Politics Official recount thread

Since it's going to happen, may as well have a thread to discuss it.

fivethirtyeight.com:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/demographics-not-hacking-explain-the-election-results/

According to a report Tuesday in New York Magazine, a group of computer scientists and election lawyers have approached the Hillary Clinton campaign with evidence they believe suggests the election might have been hacked to make it appear that Donald Trump won the Electoral College when Clinton really did. The hacking claim appears to be based on concerns about tampering with electronic voting machines. We’ve looked into the claim — or at least, our best guess of what’s being claimed based on what has been reported — and statistically, it doesn’t check out.

There’s no clear evidence that the voting method used in a county — by machine or by paper — had an effect on the vote. Anyone making allegations of a possible massive electoral hack should provide proof, and we can’t find any. But it’s not even clear the group of computer scientists and election lawyers are making these claims.

...

We found no apparent correlation5 between voting method and outcome in six of the eight states, and a thin possible link between voting method and results in Wisconsin and Texas. However, the two states showed opposite results: The use of any machine voting in a county was associated with a 5.6-percentage-point reduction in Democratic two-party vote share in Wisconsin but a 2.7-point increase in Texas, both of which were statistically significant.6 Even if we focus only on Wisconsin, the effect disappears when we weight our results by population. More than 75 percent of Wisconsin’s population lives in the 23 most populous counties, which don’t appear to show any evidence for an effect driven by voting systems.7 To have effectively manipulated the statewide vote total, hackers probably would have needed to target some of these larger counties. When we included all counties but weighted the regression by the number of people living in each county, the statistical significance of the opposite effects in Wisconsin and Texas both evaporated.8

Even if the borderline significant result for Wisconsin didn’t vanish when weighting by population, it would be doubtful, for a few reasons. You’re more likely to find a significant result when you make multiple tests, as we did by looking at eight states with and without weighting by population.9Also, different places in Wisconsin and Texas use different kinds of voting machines; presumably if someone really did figure out how to hack certain machines, we’d see different results depending on which type of machines were used in a county, but we don’t. And Nate Cohn of The New York Times found that when he added another control variable to race and education — density of the population — the effect of paper ballots vanished.

 

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/election-results-hacked-new-york-magazine-231796

Professor cited in report says election results 'probably not' hacked

A computer science professor at the University of Michigan confirmed on Wednesday that he has been spoken with the Clinton campaign about seeking a recount in several key states — but he clarified that he thinks the election results were “probably not” the result of a cyberattack.

 

http://www.vox.com/2016/11/22/13721426/election-hacked-stolen-trump-russia

Be very skeptical of stolen election claims

When one candidate loses a close election, it’s pretty common for his or her supporters to come up with some reason why the election was “stolen.” It happened for Democrats after John Kerry lost the 2004 presidential race, it happened for Republicans after Norm Coleman narrowly lost a 2008 Senate race in Minnesota, and it’s happening again for Republicans now that Pat McCrory appears to have lost this year’s North Carolina governor’s race. These claims are generally judged to be baseless.

So when you read Gabe Sherman’s New York magazine report that “a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers” is urging Hillary Clinton’s campaign to request recounts because they believe “they’ve found persuasive evidence that results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked” in Donald Trump’s favor … well, then you should take a deep breath and look at the evidence that’s actually presented.

And there’s not much. In fact, there’s a grand total of one specific claim from this analysis that’s reported in Sherman’s piece, sourced to an anonymous person briefed on a recent call in which this group made its case to Clinton campaign bigwigs:

• “The academics presented findings showing that in Wisconsin, Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting machines compared with counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots. Based on this statistical analysis, Clinton may have been denied as many as 30,000 votes; she lost Wisconsin by 27,000.”

But this alone proves nothing. For one, it’s quite possible that electronic-voting machines were more often used in counties that were already more likely to support Trump — for instance, counties with lots of low-education or rural white voters who strongly supported Trump across the whole country. Indeed, back-of-the-envelope insta-analyses by Nate Silver and Nate Cohn suggest this is the case, though it’s hard to rebut claims that haven’t been made publicly.


Further reasons for skepticism:

• The swing toward Trump in Wisconsin was part of a swing toward him across the whole Midwest — including Iowa and Minnesota, two states next to Wisconsin that are demographically similar to it, and which both use only paper ballots counted by machines that are not connected to the internet.
• Michigan also uses paper ballots, so there would have to be manipulation of a different sort going on there. The article doesn’t shed light on what evidence there might be regarding Michigan (and Pennsylvania — to change the Electoral College outcome, major fraud would’ve had to have happened in all three states).
• According to Sherman, Clinton campaign chair John Podesta and the campaign’s top lawyer Marc Elias were given all this data five days ago. They have apparently done nothing with it, even though the deadlines to request recounts in states are approaching quickly. That seems to suggest they did not view the analysis as credible.

So … be skeptical. Maybe this group of “prominent computer scientists and election lawyers” is sitting on more persuasive evidence than this. If so, they should post it publicly and let their claims be analyzed, rather than letting vague rumors swirl. But you definitely shouldn’t believe a vague, fantastic-sounding claim about a stolen election unless serious, solid evidence emerges to back it up, and independent experts validate how that evidence is being analyzed.

Update: One of the computer scientists mentioned, J. Alex Halderman, has now posted his views on Medium. They are much less dramatic than the secondhand account in New York magazine. “Were this year’s deviations from pre-election polls the results of a cyberattack? Probably not. I believe the most likely explanation is that the polls were systematically wrong,” he writes. But he argues that since hacking is possible, it’s simply prudent to conduct a recount in close states where there’s a paper trail, which is reasonable enough.

 

This.

The media is talking about the irrelevant Jill Stein and Green Party weeks after the election when otherwise they wouldn't be.

 

Democrats set the bar low with Obama. The guy had near zero skills at governing, nor a ready-to-go team to hit the ground running. I think this is THE thing that held Obama back, for the entirety of his presidency. The people he did hire had to learn on the job, for the most part (there are exceptions).

That said, Trump absolutely has the same problem. He has no ready-to-go team to hit the ground running. Like Obama, he has a friendly congress, but that doesn't mean they'll get anything good done.

The Clintons hired the most White House lawyers of any administration, to cover up their racketeering. Trump would do well to hire good lawyers and heed their advice. I do think he's quite sophisticated (to be a billionaire one has to be), and he should be able to steer clear of high crimes and misdemeanors.

 

Obama had 60 democrat votes in the senate, a majority in the House.

Even with Republicans refusing to vote for ObamaCare, they 60 votes proved enough to break the filibuster and enact the terrible law.

Not my fault if the inexperience proved itself in that awful social program and failure to do even more damage to the nation.

 

For what, less than 3 months? Continuing to spread the misinformation about the "60 votes" is pretty sad, actually.

http://sandiegofreepress.org/2012/09/the-myth-of-the-filibuster-proof-democratic-senate/

http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/di...have-60-votes-in-the-senate-and-for-how-long/

 

The recount could show that the democrats stuffed the ballot box. (They just didn't stuff it enough.) They didn't ask for this, the Green Party did.

 

She's breaking the glass ballot box.

It's like a ceiling, just smaller.

 

Guess the Greens are better at this politics thing than the Libertarians, who we'll never hear from again.

barfo

 

Yeah the gap just widened and the rich got richer.