballer12 · 1 year

As a scientist, I think you have one more thing to do before you can really claim fraud

You have to consider that precincts with larger populations may be more inclined to vote for Romney. You would have to correct for this effect somehow in order to say with confidence that any change in percentage of people voting for Romney is fraudulent and not just due to a bias in favor of Romney in larger precincts.

asdjfsjhfkdjs · 1 year

Counting votes in a ballot is like taking marbles fron an urn until you've got them all out.

You're assuming that they come in at random. What if the votes that are counted first aren't representative of the votes that are counted last? This would be like having more blue marbles at the top and more red ones at the bottom: your running estimate of the fraction of red marbles will steadily increase as you get toward the bottom.

isitevergoingtobe · 1 year

I think that you’ve found some positive correlation between precinct size and support for Romney. You’ve sorted the voting data from the smallest precincts to the largest precincts. Romney’s support goes up as the precinct size increases. The statement that troubles me the most out of your argument is:

“Are demographics of 50-vote precincts different from 70-vote precincts? No way. The impossibly large systematic linear deviation is the mathematical smoking gun.”

I don’t think that this argument holds if the demographics of the larger precincts differ. Can you prove that the demographics of the 50 vote precincts are not different than the 70 vote precincts? A common sense argument won’t hold up in court. Also, the “systematic linear deviation” that results may just be a result of the changing demographics as precinct size increases. Your hypergeometric argument falls apart if the population composition changes as your data becomes larger.

Here’s an alternative story: urban areas are much more likely to support Romney than rural areas (or more densely populated areas with more people per precinct are more likely to support Romney than less densely populated areas with fewer people per precinct). Perhaps there are relatively fewer conservatives in urban areas, and Romney’s relatively moderate positions gain more support. I think that a political scientist with some statistical experience would probably be the best person to answer your question since he or she would know much more about the demographical changes as precinct size changes (knowledge of political institutions and how precincts are designed would be helpful). If you can disprove this argument, then you’re one step closer to showing that there’s voter fraud. You could find data about population density from the Census Bureau for each census tract (go here: http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml, search for population density, and link the census tract data to the precincts), and then look for patterns…though some econometrics experience would be helpful here. Then, you would need to disprove other alternative hypotheses and figure out how such a massive conspiracy is organized. You’ve found an interesting relationship. Hold off on hitting the panic button until you (or other Redditers) have looked into other possibilities further.

rockhardmeatloaf · 1 year

BS in Mathematics, 4 years actuarial and statistical real world experience, several actuarial exams passed.

i need to see actual data. i think whoever made these charts may be retarded.

making my meatloaf crack.

babydum · 1 year

Undeniable evidence? Not politically motivated? UH HUH....

HogglesPlasticBeads · 1 year

"(This post is not politically motivated.)"

But:

"People in Fairfax No 1 are known for their superior political wisdom. Santorum gets no vote."

"But he [Santorum] does very well in the Martin precinct (guys, get a grip, his a fake)."

Mageant · 1 year

Here is also a good summary: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B_wWkfsJPShUMWQxMTc2NzgtM2MzYy00ZGJhLWI1MmYtMWU2ZGU1OWZkZjhk

sgtmeow · 1 year

Run them through the Diebold machines again!

ZombieDivinity · 1 year

I have a raging brainer.

DeSanti · 1 year

If you want to, I can try to run this by to my professor in Comparative Politics, Frank Aarebrot. Also, I have some friends in the institute that supervise Methodology and CSES (The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems).

I can't promise anything, though. But I'll try if you want to.

VeryProudhonOfYa · 1 year

"Consider ballots as a random variables"

and your problem arises in your first assumption. voters are certainly not random variables. You can't simply analogize them with marbles plucked from a bag.

Vogon_Poet · 1 year

Just a guess...as voter exit polls come out as the day goes on isn't it inevitable that the winners margin will increase in an uncompetitive race? e.g. if at 1 pm news is widely reporting a wide Romney lead wouldn't more of his opposition voters not vote? Thus increasing his lead? Can we dub this study "the romney effect?"

gjallard · 1 year

Aren't smaller precincts more rural precincts? Isn't a possible explanation that voter preference seems to vary based on rural versus urban population densities?

nryan85 · 1 year

Do these statistics take location into account? Because larger precincts tend to be in cities correct? Cities tend to be more liberal, so it would stand to reason the "liberal" candidate (Romney) would get a higher percentage in these precincts.

ryrybang · 1 year

I think you need to address one of your big assumptions: "Counting votes in a ballot is like taking marbles fron an urn until you've got them all out."

I think you are assuming in the ballots are cast, counted, and tallied randomly. I don't know enough about GOP primaries or caucuses counting techniques to know if this assumption is safe. But it doesn't seem like a reasonable assumption for a few reasons.

1.If ballots are tallied as the votes come in, here is one possible scenario that could lead to those charts without fraud:
* Paul supporters tend to show up early and Romney supporters show up late. Romney's counts rise as you approach 100% tallied.

2.If you can assume that votes are cast randomly by GOP members, then there is another scenario that could lead to these result without inducing fraud. * The ballots are not counted in random order or the order they came in. Or the counts are not reported real time. Maybe some counter was sorting before counting and then reported counts for each canidate. So maybe a huge batch of Romney votes all come in at the end.

I2obiN · 1 year

How is this evidence of fraud in anyway? I see an opinion based on numbers and statistics.. small numbers of people too.

It's not like 500,000 people in various districts all of a sudden started voting for Romney at the exact same time.

Sorry but proof would be false vote cards, otherwise you have nothing.

lucasj · 1 year

IANAS but the biggest flaw I see is that you are using ascending size of precinct as a measure of how votes should oscillate over time, even though the two things are clearly different. In order for this analysis to stick, you would have to check the oscillation as votes are counted, not the oscillation as precincts report their tallies. All you're proving is that Romney did better in larger precincts, which isn't really that surprising. He probably just campaigned more in larger precincts. He may have even set an arbitrary cutoff where he decided not to campaign at all in precincts below the 10th percentile, which would go a long way towards explaining your first chart.

Let's change your marble example to M&Ms. Sally fucking loves green M&Ms. Bobby prefers red. They split a bag. You watch them eat and mark their preferences. At the end, you look at your data, Sally first. Sally only ate green M&Ms. You conclude that all the M&Ms were green. Does that makes sense?

TL;DR You're looking at chunks of the end result in percentiles, but talking about random oscillations as votes are counted. The two things are not the same.

grr34 · 1 year

His score starts by oscillating and flattening but then shoots up in a straight line in dozens of counties. That is mathematically impossible.

Unless like, demographics are seperated by region and he's more likely to get voted for by rich people, you know like in real life.

JoshSN · 1 year

Are demographics of 50-vote precincts different from 70-vote precincts? No way.

Incorrect assumption. In fact, the main dividing line between the parties now is urban versus rural, so it is only common sense to say that the gradations within the rural communities make a difference, too.

Further, we can posit the existence of two types of low-population-density communities. 1) Rural farms, and 2) great estates. While having similar population densities, they will have very different voting patterns, especially re: Romney.

Wilawah · 1 year

I have a fair amount of statistics experience, and this "evidence" looks like crap. No raw data, just mumbo jumbo from 2008. Yeah, 2008!

For example, The actual number of voters in Iowa is extremely small as a percentage of the population.

Therefore the vote is not so random, but can be largely influenced by a campaign's effectiveness in getting their supporters to show up to the caucus.

If I were spending Romney's millions, I would focus my get out the vote efforts on the larger precincts. Send buses to senior centers, free food, etc.

I am NOT a Romney supporter, but am not so impressed by the data

Flytape · 1 year

Wow, I won't hide the fact I'm a paul supporter. I never bought into the whole vote rigging thing personally. I always just figured Pauls support was burried by all those mindless republicans who watch fox news and do as fox news tells them to.

I must admit the graphs for the larger counties really does make it look suspect. I hope you can find some statistics people here to help.

shit_pouch · 1 year

have you tried comparing the caucus states to the ballot states? I would think that the caucus states would be more immune to vote flipping and therefor a good control to compare with the flipping states.

astrozombie222 · 1 year

I love that we get to play this game every 4 years.

So nostalgic.

ruizscar · 1 year

What I don't get is why the same people who flip votes don't also rearrange the stats to not give themselves away.

OmegaKnot · 1 year

Are the later votes going to Romney because they are cast later in the day? I would expect late votes to go to Romney because his support might be correlated with the types of people that work all day and vote late in the day.

For example, my parents are the type of people that would vote for Romney and they usually vote as the polls are closing after work. Retired people like my grandparents may be more likely to vote for Gingrich or Paul and they vote early in the day.

cowmandude · 1 year

The issue is that the distrobution is not hyper geometric because the order the votes are counted is not random. Your drawing marbles from 1 urn(which most likely contains most of the non-romney marbles) and then when that one is empty drawing from another urn. In order to show a statistical problem of the type you described you would have to show that opinion is distributed "fairly"(probably within 10% of each other) evenly over all precincts. You could perh aps do this with exit polls, but exit polls match up with election results in this case.

bigheadfred · 1 year

Submit this to Nate Silver. He's the only statistician who matters, as he has a lot of clout and credibility in the national discussion.

xoxo_icandy · 1 year

Everyone with a stats background (such as myself) knows that you can use stats to "prove" anything. They can probably take that same set of data to show that there isn't election fraud. There are so many tests you can run on a set of data. I would be interested in seeing a) WHO collected it b) HOW it was collected c) WHERE it was collected and d) over what period of time it was collected. Also, where there any post hoc studies done? What program was used for this? SPSS? There is just too many unknowns it seems like which is why I would take this "data" with a grain of salt....unless it is peer-reviewed and published, it doesn't mean shit

Also, what was the P value threshold used? It should have been .05 for a study like this but my guess is a smaller value was used to calculate any margin of error

swi55mike · 1 year

These sample sizes are extremely small. They are good starting point for a look into this but making an accusation of election fraud is a little far fetched right now. Probability laws look great in a general election where millions of people vote. You are going to get statistical irregularities when you look at precincts of a couple thousand or even only a couple hundred voters. Flipping a coin and getting heads 17 times in a row is nearly the same odds as 1 out of 267,385,153. Not exactly statistically impossible.

dekuscrub · 1 year

Are demographics of 50-vote precincts different from 70-vote precincts? No way.

By assumption?

The mathematical law describing this process is call hypergeometric. It describes in particular the statistics of partial ballot counting!

I skipped down to the bottom after seeing this, because I know where you're headed.

How do I know? Notice a difference with the previous charts? I guessed so. What are the odds when Romney is at 27% with 23% of the votes counted to end up where he did, at 32%? Hypergeometry, a law of the universe, says: 1 out of 267,385,153.

Not really. The hypergeometric distribution assumes that, at any given "draw", all "choices" are equally likely. Meaning what? That, at any given time, you're probability of getting a Romney vote is exactly equal to the true proportion of Romney votes remaining divided by the true number of votes still to be cast- but in reality, this is not necessarily case. Who's to say Ron Paul fans don't vote earlier? That all poling stations in a precinct send in their reports at exactly the same time and that the vote totals from said polling stations are independent and identically distributed?

Geminii27 · 1 year

I'd be more surprised if there was absolutely no fraudulent activity going on in an election.

ThanatopsisJSH · 1 year

As someone with a somewhat knowledgeable background in statistics (my uni courses in statistics are a few years back) I see a lot of flaws in this post.

Practically all of the conclusions drawn in this work are unsupported by the statistics and some do show a pretty flawed understanding of statistics itself which make me very doubtful of the veracity of the whole article even without being able to look into it more carefully (based on time constraints and the totally unreadable presentation in the original thread).

A few of the points that trouble me:

There is no "UNDENIABLE" statistical evidence. There are strong hints here but no single statistical test is ever so sure as to be UNDENIABLE. Very improbable... Sure, but never impossible.
The following conclusion is simply wrong:

"A candidate's cumulative score should gradually converge with reducing volatility towards his final result. This is an absolute mathematical law. Romney's score goes there in straight slanted line with no volatility. This is simply entirely impossible in an un-rigged election."

It is entirely possible for this not to happen in an unrigged election. Again, possibly improbable but nowhere near impossible.

The sample size of so very few districts simply does not allow to draw any statistically sound conclusions. Additionally many of the counties are very small further reducing the statistical certainty of conclusions drawn based on them. if you look at statistical work on election fraud (of which there is a lot out there) the papers usually look at results for whole countries and still have problems getting adequate statistical certainties from their data.

TL,DR: To conclude I would say that whoever wrote this has produced some nice charts but is nowhere near a statistically valid analysis of this data. Any conclusions made from this analysis are highly suspect and not statistically sound. This work has nothing to do with a good scientific statistical analysis except using some of the tools from a statistics textbook.

edit: I have no idea why the numeration starts anew after point 2 and I have no idea how to correct that

Dlucks83 · 1 year

Repeat after me, ELECTION FRAUD is back end cheating. IE, votes being flipped, not counted, discrimination used to suppress voting. ELECTION FRAUD!

VOTER FRAUD is when someone votes that legally shouldn't be able to or votes more then the allotted time.

You want to get into statistical arguments when you can't even get a basic classification correct? Sorry if I take anything reported with a salt shaker's worth of salt. It's not being a stickler either. It is about having your shit straight when having a discussion on a serious issue like this.

pwndnoob · 1 year

Are passionate Paul voters just getting to the polls first, thereby getting counted first, while Romney voters are noticeably later or lower in the stack? I suspect the process isn't random, which would be a basic assumption of your statistical model.

stumpy357 · 1 year

This is also not true because of how the votes are reported: BY PRECINCT. Votes are reported in large chunks from different precincts at different times depending on when each precinct has finished counting their votes. Moving from precinct to precinct you will see great changes in socioeconimic status and political ideology of the voters, so you can expect to see large gains and losses as the counting proceeds. On top of this we have mail-in voters, who are typically counted last and often have their own voting tendencies that can influence who wins and loses.

TL;DR My point basically elaborates on what others point out - the counting and voting process is not random AT ALL, so we can't use the methods described by hypergeometric.

ObviousAnswerGuy · 1 year

I'll just say what everyone else is thinking....."Huh?"

username_unavailable · 1 year

You're making a huge assumption regarding how the ballots are counted. For your analysis to hold true ballots would have to be counted and registered one-by-one. Any batching of ballots during the counting process would necessarily create peaky data.

[deleted] · 1 year

Easily debunked --

Go back to the marble example.

The confusion lies with his comparison of drawing marbles out of a jar one by one and how vote counting works.

All of the votes are not sent in to some special unified room where each vote is randomly drawn one by one and then counted.

Instead each precinct counts their votes and sends in a tally so large groups of votes are sent in at once.

So the number of marble-draws is significantly reduced. Sure you might have 10,000 marbles, but you are drawing 1,000 at a time so you only really have 10 data points.

Finally, unlike marbles, each precinct is not equal.

Suppose the following - 49% of a states voters live in a rural area split into 10 areas with about 5% of the voting population each. They all vote for Santorum.

The other 51% live in the city which is one big precinct. They all vote for Romney.

Because the city is a single big precinct it takes a while longer to count all the votes. So as the vote count comes in from the rural areas it looks like Santorum is running away with it.

After 9 returns, 45 percent of the vote is counted and Santorum has 100% of the vote. Hypergeometry says the chances of Romney coming back from this are near impossible.

But when the City vote is counted, wow, Romney pulls it off! Mathematically impossible? No, just using a very bad mathematical model that works well on random samples of perfectly identical objects but does not accurately model political geography.

themanofum · 1 year

Of course this post is politically motivated. Just like every article in the news that pumps up the slightest blip of success in Santorum's campaign, or snows over Romney's big wins.

dubman42 · 1 year

Statistical Proof sound like an oxymoron to me. But I'm no statistician.

rsnyds519 · 1 year

I don't know if i'm misinterpreting the data here but I think absentee ballots may be playing a very big role. In general Romney has played exceptionally well on absentee ballots because in the long run he has been the most consistent candidate. These ballots are generally counted in a huge cluster and generally are the last votes to be counted as they are sent in via mail and don't arrive until the last minute. I'm sure this post will just get buried but I'd like to know if you considered this in your data.

Limiate · 1 year

Voter Fraud? Tell me more.

Math??? Nope.

[deleted] · 1 year

Oh god. Not a Reddit "debunk."

fasmaun · 1 year

Relevant

skyclown · 1 year

147% of Russians agree

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