November 23, 2016

"Demographics, Not Hacking, Explain The Election Results."

Write Carl Bialik and Rob Arthur at FiveThirtyEight.
We’ve looked into the claim... and statistically, it doesn’t check out....
I'm skipping a lot and jumping to the last paragraph, which is funny and fascinating:
It’s possible nonetheless that the election was hacked, in the sense that anything is possible. (And the best hackers are experts in erasing their tracks.) Maybe hackers knew which control variables we’d look at and manipulated the vote in a way that it would look like it was caused by race, education and population driving different voting preferences....
Yeah, in the future, we need to expect some really sophisticated hacking. I'm glad they brought that up.

75 comments:

rhhardin said...

Low turnout amoung dead people.

Greg Hlatky said...

Say this every day: Hillary Clinton will never be president.

Audit the results? Don't ask questions you don't know the answer to.

Faithless electors? They aren't going to flip from Trump to Clinton, they'd flip from Trump to someone else.

So the election ends up in the House? Each state gets one vote. Republicans hold a 32-16 edge in state majorities. Do you think they're going to vote for Clinton?

There's an infinitesimal chance Trump won't be president but there's no way Hillary! will ever be elected or selected.

mccullough said...

Apparently the SVR didn't do a good enough job in hacking machines in Minnesota while providing Trump close to a landslide in Iowa and Ohio.

This whole conspiracy only works in hindsight. The states Trump had to win going into the election were Florida, North Carolina and Ohio to get to 253 electoral votes. Polling made Iowa look very good for Trump so
that would get him to 259.

Give him Maine's second congressional district and he's at 260. So he needed 10 more votes. Wisconsin or Minnesota would give him that. Or Pennsylvania would put him up comfortably.

Given the thousands of machines needed to hack to win Trump all of these states, the SVR would have been overwhelmed with just Florida, NC and Ohio. Perhaps the SVR commissioned its own polls in the swing states, including micro polls needed in counties and precincts in order to figure out which polling places machines needed to be hacked because they would have to actually hack the machines themselves since they aren't connected to a network.

So the SVR needs to figure out plausible polling places to tip the vote, identify the machines, break into the facilities where they are stored, and then upload the software to alter the votes.

This is fucking preposterous

Forbes said...

The Russians "rigged" the election by making sure Trump didn't win a plurality of the popular vote. Boy, those Russians are good! How did they ever lose the Cold War...

Big Mike said...

Yeah, in the future, we need to expect some really sophisticated hacking. I'm glad they brought that up.

You can't begin to imagine. I'm not knocking your intelligence, but what's going on right now is scary as hell and that's only what we've discovered post hoc.

Big Mike said...

How did they ever lose the Cold War...

He was named Reagan. Ronald Wilson Reagan. Democrats hate him.

But, as an aside, yeah. They really are good. When the Obama administration floated the idea of initiating a cyber war against the Russians I figured we'd lose in a matter of days. And we've got some pretty good folks ourselves.

Mary Beth said...

I want to know how they hacked Michigan's paper ballots.

mccullough said...

Paper ballots are counted by machine so they would have to hack the machine that counted them. Of course, you could hand count the paper ballots and then compare it to the machine count to find any discrepancy. This would get very expensive. George Soros should pay for it since it's a waste of taxpayer dollars

Clyde said...

As bright people have noted, it sure would be odd if the election was hacked and the hackers didn't bother to change enough votes to give Trump the popular vote as well as the electoral college.

Guildofcannonballs said...

Vast rape incidents preceded this article.


PHOW MANY

How you personally gonna make it and us and God and also lastly "Frankly" okay after you pulled so stupidly fastley first?

HOW HOW HOW TELL ME PLEASE (beside God) HOW WHY TELL ME NOW PLEASE

StephenFearby said...

Halderman needs the benefit of at least some traffic on his Medium blog to justify his lonely existence. To help him out I posted the following:

“…The candidate needs to pay the cost, which can run into millions of dollars. The deadlines for filing recount petitions are soon — for example, this Friday in Wisconsin (margin 0.7%), Monday in Pennsylvania (margin 1.2%), and the following Wednesday in Michigan (margin 0.3%).”

Your analysis blithely ignores even ballpark estimates of how many millions of dollars these recounts would cost or how long they might be expected to take.

But an intelligent person would hardly go to the bother, since you’ve also opined:

“…the most likely explanation [for the election result] is that the polls were systematically wrong.”


tcrosse said...

It was Hillary's turn to be President.
Yet she was denied the presidency to which she was entitled.
Ergo, somebody must have cheated.
QED

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

Hillary is now up by 2 million votes. Two million is a big number, at least when it comes to counting voters.

tcrosse said...

Hillary is now up by 2 million votes. Two million is a big number, at least when it comes to counting voters.
But those votes are too poorly distributed to effect the outcome.

M Jordan said...

Minnesota went Hillary by +1.5 Minnesota is +4 Dem vs. Wisconsin. There was no hacking, no miscount unless it went Hillary's way.

She won big on the coasts and lost in between. It's over, libs, and not just the election.

Mark said...

Hillary is now up by 2 million votes. Two million is a big number, at least when it comes to counting voters.
But those votes are too poorly distributed to effect the outcome

Those votes are not too poorly distributed. Those votes are all concentrated in one state -- California. Set aside California and Trump wins the popular vote by two million in the other 49 states of the Union.

Greg Hlatky said...

Hillary is now up by 2 million votes. Two million is a big number, at least when it comes to counting voters.

Not relevant. We don't have a national election, we have 50 elections for President held on the same day.

Everyone knew the rules going into this. Clinton lost. Get over it.

Michael K said...

"Two million is a big number, at least when it comes to counting voters."

Yes, and counting illegal aliens in California gets you an even bigger number. Hell, Los Angles can turn out more than 2 million.

A lot of them probably couldn't get their cars started on November 8.

rcocean said...

Hillary is up by 2 million because Trump lost California by 4 million votes. Trump won the other 49 states by 2 million votes. In fact, if you toss out NYC, he won the rest of the country by 3.5 million votes. It should be noted that:

1) Trump wrote off California and NY and did minimal campaigning there.
2) The Republican national party has written off California
3) Voter fraud in California is massive. No one knows how much, because the Democrats have zero interest in reducing fraudulent Democrat votes. And the Republicans don't really care (see 1 and 2).

Conclusion: Who knows who would have won the popular vote if that was the way we picked POTUS because Trump would've done everything differently including choosing a different VP.

StephenFearby said...

Never let even a manufactured crisis go to waste, either to get money or donors' contact information, even though you probably have no standing in this matter:


"WASHINGTON, Nov. 23 (UPI) — Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein on Wednesday made a major push to raise $2 million to pay for recount efforts in three critical battleground states that cost Hillary Clinton the election.

Stein launched an online funding page Wednesday, hoping to raise the money by next week so recount efforts can begin immediately in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — three states that provide enough electoral votes (46) to give Clinton the victory."

'...“We are raising money to demand recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania — three states where the data suggests a significant need to verify machine-counted vote totals,” Stein’s fundraising page tells supporters. “In true grassroots fashion, we’re turning to you, the people, and not big-money corporate donors to make this happen.”

As of late Wednesday afternoon, nearly $600,000 of the $2 million target had been raised....'

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2016/11/23/Jill-Stein-raising-2M-for-recount-in-3-battleground-states-that-would-elect-Clinton/6251479943186/

harrogate said...

As one of the sometime resident liberals who posts on this site, and who may not have access to blog comments tomorrow, I want to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving.

Especially Ann Althouse whose blog I've read and disagreed with often but whose writing is about as excellent as any blogger I know.

I hope everyone reading this has loved ones to be with tomorrow. And we will all have plenty of time to argue about politics afterwards.

Sorry for off topic. Maybe been drinking.

Fabi said...

Anything to delegitimize Trump's election. Get over it, lefties -- move on!

StephenFearby said...



Closing fast on the first million!

Jill2016

$955,854.87 RAISED
GOAL: $2,500,000.00
Election Integrity depends on YOU! - Recounts in MI, PA, & WI

"...We hope to do recounts in all three states. If we only raise sufficient money for two, we will demand recounts in two states. If we only raise enough money for one, we will demand a recount in one state. ***If we do not raise enough for any recount (which is highly unlikely) we pledge to use the money for election integrity efforts and to promote systemic voting system reform.***"

https://jillstein.nationbuilder.com/recount

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

harrogate said...
Maybe been drinking.


Almost certainly if you are not sure.

mccullough said...

Why would Jill Stein have any standing to demand a recount and audit. She got 1% of the vote. What state and local governments want to waste their time ensuring that yes indeed she did get 1% of the vote. I wrote my own name in. Do
I get to demand a recount and audit?

tcrosse said...

Point of information: Did Hillary personally campaign in WI ? Did Trump ?
Just asking. I was elsewhere.

tim in vermont said...

It would be cool, just once, to hear one of these people harping on the popular vote address the fact that California allows illegals to vote.

The House has the right to set the manner of their own election. They should require proof of citizenship and proper ID to vote for Congress.

tim in vermont said...

Hillary never went to Wisconsin. That probably helped her there.

Big Mike said...

It seems to me that the only way one can confidently assert that Hillary won the popular vote is to prove that fewer than two million votes were cast by ineligible voters. And California, in particular, has made that difficult to do.

My comment illustrates one of the main reasons why going to the popular vote is unworkable. Every voter would have to be absolutely, positively identified and verified. Verified that the voter is who he claimed to be (no young dude presenting himself as a 70 year old woman) and cross-tabulated to confirm that each eligible voter voted at most once. That is going to be intrusive and extremely costly and still not immune to hacking.

The other reason is that the Electoral College weights small rural states more heavily than highly populated irban states. This is good because all interests need to weigh in on the selection of a Chief Executive -- the coal miner, the farmer, the roughneck in the oil fields -- and not merely the urban dwellers.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

It turns out the national polls were fairly accurate, they predicted a 3% Clinton lead versus the actual 1.5% lead. The polls were more inaccurate in the 2012 election, when the RCP average was only 0.7% in Obama's favor and he actually won by nearly 4%.

Skipper said...

Are there no end to excuses for not getting what they want?

Michael K said...

I hope everyone reading this has loved ones to be with tomorrow. And we will all have plenty of time to argue about politics afterwards.


Agree completely and thanks for saying so.

Trump appeared in Orange County but I think it was in the primary period and the predictable riots occurred.

I was very disappointed to see Orange County went for Hillary but there are a lot of illegals in Santa Ana and there are lots of crony capitalist types in Newport Beach. Maybe that was enough.

Anyway, I'm moving to Arizona in January. We will have a quiet day tomorrow as the kids are all over the place.

Quaestor said...

If we do not raise enough for any recount (which is highly unlikely) we pledge to use the money for election integrity efforts and to promote systemic voting system reform...

The Green Party, a useful siphon for a small fraction of the brainless left vote, but otherwise a waste of valuable oxygen. Just what Jill Stein intends by her recount efforts is beyond rational analysis. A million dollars directed at "systemic voting system reform" (how voting system reform can be other than systemic is also beyond rational analysis) is a laudable effort, however.

Quaestor said...

Trump appeared in Orange County but I think it was in the primary period and the predictable riots occurred.

Predictable and well-funded.

tcrosse said...

Hillary never went to Wisconsin. That probably helped her there.
Excellent point.

sane_voter said...

Every liberal needs to pony up the dollars and donate to Ms Stein's cause. I think a minimum of $50 million is needed as 13 million votes need to be re-counted and likely recounted again. Every ballot held up to the light to look for stray marks, fingerprints taken from each one and all of the voting machines, DNA tests for Russian genomic markers. I mean we cant do a Gore 2000 and just cherry pick the votes from certain areas within the state that you want to filter, peruse or otherwise molest.

Big Mike said...

Michigan just completed its tabulation. Trump by 10,704.

Two million popular votes is impressive. But 306 electoral votes is what sends your wife to the family quarters of the White House to measure for new drapes.

mccullough said...

Looks like Hillary should run for governor of California. They love her there.

Lewis Wetzel said...

So, if the Dems pick a hard core lefty and racial/religious minority like Ellison to chair the DNC, They'll get even more votes where they don't need them and even fewer votes where they do need them.

Jake said...

If Clinton did better in counties with paper ballots isn't it equally likely nefarious poll workers stuffed the ballot boxes?

MikeD said...

Voting with paper ballots over the first weekend in November! No early voting of any sort! No provisional ballots, you either cared enough to ensure you're properly registered or you didn't! If you believe election voting lines were too long last Presidential election, make sure your local government increases the voting locations!
When I first voted (1964) the polling places were, in many instances, neighborhood garages & there were a lot of them, usually manned by the retired property owners & like neighbors of same. Voting is a right but, it's also a privilege.
In closing, I find it somewhat ironic that Tricky Dick Nixon showed more class in 1960 that his haters & detractors are showing today. There was an excellent case to be made the Chicago vote manipulation led to his defeat, yet he didn't contest it.

damikesc said...

I'm betting Trump can always change his mind on investigating her.

Hillary is now up by 2 million votes. Two million is a big number, at least when it comes to counting voters.

So, the theory is that hackers gave him the electoral vote and her the popular?

Can you explain the logic?

khesanh0802 said...

The Founders spent a great deal of time trying to determine how best to balance the interests of large vs. small states. At the time I think VA and RI were at the opposite ends of the scale. They did an incredible job creating the electoral college that has done that job since the founding. These were very smart guys. we ignore their advice at our peril.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Henry said...

Given the leftwing consensus that Trump voters are uneducated, it will not surprise me when they argue for literacy tests.

The left is busily becoming the thing they pretend to hate.

exiledonmainstreet, green-eyed devil said...

harrogate, drinking or not, that was decent of you.

A happy Thanksgiving to you and yours as well.

exiledonmainstreet, green-eyed devil said...

"Given the leftwing consensus that Trump voters are uneducated, it will not surprise me when they argue for literacy tests."

The problem is that will disqualify many of their own voters as well.

Henry said...

Nate Silver's original tweet was better than this article. "This is disproved by a simple regression test" he wrote and posted the numbers.

In other words, "your math sucks."

* * *

That said, scanned paper ballots are an obvious win.

Henry said...

exiledonmainstr wrote, "The problem is that will disqualify many of their own voters as well."

Not if you target the right states. That's the whole point. Principle means nothing.

sunsong said...

Apparently Jill Stein is calling for a recount - which she has the right to do!

Birkel said...

sunsong is having a sad

Quaestor said...

Apparently Jill Stein is calling for a recount - which she has the right to do!

She has the right to say anything or call for anything, something people Sunsong tends to agree with often disregard. She has no right to an actual recount unless the de jure conditions set by the state in question are met.

Quaestor said...

The money Stein is raising is primarily for lawyers who will waste it bringing frivolous lawsuits to court.

Quaestor said...

That said, scanned paper ballots are an obvious win.

Absolutely the best balloting technology available. The optical scanning tabulators are hardwired and are virtually unhackable, There are no switches which can be cross-wired, software-controlled tabulation to be hacked, nor chads to be dimpled or hung. Analog voting machines are good, but there is no re-countable permanent record of the vote as such.

The Cracker Emcee Refulgent said...

The money Stein is raising is primarily for some kind of political scam that she rakes a fat salary off of.

The Cracker Emcee Refulgent said...

"Given the leftwing consensus that Trump voters are uneducated, it will not surprise me when they argue for literacy tests."

In English, Si? One Republican landslide after another.

David said...

Paper ballots.

Or the old voting machines, basically mechanical tabulators, with no software and no online connections.

And voter ids.

Darrell said...

Jill Stein has to get her Leftie cred back after dissing Hillary on the campaign trail. This is one of her required acts of penance.

Darrell said...

Academics wonder why voters requested paper ballots instead of using George Soros' electronic voting machines. That's a permanent self-beclowning.

Achilles said...

This will be the last election for a long time where democrats are nationally competitive. Illegal immigration/voting is going to be a very big target for the Sessions led DOJ.

I can't wait for the imminent and inevitable day when the sanctuary cities surrender to the rule of law.

StephenFearby said...


The disclosure / caveats on the Jill2016 recount fundraising site has now been significantly expanded since the early stages of the solicitation. Here's what it says now:


"We cannot guarantee a recount will happen in any of these states we are targeting. We can only pledge we will demand recounts in those states."

"If we do not raise enough for any recount (which is highly unlikely) we pledge to use the money for election integrity efforts and to promote systemic voting system reform. If we raise more than what's needed, the surplus will also go toward election integrity efforts."

[This paragraph was there before. What follows is new.]

"Here are the filing fees and deadlines for each state:

Wisconsin: $1.1 million by Nov 25
Pennsylvania: $0.5 million by Nov 28
Michigan: $0.6 million by Nov 30

Those are filing fees alone. The costs associated with recounts are a function of state law. Attorney's fees are likely to be another $2-3 million [the lawyers will enjoy the feast], then there are the costs of the statewide recount observers in all three states. The total cost is likely to be $6-7 million."

"Paid for by Jill Stein for President PO Box 260197, Madison, WI 53726"

["If everybody in who voted for me had voted for Hilary, we wouldn't have had to do this, at least in Michigan & Wisconsin."]

https://jillstein.nationbuilder.com/recount

The original goal was $2 million, then raised to $2.5 million, which is now in the bag.

But since fools and their money are soon parted, the Jill Stein for President operation will probably rake in a lot more from the legion of precious snowflake donors.

tim maguire said...

The problem becomes, if the hackers have to stay within all the demographic norms (no group statistically signficantly outside its average), then they have a severe limit on their ability to change the outcome--maybe a point or two total. Maybe less. The old rule for Republicans still applies--they can't steal it if it's not close.

tim maguire said...

The joke about Russian hackers changing the outcome without changing the popular vote is dumb for the same reason Hillary supporters crowing about winning the popular vote is dumb.

They're not going to pointlessly erase millions of Californian votes, they're going to change a handful of votes in a handful of states.

Rusty said...

Blogger harrogate said...
"As one of the sometime resident liberals who posts on this site, and who may not have access to blog comments tomorrow, I want to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving.

Especially Ann Althouse whose blog I've read and disagreed with often but whose writing is about as excellent as any blogger I know.

I hope everyone reading this has loved ones to be with tomorrow. And we will all have plenty of time to argue about politics afterwards.

Sorry for off topic. Maybe been drinking."

Thanks.
You too.
Cheers.

tim in vermont said...

When the British broke the German codes, they had to be very circumspect in their use of the info, for that reason, allowing ships to be sunk they could have saved to avoid tipping their hand.

tim in vermont said...

When the British broke the German codes, they had to be very circumspect in their use of the info, for that reason, allowing ships to be sunk they could have saved to avoid tipping their hand.

MayBee said...

If they are saying the machines could be hacked with untraceable code, why would we trust a recount?

Couldn't the recount be hacked, too?

Steve said...

When in court over whether requiring photo IDs for voting is constitutional, many judges accepted the argument that there's no proof of routine or common vote fraud, so no real need for photo ID (that is, compared to the potentially discriminatory impact on minorities). How will that argument work in the future, if all Democrats now claim there was rampant vote fraud? All those millions donated to fight vote fraud in this election just help support the argument for picture ID and other methods that will significantly cut the Democrat vote totals in the next election.

MayBee said...

ISTM the problem with the hacking idea is the program would have to somehow know how many votes to add to beat another jurisdiction.

They aren't all tallied together- the outstate vote isn't computed against the Madison vote. The Dane county number isn't known in advance. You could add votes to the county you hacked, but you'd have to guess how many votes Clinton is going to get when you are programing the hacking software. These computers aren't talking to each other during the day or even during the vote count.

Right?

cornroaster said...

Henry said...
Given the leftwing consensus that Trump voters are uneducated, it will not surprise me when they argue for literacy tests.

The left would probably be happy to only have the literacy tests available in languages other than English.

MacMacConnell said...

Hillary didn't win the popular vote after we subtract the 3 to 6 million estimated illegal alien votes cast.

What we are witnessing is the media human centipede flailing to find a find a progressive politician's anal pore to attach to. Their present host is soon to be spent and their prospective host went down in flames along with her party.

Fen said...

Hillary didn't win the popular vote. Period.

No one did.

Because the popular vote was never in play. It could not be won.

If the popular vote determined the winner, both campaigns would have had entirely different strategies over the last 18 months and the popular vote totals would not be what they are today.

Fen said...

You can't begin to imagine. I'm not knocking your intelligence, but what's going on right now is scary as hell and that's only what we've discovered post hoc.

You could bring every American city to its knees simply by taking the EBT system offline. Imagine the LA riots going national. America would be in flames.

Zach said...

There's a long quote from Douglas Adams that I often think of:

"I know that astrology isn't a science," said Gail. "Of course it isn't. It's just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis or -- what's that strange thing you British play?"

"Er, cricket? Self loathing?"

"Parliamentary democracy. The rules just sort of got there. They don't make any sense except in terms of themselves. But when you start to exercise those rules, all sorts of processes start to happen and you start to find out all sorts of stuff about people. In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It's just a way of thinking about the problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It's like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust onto a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that's now been taken away and hidden. It's just the means of revealing their indentations. So you see, astrology's got nothing to do with astronomy. It's just to do with people thinking about people."


Here you have an incident of a few computer security experts talking about ways of auditing that electronic voting machines give the results they say they do. It's a technical issue, and I'm sure they have a point. But their audience has jumped from "theoretical methods to insure software integrity without a trusted chain of custody" to "Russians hacked the election!"

It's not about computer security. It's not about demographics. It's not even really about elections. It's about people who can't emotionally process being contradicted reading things into random stimuli that aren't really there. Like astrology, it's not about the random stimuli, it's really about people's reactions to them revealing tendencies that were already there.

hstad said...

".....Hillary is now up by 2 million votes. Two million is a big number, at least when it comes to counting voters.....?" . Democrats are throwing this tantrum not because they believe that reason backs their argument. They’re throwing this tantrum because the recent actions of the Democratic Party have resulted in its absolute repudiation by the people of the United States, and they’re in denial as to how or why it’s happened. To say that the last eight years have culminated in the neutering of Democrats in terms of federal power is an obvious statement, given the loss of both chambers of Congress and the presidency. By the midterm elections of 2014, Democrats had already lost 70 seats in Congress, the largest Party sweep in over 60 years. But going far less noticed is the fact that by that time, Democrats had also lost over 910 seats in state legislatures nationwide since 2009. The Republican Party has never in that time owned a majority among state legislatures to the extent that it does today. Sure, Democrats had continued dominance in their prized, highly-populated urban strongholds like D.C., New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. But even prior to the 2016 election, the vast majority of Democrats’ numerous political outposts in flyover country had already been razed, overtaken by a groundswell of popular dissent unlike anything seen in the last 38 years. The point is, it is only too obvious that the American people have turned on the Democratic Party, and that the actions of the Party for the last eight years are the reason for it.

hstad said...
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