2024 election – Votes skew as vote count increases in PA county

Posted by PopsicleParty2

5 comments
  1. > Essentially, one candidate benefited, unexpectedly and disproportionately, in precincts where more votes were cast.

    I read through page1 and page2 of your link carefully but I didn’t follow the argument they made. It boiled down to the quote above.

    The graphs they picked are not able to convey evidence for their claim. The graphs clearly show a 60/40 preference for Harris in mail-in votes, and the reverse 40/60 preference for Trump on election day voting. That’s unquestionable. But they also claim that the difference in preference was concentrated in the larger precincts. I don’t see that from eyeballing it, but the choice of axes makes it positively difficult to eyeball.

    From eyeballing, it looks like the *mean* on election was about the same for small+large counties, and the variance decreases with larger counties, as you’d expect. And also the same for mail-in, albeit with a different mean.

    I think if they want to advance their claims, they need to (1) come up with an actual model and do statistics to see how well their model fits the data, (2) come up with graphs that let you see mean and variance across county sizes, if that is indeed what their claim is about.

  2. To me, this data looks like it’s separating mail in and election day votes, finding ‘curious’ phenomena, and then throwing up their hands and implying that there is something potentially nefarious going on.

    Part 3 is the easier one to refute, so I will start with that.

    They find it ‘curious’ that Trump gets more votes for precincts that had >58% election day turnout. But it’s quite clear why that’s the case. You need to have a very Republican precinct to get to 58% e-day turnout. More Democrats means more mail in votes which means its impossible to get to 58% e-day turnout when total turnout was ~76% in PA.

    For parts 1/2:

    They reverse the problem here. A precinct with high election day turnout being 60/40 Trump is not weird by any measure. The only reason it’s weird, in their mind, is that low election day precincts are more Democrat leaning, and then shifts over to Trump. But that’s also quite clear. Heavy Dem precincts are going to have a lower number of election day votes since they prefer to vote by mail. But they are still going to be heavily Democrat.

    And just a final general question. If Trump was stuffing ballots in swing states, why were they the ones that actually moved the least towards Trump? Pennsylvania shifted 4%, yet New York moved by 12%. Country as a whole moved by 6%. Every swing state moved less than that. So apparently everyone hated voting for Kamala, but we find it so hard to believe swing state voters also may have hated voting for her?

  3. If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, its a duck.

Comments are closed.