Comment on the Substack post "Anomalies in Vote Counts and Their Effects on Election 2020"

[Note: I originally wrote this as a Comment for the Substack post, but the comments section for that article is a train wreck. So I am putting it here, as a new post on this dormant blog, which I started to record thoughts on a technical issue in Holocene climate reconstruction. It is exceptionally difficult to fish out information from the good Substack comments, so this is disappointingly incomplete. But I am out of time. Maybe I'll edit/improve it later. --AMac78]

On 11/24/20, the pseudonymous "Vote Integrity" posted "Anomalies in Vote Counts and Their Effects on Election 2020: A Quantitative Analysis of Decisive Vote Updates in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia on and after Election Night".

The author designed and employed a method to highlight unusual and possibly fraudulent additions to the vote counts in battleground states. To do this, he or she advantage of the time-series data that Edison Research created for each of the 50 states for "National Election Pool" subscribers, and that the New York Times posted online.

Two excellent tools:

* Substack commenter Steve created a script that pulls the Edison data and generates time-series graphs (like the author's Fig. 1/Michigan and Fig. 2/Wisconsin) for the state of your choice, at this page.

* Substack commenter Mario Delgado coded a self-service application that uses the same source to generate anomaly profiles (like the author's Fig. 3/Michigan and Fig. 5/Wisconsin) for the state of your choice, here.

The author uses statistical procedures that identify "anomalous" batches of votes that were added to the State Election Boards' running counts, beginning when the polls closed on the evening of Tuesday, Nov. 3, and continuing for the next few days. The core assumption is that the voters of each state are evenly distributed. In other words, each subset (precinct - city - county) has more-or-less the same percentage of Biden and Trump voters. In addition, Biden and Trump voters would be more-or-less equally inclined to vote in person or by mail... and so forth.

The author isn't stupid, s/he knows that these assumptions aren't completely true. This is taken as a starting point to find possible needles (phony votes) in a haystack of genuine returns.

Readers who are unfamiliar with the field should be aware that there have been multiple informed criticisms of this approach by commenters who are very knowledgable in statistics and forensics. Thus, my advice is to be very wary of accepting the author's methods and conclusions, without considering the merits of those critiques. I raise this as a warning -- that subject is beyond the scope of this comment. And, unfortunately, sorting through thousands of Substack comments to find these solid criticisms would be a major chore.

In the section "Quantifying the Extremity," the author presents a table with ten anomalies -- suspicious batches of votes that were added to the Presidential race's tallies, late on Election Day or in the early morning hours of the following day. S/he highlights (in yellow) these four entries from battleground states:

Anomaly 1. Michigan batch on 11/4/20 at 6:31AM EST -- 141,258 Biden / 5,968 Trump

Anomaly 2. Wisconsin batch on 11/4/20 at 3:42AM CST -- 143,379 Biden / 25,163 Trump

Anomaly 3. Georgia batch on 11/4/20 at 1:34AM EST -- 136,155 Biden / 29,115 Trump

Anomaly 4. Michigan batch on 11/4/20 at 3:50AM EST -- 54,497 Biden / 4,718 Trump

As of this writing (12/1/20 1430 GMT), the comments to "Anomalies in Vote Counts..." have provided strong evidence that:

* Anomaly 1 is explained by the City of Detroit's report of most of its Absentee ballots to the Michigan Secretary of State.

* Anomaly 2 is explained by Milwaukee's report of most if its Absentee ballots to the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

I don't know if other commenters have explained Anomalies 3 or 4.

I've written up this summary because the Substack commenting system as adopted by "Vote Integrity" fails to support an informed discussion of the points raised in the original article. As far as I can tell, submitted comments are impossible to search, and nearly impossible to link effectively. So the most civil and informative remarks get buried, and people new to the post never see them. Discussion doesn't build on what has been linked, discovered, and discussed. Instead, amnesia rules the thread. Hard-won insights on technical issues are overlooked, forgotten or ignored. As a result, everything keeps getting re-litigated from the beginning. Tempers fray.

Anomaly 1. Michigan batch on 11/4/20 at 6:31AM EST

The City of Detroit published the PDF "November 2020 Election Summary Report Signed Copy" on its November 3, 2020 General Election Official Results page

. Page 2 breaks down election results, 100% of 637 precincts reporting.

74,733 Election Day and 166,203 Absentee votes for Biden

6,736 Election Day and 6,153 Absentee votes for Trump

1,126 Election Day and 1,081 Absentee votes for Other candidates

(also 373 Election Day and 109 Absentee unresolved write-ins)

Anomaly 1 is 141,258 Biden / 5,968 Trump / 2,546 Other thus 94.3% / 4.0% / 1.7%

Detroit City Absentee is 166,203 Biden / 6,153 Trump / 1,081 Other thus 95.8% / 3.5% / 0.6%

Commenter "Mike" linked sources that showed that Detroit counted its own absentee ballots, and submitted them directly to the State -- they were not consolidated with absentee ballots from the other jurisdictions in Wayne County.

Anomaly 2. Wisconsin batch on 11/4/20 at 3:42AM CST

Page with downloadable Wisconsin vote data, by county.

Milwaukee City (pop. 590,000) is one of 19 municipalities in Milwaukee County (946,000). This County government page says the City recorded 169,519 absentee ballots. I don't see a total for the County total. It looks like the municipalities report to the County, which then reports to the Wisconsin Elections Commission (is that right?). But without a breakdown of Biden and Trump counts for absentee ballots, it's going to be impossible to a detailed comparison of the Milwaukee submission with Anomaly 2.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article of 11/4/20, "Biden overtook Trump in the early morning hours when Milwaukee reported its roughly 170,000 absentee votes, which were overwhelmingly Democratic."

Commenter "Eric 377" wrote on 11/29/20: "I live in Wisconsin... My understanding is that update [listed by 'Vote Integrity', i.e. Anomaly 2] is Milwaukee County data. Milwaukee County is the state's most populous and easily the highest number of votes cast, yet the elections staff is proportionally not smaller than other counties. Prior to the election, the Milwaukee media reported that the elections team was very well prepared, but the size of the team, their resources including numbers of voting machines and the vote totals tell us that their actual performance was the worst in the state, and by a lot, compared with other counties with similar 'per vote' resources... It seems to me that the most 'acceptable' rationale for Milwaukee being hours behind where they were expected to be would be exactly that the team was a lot less efficient than teams in the rest of the state. The second largest county in the state, Dane (also the second greatest source of Biden votes) reported nearly 100% of their votes almost 6 hours earlier than Milwaukee."

Conclusion

As mentioned at the onset, I'm posting this to serve as a point of reference for commenters at "Vote Integrity's" Substack article. New readers should be aware that Anomalies 1 and 2 are likely explained by ordinary vote-counting mechanisms. That means they aren't telltales of, say, a hacker injecting tens of thousands of phantom votes into the Michigan or Wisconsin vote-counting systems.

I may or may not edit the post further, depending on how much more time I can afford to sink into this hobby.