The US election: some misleading claims.
In this series of Medium posts, I will address some of the misleading claims about the US election.
Despite the grim prognoses of my previous post, the populist right’s advance was halted with a shudder by Joe Biden’s victory last month.
A big reason for this reversal was the COVID-19 pandemic. President Trump’s inability to manage the crisis or provide leadership, his focus on campaigning and holding rallies as the virus spread, his wild and erratic claims all took their toll and allowed his challenger to build a narrative around ‘not being Trump’, around unity, decency and trust in science. Faced with mounting infections and deaths, the populists found it harder to promote alternative narratives. They tried their very best, however there are few post-truth moments when dealing the realities of a pandemic. Joe Biden did not need to be liked, he merely needed to persuade Americans of being safe, reasonable and boring, to be a calming influence on politics. That way, he was able to attract people of very different political outlooks to vote for him.
Facing impending defeat, the populists switched to attacking the election process itself — both before and after Election day. By creating a multitude of different theories, claims and narratives about the election, Trump and his cheerleaders hope to create uncertainty and doubt about its outcome. And yet, despite the fighting rhetoric, Trump will not attempt anything drastic to stay in power. The aim is to create a grievance narrative for future elections, for 2022 and 2024, to keep up the pretence of ‘the wicked elites’ opposing ‘the people’ by removing ‘the people’s president’ from power.
This grievance narrative is built along familiar lines. A massive bouquet of conspiracy theories, claims, assertions, half-truths and allegations is put forward haphazardly. Even though each individual element has a debunking, the sheer number of them is calculated to overwhelm and disorient, to create an impression that whilst each individual claim might be tenuous, together they mean something.
Below, I will discuss some of those claims. They can be broadly divided into three categories.
- Claims of statistical anomaly and patterns in data supposedly pointing to fraud.
- Eyewitness/whistleblower testimonies of individuals detailing what they observed.
- Criticisms of the election procedures, in particular the emergency procedures for mail-in voting implemented in the wake of COVID-19 in order to not disenfranchise voters.
The last of those is genuinely contentious and should start a debate about lessons leant for future elections, but is not valid grounds for changing the result of this one. With the individual testimonies, none of the witnesses (it is probably safe to describe most of them as ‘Trump activists’) have been cross-examined to check the veracity of their affidavits. It is illustrative here to consider the hypothetical scenario in which Trump supporters are asked to evaluate a similar body of evidence from the other side — it is likely that they would dismiss it wholesale as the work of ‘activists’, would seek to discredit every individual involved and accuse them of lying.
It is however the first category that is both the easiest to address and of the greatest interest to me. In the following posts, I will discuss the various allegations of fraud via the claiming of statistical anomalies in the data — statistical patterns that cannot be explained in a reasonable way except through either an extremely unlikely event or through fraud. I will explain why (most of) these anomalies are in fact not anomalies and in some instances compare them to genuine evidence of fraud in elections elsewhere in the world.
These data-related claims themselves subdivide into three sub-claims, in each case looking for ‘suspicious’ patterns in the data to justify their claim.
Sub-claim 1. The voting machines were fixed/hacked to transfer votes from Trump to Biden. This claim typically is made about the Dominion voting machines, leading the company to launch a lawsuit. However, other voting machine manufacturers were also suspected.
Sub-claim 2. In the pro-Democrat metropolitan areas, Democrats in the vote count were guilty of ballot-stuffing, for instance ‘using ballots of dead people, harvested ballots or ballots of people who moved out of the area’. Various methods are employed to present vote totals from the counties in which Biden won as abnormal.
Sub-claim 3. In the pro-Democrat metropolitan areas, Democrats in the vote count allowed mail-in ballots that would normally be rejected to stand, knowing that mail-ins heavily favoured Biden. For instance, signature verification was performed very liberally.
Let us now see some examples:
The 18 out of 19 bellwether counties won by Trump are not evidence of election fraud.
The ‘abnormal updates’ during the live count: how not to apply a Gaussian fit to election results.
Misinformation related to the mail-in ballot rejection rate.
The claims of Dr Sheva Ayyudurai: the fallacy of assuming a particular split ticket voter behaviour.
The case of Dr Lott: a few problems with his cross-border precinct analyses in Fulton.
How you can go wrong with assumptions of statistical independence.
Some odds and ends: a few links to articles/fact-checking sites with more debunkings.
Finally, this excerpt from a Democrat motion to dismiss whose description of Trump’s ‘expert’ claims I agree with entirely:
