[taxicab]

It certainly is a mystery why legally cast mail in votes (which are allowed to arrive after election day per state law in some jurisdictions) would sway to one party. It's almost like one candidate has been telling his supporters to, in no uncertain terms, not use mail in ballots.

Your other claim is literal misinformation.

Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt, a Republican: "Observers from the Democratic Party and Republican Party, from the Biden campaign and the Trump campaign, have been in our counting area observing, right up against where the process is taking place, from the very beginning" (he said this in response to a similar lie by Ted Cruz)

[onecommentman]

I would tone down the contrast/volume on your responses if you want to sound persuasive. I’m guessing this is showing up on Hacker News because of the data analysis methodology nature of the postings.

Benford’s law is a very well-established approach in forensic accounting to determine patterns of fraud. Is it appropriate to use in these cases, and was it used properly?

Selective analysis/p-hacking/cherry picking is a strategy all-too-often used in even scientific publications to exaggerate the strength of claims. Mathematical statistics itself, however, is pretty well-established as an approach to analyze data and identify outliers to gain insights. Is the author biasing the analysis with selective focus in a way that any objective observer would believe was unreasonable? Exactly how, and what would a more balanced analysis show?

Responses that identify methodological concerns with challenges to reported voting numbers in a systematic and thorough way would be of value to the HN community. Angry words that veer off-topic and provide only anecdotal information make you sound overly defensive and do not serve your cause well in this forum. It’s like running away from a dog, it only motivates the dog to run faster.

Just chill and address the points systematically. There aren’t that many points to address. Maybe it will take more than one post or a pdf of your own.

But if you skip a point, assume that the audience will interpret it to means that the post is correct on that point. Acknowledge if it is and move on.

I do love voting data. It collapses the wave function of political rhetoric...

[sergioro]

> It's almost like one candidate has been telling his supporters to, in no uncertain terms, not use mail in ballots.

MI, WI, PA stopped counting votes on November 3. These states had the same candidate winning by 130K+, 300K+ and 700K+ votes respectively. It's remarkable that at about 4AM in Nov 4, WI and MI reported just enough votes to change the outcome of the election.

And there is evidence of people that was prevented from observing the vote count, and apparently some observers were kept so far away that they had to use binoculars to observe.

[vaidhy]

Given the emotional argument, here is another way to think about it - do you believe in the process and the court system? The person(s) most affected by it, the 2 candidates are making those calls. If you believe everything is corrupted and you cannot trust the system, then it starts sounding like a conspiracy theorist would.

If you want to discuss application of Benford law to election process, maybe a different tone would help.