
Statistical Anomalies in Republican Primary Election Results (2012) [pdf] - anigbrowl
http://electiondefensealliance.org/files/PrimaryElectionResultsAmazingStatisticalAnomalies_V2.1.pdf
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gojomo
The words "spend[ing]", "budget", "get-out-the-vote", "precinct walk[ing]",
"phone", and "direct mail" appear nowhere in this analysis – which indicate a
pretty big blind spot for the researchers.

What if the candidate with an overwhelming fundraising/spending advantage
(Romney) focused his resources in larger precincts?

The authors appear to have a pet theory ("larger margin-of-victory in larger
precincts suggests fraud") and desired result ("fraud for Romney") and deploy
all their reasoning powers towards that end.

Rather than just running lots of Romney share-vs-precinct-size slopes, what
are the slopes for other candidates (of both parties), in other elections
(including non-Presidential)?

Do Romney's slopes still stick out? Or do all "well-funded compromise
frontrunners" show the same slope, where insurgents and protest candidates
overperform in small precincts, farther from the influence of professional
campaign/media operations?

Notable, also, is that Romney has the 'suspicious' slope even in states where
he came in 3rd (Oklahoma, Alabama), or a distant 2nd (Louisiana). The slope
doesn't even serve to improve his rank-order in the final results. What's the
plausible mechanism, or rational risk/reward calculation, for engaging in
fraud in places where your supporters are ~25% or less of the local party, and
the fraud has a negligible impact on your count of nomination delegates?

~~~
anigbrowl
Some of these concerns are addressed on pages 19-21.

~~~
gojomo
I find the hand-waving around the Maryland and Utah graphs to be great
examples of the their motivated reasoning, and total blindness to the effect
of conscious campaigning. (Appropriately, 'campaign' is another word missing
from their 38 pages.)

Romney easily won Maryland's 2012 primary – 49% overall, presumably with the
'big precinct' advantage they find suspicious. (But, the researchers don't
show us that graph or include any Maryland data in their tables.) But because
the Maryland-2008 graph is 'flat' for the "same candidate… same state… same
type of election", we are to believe all non-fraud density-driven vote-share
effects are refuted.

But 2008 was a wildly different election! Other candidates were contending on
the same axes of fundraising, organization, and compromise/moderation that
Romney dominated in 2012. Another candidate (McCain) won the overall
nomination, but looking at the Maryland graph, it appears both Romney and
McCain barely even contested Maryland: both finished at about 6%, less than
1/5th the winner.

Do they show us McCain's or Obama's or Kerry's or Gore's or Dole's or Perot's
or Clinton's slopes in any state or election? No. They just pick one small,
relatively urban, and electorally irrelevant (for Republicans) state,
Maryland, in one year, 2008, and imply its flatness means something.

The same problem applies to their choice of Utah-2012 as another flatness
example: Romney won with 93%! No one else spent a cent there! How does that
reflect anything about the effects of density and campaign expenditures in
actively-contested races?

This kind of cherry-picking of outliers makes their case, especially with
regard to the density-issue, look extra-flimsy.

------
andrew-lucker
Without historical context this analysis is meaningless. Is this one election
the exception or the norm?

~~~
privong
> Without historical context this analysis is meaningless. Is this one
> election the exception or the norm?

Why is it meaningless? It is still interesting and important to look for fraud
during a single, particular election. Especially, one could argue, in the most
recent one, since that presumably means bad-actors are more likely to be
active in the next presidental election. I agree that it is interesting to see
if voting fraud is common or widespread in primary elections in general, but
studying individual events is not useless.

It occurred to me that you may have meant to say that the analysis is not
robust without historical comparisons to establish that such anomalies are not
just statistical fluctuations? That would something worthwhile to explore. It
seemed (from very quickly skimming the pdf) that they did try various
statistical tests to ensure their results were robust. But comparison with
other datasets would likely provide a good test of the robustness of their
findings.

~~~
andrew-lucker
Would you run a stock-picker algorithm that never did backtesting? Real data-
science is much more complex than just applying "this should work" reasoning
and jumping to a really controversial conclusion with zero data to back it up.

This is a good hypothesis as it stands, and may be valuable as a predictor of
fraud. However the conclusion is meaningless without sufficient evidence of
predictivity to back it up.

Take historical examples of elections with known fraud and run this analysis
to see if it can correctly label the fraud/no-fraud categories. _Then_ after
we can agree that it works well, only then will I care about the results of
any specific analysis.

------
mrb
This statistical anomaly was also noted by former NSA analyst Michael Duniho:
[http://www.globalresearch.ca/why-is-mitt-romney-so-
confident...](http://www.globalresearch.ca/why-is-mitt-romney-so-confident-is-
the-gop-stealing-the-elections/5310109)

I am personally shocked by this. Why didn't this make more noise in 2012? Why
am I only hearing about this now?

Since voting fraud seems to take place in larger precincts, why not split them
into smaller precincts that are never bigger than a certain size? This would
make the life of fraudsters harder since they would have to commit fraud in
more precincts instead of a few big ones.

~~~
LyndsySimon
This was alleged relatively loudly by the libertarian wing of the GOP. While
no one expected Ron Paul to win the primaries, most of us did expect him to do
significantly better than he did. Further, I recall instances in very small
precincts where more people openly claimed to have voted for Paul than were
counted.

Coupled with the reported suppression of Paul's delegates to the national
convention, there seems to be strong evidence of an active conspiracy within
the GOP to resist a perceived ideological shift in the party. Such a shift
occurred last in the wake Pat Robertson's failed bid for the GOP nomination
for the presidency in 1988.

------
CurtMonash
If you'd asked me before seeing this thread whether Romney did better in the
primaries in areas with high turnout or lower turnout, I'd have strongly
guessed "higher", because it is widely believed that dogmatic conservatives --
and also dogmatic libertarians -- are more passionate about elections than
typical Romney supporters.

Similarly, when Democrats benefit from higher turnout in general elections,
the reason may not be that evil ward captains are stuffing the ballot boxes.

------
Osiris
The paper doesn't explain _how_ this may have been accomplished. That would be
a very interesting analysis. Since this was a primary, is it possible that the
Republican party favored Romney as a candidate and thus modified vote counts
to his favor? I'm curious how this would have logistically taken place.

------
pmorici
Sooo, this is saying that Mitt Romney probably committed election fraud
throughout the 2012 primary?

~~~
ForcesOfOdin
The paper offers VERY strong statistical evidence of vote fraud of a specific
type occurred in Romney's favor in the 2012 primary. It seems that almost
without a doubt, wide spread vote-flipping (the type of fraud analyzed in this
paper) was in play and had large impacts on the primary, on the order of
hundreds of thousands of votes and to the extent of causing the outcomes to
differ (meaning the fraud caused Romney to win in places he maybe wouldn't
have). The fraudelnt votes have compounding effects on the election that go
beyond the flipped votes because of momentum loss effects on candidates
election campaigns who were losing (but shouldn't have). Votes were being
flipped from Santorum and Ron Paul to Mitt Romney. To a lesser extent votes
were also flipped from Newt Gingrich. Other types of fraud were considered
beyond the scope of the paper, such as ballot injection or vote removal.

~~~
leereeves
What's more likely: a nationwide and unrevealed conspiracy to flip votes in
favor of Romney, or that Republican voters in larger/more populous precincts
favor Romney more often than voters in smaller precincts?

Edit for clarity: by larger/more populous I mean the x-axis on the graphs in
the paper, though I forgot that this is only Republican voters and
Republican/Democrat split in the precinct is also a factor. The x-axis doesn't
necessarily mean rural to urban.

~~~
toyg
FTFA:

 _> Some argue that more liberal candidates are more popular in urban than in
the rural precincts. To verify this hypothesis, we drew geographically random
samples of precincts and computed partial correlations to filter out the
population density factor. We will demonstrate in this paper that this factor
has no impact on our conclusions._

~~~
leereeves
Yes, I saw that. The authors ruled out one possible explanation (urban vs
rural).

Perhaps it's due to gerrymandered districts, republican vs democratic
districts, large farm districts vs small towns, small towns vs large cities,
or some other factor we can't think of in a few minutes.

The authors should rule out a lot more possible explanations before alleging
fraud.

