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[–] WORF_MOTORBOATS_TROI 0 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago 

Did you actually watch the video? I did and boy was that a waste of time.

tl;dr - In this video they graph data in a manner that doesn't really make sense (looking at % of vote splits between straight-ticket voters the % of the vote splits for voters who cast their votes for candidates individually), and then they pose an explanation for why the graph looks that way (fraud) without considering other explanations for why it would look that way. They tell you what the graph should look like without making a good argument for why that would be the case. This flawed analysis leads them to make some absurd conclusions, like that there was NOT fraud in deep blue Wayne county where Detroit is, but there WAS fraud in the purple Kent county where Grand Rapids is located.


RSP = the percentage of the straight party votes that were cast for republicans

TN = the percentage of individual votes cast that were for Trump.

The X-axis is RSP and the Y-axis is TN-RSP. If the graph is flat then that would mean that people who split the votes on their ballot voted for Trump at the same rate that straight-ticket voters went for republicans.

What the data shows that the higher RSP is, the lower TN-RSP is. It basically means the more republican a precinct is, the less likely it is that the people who voted for races individually were to select Trump. If they're voting individually, they're probably voting for a republican in one race and democrat in others. So what the downward slope of the graph means is that the more republican a precinct is, a greater share of Trump's votes came from straight ticket voting, and the vote splitters were less likely to do so because they favor Trump.

I see no reason why this would be anomalous. It just means that downballot republicans got more votes from the vote splitters in those areas than Trump did. If TN = 45% and RSP = 65% that means that the reason people in those districts split their votes was 20% more likely to be because they wanted to vote for a downballot republican even though they were voting for Biden. The Senate race would seem to confirm this because the senate race was 49.8%Dem vs 48.3%Rep while the presidential race was 50.6%Dem vs 47.9%Rep.

Part of the reason why this would seem to be the case is who is splitting votes and why? If you're in a place where 85% of the people are voting a straight republican ticket there likely aren't going to be many down ballot democrats running for those offices. The fact that Trump still got 60% of the individual votes in that precinct means that Biden supporters were 25% more likely to vote for a republican down ballot than Trump supporters were likely to vote for a democrat down ballot, of which there probably weren't very many aside from the senate race. Why should this be a surprise?

They're not even comparing the number of votes cast. It would seem like they're comparing the ratio of straight-ticket votes won to individual votes won, but by using percentages they're not considering that at all. I would like them to explain why it is a sign of democrats committing fraud if a precinct has 10k straight ticket votes 85% of which are republican, and 2k individual votes of which only 60% went to Trump. If Trump wins (8.5k + 1.2k) = 9,700 votes while Biden wins (1.5k + .8k) = 2,300 votes, how the hell is that a sign of fraud being committed in favor of Biden.

Then they look at Wayne County, the very left-leaning county which contains Detroit, and find that trump performed better among vote splitters than he did among straight-ticket voters. He then states that no cheating took place in Wayne County. This is an ABSURD conclusion. As far as I can tell he seems to believe the vote counting machines are flipping votes from Trump to Biden, except by looking at the counties separately he's restricting the set of data that he's graphing in a way that shows a different trend lines depending on how purple the county is. If he aggregated all the precincts in the whole state it might show different trend lines, there's no reason to separate it by county except that they released the vote totals by county and he was too lazy to graph them all together.

I doubt anyone read this far but I was just typing as I was watching the video to organize my thoughts about what he's trying to explain. He basically seems to be representing the data in a way that is not meaningful and trying to analyze it in way that gives it meaning.

[–] [deleted] 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

[Deleted]

[–] WORF_MOTORBOATS_TROI ago  (edited ago)

Their whole theory is based on the faulty premise that the percentage of individual votes for a candidate should naturally track with the percentage of of people in that precinct who are voting a straight ticket for that candidate's party. Why look at the trend lines based on the county borders instead of the borders of the congressional districts? Vote-splitting behavior is far more likely to closely track with the borders of the down ballot races than it is for a county. They looked at Oakland county, which is split between 4 congressional districts 2 of which were very close and 2 of which the winner had a 19+ point margin of victory, all of them went for democrats who were incumbents. Wayne county has 4 congressional districtsin its borders and Kent county as 2 congressional races in their border. Those races will have a huge impact on vote splitting behavior in those areas, way more than the fact that they're in the same county. Were there even any county races on the ballot there? In this instance, analyzing numbers on a county-by-county basis is completely arbitrary. They might as well have looked at the results based on north/south/east/west part of the state it would have been just as meaningless.

There might have been vote flipping and there probably was fraud, but the way they tried to analyze in this video didn't prove jack, and I'm angry that I wasted my time on their dumbass theory. I mean I'm not mad at you it's not your fault, I would have watched it no matter who had posted it and I saw that a few others had posted it too.