There was quite a big argument between Nate Silver, from 538, and G. Elliott Morris, the author of this model, which was quite an entertaining read if you’re into statistical drama.
> "The first thing to say is that 72% and 89% can correspond to vote forecasts and associated uncertainties that are a lot closer than you might think."
I'm with Nate Silver on this one, 72% and 89% are as close as 75% and 50% in terms of being double the likelihood for a Republican win.
We will likely never know which model is more accurate but given Nate Silvers history on these predictions I trust him a bit more than others.
> "72% and 89% are as close as 75% and 50% in terms of being double the likelihood for a Republican win."
In a postscript (P.S.) Andrew Gelman clarified that the forecast distributions are close and not the probabilities of winning [0].
> "I’m not saying that 72% and 89% are close in probabilistic terms. I agree that there’s a big difference between 8-1 odds and 3-1 odds. What I’m saying is that the large difference in these probabilities arises from small differences in the forecast distributions. Changing a forecast from 0.54 +/- 0.02 to 0.53 +/- 0.025 is highly consequential to the win probability, but as uncertainty distributions they are similar and they are hard to distinguish directly. You can get much different headline probabilities from similar underlying distributions."
His tone comes off as very defensive about his own work rather than constructive criticism of the Economist model.
>In that sense, the best tip-off that the forecasts are different is they have Biden at 97% to win the popular vote, and have sometimes been as high as 98% (and 99% before they revised their model) whereas we are at 82%. You're getting up to 97-98%, you're getting VERY confident.
> His tone comes off as very defensive about his own work rather than constructive criticism of the Economist model.
Most of the linked thread isn't about his own work or the Economist model, but about the false description of their forecasts as being pretty close, made as part of the (true) description that fairly small changes in intermediate results in the Economist model would lead to the same bottom line forecast as Silver's model.
I don’t agree with the “fairly small changes” part -- it looked like they were talking about 1% change in mean estimate and something like 25% change in variance. Those sound small, but they’re really not!
Or I guess another way to put it is, given the highly polarised two party system in the US, elections tend to be fairly balanced and small differences have an inflated impact on the results.
But whether you see the difference as small (1% difference in popular vote) or large (3x difference in chance of victory), the models are different, and one of them must be better, although it’s probably impossible to tell which it is!
Comparing models across multiple elections and calculating the Bayesian regret is one way to do it. The models get tweaked each election so this isn’t exact, but it could give a sense of the skill of each forecaster.
Does anyone have links for previous election forecasts from Morris and/or Gelman?
> Comparing models across multiple elections and calculating the Bayesian regret is one way to do it. The models get tweaked each election so this isn’t exact,
As long as the same inputs aren’t fundamentally unavailable (and even then if the model has systematic handling of missing data, though the validity of that comparison is less clear) you can run the tweaked model on past elections (the main problem there is since those are probably the data used to generate them, it rewards overfitting; you might do better by running them against past elections with differing sets of random dropout of input data points [individual instances of particular polls, etc.] to mitigate that.)
Reading through both Nate’s twitter thread and the article, it reads like Nate never read the article. It seems to address every point he brought up in a reasonable manner. Odd.
Nobody was “proved to be correct”, because the winner of a poll does not by itself show anything about the probability of that particular candidate having won.
I think Nate's _interpretation_ was proved correct, and in the vein of "all models are wrong, some were useful," his proved useful (or would have if people were taking it more seriously) in both forecasting a more uncertain result as well as ancillary things like showing which states were"tipping point states" e.g. where should you put your money if you want to win.
Sure, if the forecaster and the model were only used one time.
But in 538's case they use the similar methods to forecast many individual contests like presidential primaries, presidential elections, senate elections, house elections, governor elections, club soccer, college football, March Madness men and women, MLB-NBA-NFL games and playoffs, etc.
Multiple-year track records over many events so you can compare their forecasts to actual results over time.
All of those things are very different though. It’s possible you could be excellent at predicting Senate races and terrible at the electoral college, right? And you only get one data point every 4 years.
There's a philosophical side to your question that I am not going to engage with, but for the practical you might be interested in this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoring_rule
The probability of winning is based on the popular support for a candidate. The poll directly measures that support. How can it possibly not 'show anything about the probability of that particular candidate having won'?
>The probability of winning is based on the popular support for a candidate
This isn't actually true. The probability of winning is based on aggregation of regional probabilities. The same national vote probability distribution can lead to very, very, different election probability distributions due to regional variation. The electoral college essentially guarantees that the national probability distribution is worthless for actually predicting who will be President.
Let's say we have two candidates A and B for some kind of election. We analyse our polling and other data, and estimate there is a 90% chance of candidate A winning and a 10% chance of candidate B winning.
If candidate B then wins, it does not mean that our analysis was "proved to be [in]correct". By itself, it doesn't actually say anything about the quality of our analysis. After all, we explicitly pointed out that this was a possibility, and it would be strange to argue "your analysis said this might happen, and then it did, so your analysis was incorrect". There's just not enough information to draw any conclusions.
It doesn't statistically. But if I say something has a 1 in a thousand chance of happening, and you say something has a 40% chance of happening and it happens... people will rightly say that your analysis was more correct than mine. Now maybe I was right and just got monumentally unlucky for unknowable factors. But that's certainly not the way people will think about it.
If one candidate won 1000 consecutive polls would it also tell you nothing about your estimate? This is obviously absurd: of course it would.
How about 100 times? 10 times? 2 times?
At what point does evidence cease to 'say anything about the quality of our analysis'? The answer is never. Every datapoint can be used to update your priors according to bayesian statistics.
As I said in my other comment that you chose to ignore, the probability of winning national popular vote does not indicate the probability of who will be President.
>This is hacker news: I'm allowed to be more interested in bayesian statistics than your country's electoral system.
Aren't regional probabilities just conditions on the national distribution? Building the national Presidential election distribution from the conditioned distributions versus just using the sampled national distribution is bayesian statistics.
>The probability of winning is based on the popular support for a candidate
This was the argument you made. And I don't see how this is Bayesian vs frequency when all I am saying is that the same national popular vote distribution can have large variance in regional conditional distributions which leads to large variance in election outcome distribution due to the electoral college.
Winning the election != winning the popular vote. There are plenty of qualitative reasons to believe the popular vote distribution matches the Economist model. He isn't arguing about how they came up with distribution. He is arguing that the particular kind of distribution is unreasonable in all instances. Which I disagree with. There are plenty of places in statistical modeling where a narrow head makes absolute sense.
Some of the other models for the last election were really bad. Giving something like a 95-98% chance to Hillary was arguably a fundamental failure. I found it very odd how they arrived at those numbers by e.g. treating every state as a separate chance while mostly ignoring that those results are not uncorrelated.
I think he does a better job at emphasizing the uncertainty while still showing that polls can be pretty reliable.
In a scientific paper, the author would just write down what they do, and trust the reader to be experienced enough to discount such problems themselves. Now, journalists write for a general audience, that is they write for the lowest common denominator, and accordingly the question what they should write there becomes a quite interesting question.
So, 538 did actually change their error estimate during the 2016 campaign to better account for problems of correlation. From a purely mathematical standpoint that is kinda the wrong thing to do, but it is arguably better in line with what the readers expect an error estimate to be.
> Giving something like a 95-98% chance to Hillary was arguably a fundamental failure.
Was it? What's the likely hood that someone who was polling as well as Clinton losing? 15% like The Upshot at the NY Times had? ~7% like with Sam Wang's model? Even 7% is around 1 in 14, not something shockingly improbable.
People often act like Silver's prediction was good because it gave Trump a higher probability of winning than many of the others, but that's not how probability works. If you say there's a 1/6 chance of rolling a die and getting a 2, and I say there's a 5/6 chance of rolling a 2, and we roll and get a 2, that doesn't mean that I'm correct. I don't think we've had enough rolls of elections resembling 2016 to really have a good grasp of where the percentages should be.
In general I question the value of assigning probabilities to election outcomes. This is especially true when you look at the probabilities a few months earlier - for instance, 538 had Clinton going from 49.9% on July 30, 2016 to 88.1% on October 18, 2016. Look at the probabilities they gave during the recent Democratic primaries, and they're also very bouncy. These probabilities lead people to believe that there's a much better understanding of the state of the race than what actually exists, to the point where I'd argue it edges up against pseudoscience.
Election forecasting is mostly about trying to quantify the current state of play based on imperfect signals. There is theoretically a "right answer" well before the final tally, but without being able to look inside people's heads en masse you can only guess at it. Still, this is conceptually different from forecasting the behavior of a system that's actually subject to randomness or [semi-]chaotic instability, where the given uncertainties will correspond at least partly with actual nondeterminism sitting between the current state of the system and the answer.
Therefore I think it's fair to say that the weight an election forecast assigns to the actual winner is a direct indicator of the accuracy of its model. We aren't trying to guess at how a set of dice are weighted, knowing they'll only be thrown once—we're trying to get as close as we can to knowing who is going to vote and who they are going to vote for, and (absent some large disaster or upheaval) a misforecast will be largely attributable to systematic errors in our methodology.
Im not saying that because of the percentage alone, but because I think the methodology there was suspect. And this was criticized before the election. The lead in the polls was not large, and making it look like a certain thing by treating the states as almost independent results just doesn't make any sense to me.
You think if Hillary went up against Trump, America would choose her 19 times out of 20? I’m not sure that makes the mental calculation any better than 95%.
95% is “Obama vs a dog”. Maybe in another country. Every 20 elections, Obama is bitten by the dog and doesn’t make it.
You're forgetting how bad Hillary was as a candidate.
I'm not saying she ran a bad campaign (though she did). I'm talking about her "negatives". Decades of scandals. (Yeah, Trump had them too, but at a minimum it meant that Hillary couldn't use Trump's scandals against him. Also, Hillary's scandals got a lot more national coverage when they happened than Trump's did.) Benghazi. The email server (and with it, the impression that she thought that rules were for other people). The impression that she thought that she was owed the presidency, rather than having to earn it. The way the DNC chose her over Sanders, overruling the will of many of the primary voters. And on and on.
It wasn't obvious at the time, because much of the press was pro-Hillary. But she was a terrible candidate. I think if the Democrats had run anyone else, they probably would have won against Trump.
I'm not sure. Are you saying that Trump is a horrible candidate? Or that Biden is? (Or that both are?)
Biden isn't disliked as much as Hillary was. In that sense, he's a better candidate. (Trump is disliked as much as Hillary was, and then some. Perhaps that was your point.) But Biden doesn't generate any enthusiasm, except that he's "not Trump". (In fairness, some of the support for Trump was that he wasn't Hillary.)
2. Biden is far more popular than Clinton was at her peak.
3. Biden is male (which is sadly very relevant in US elections).
4. We are no longer in the biggest economic expansion in US history. We may be in a historic recession.
5. There is a pandemic that has killed 60x the number of Americans that died on 9/11, and it is no under control in the US at all.
6. Kamala Harris is not like Tim Kaine.
7. Lots of anti-Trump voters are afraid to be complacent this time.
8. Suburban women, true independent voters (those who dislike both candidates), and older Americans are either breaking for Biden or have substantially switched to Democratic support after going for Trump in 2016.
A better question would be: is anything the same this time around?
2. I'm not sure that's true. I would say, though, that Biden is far less unpopular than Clinton was.
4. But the biggest (longest, anyway) economic expansion was largely under Obama. That wasn't a reason to vote for Trump in 2016.
The rest of your list I agree with, with the possible exception of 8. I'm not sure that we can tell. I think the climate is so polarized, and the Democrats have the microphone to such a degree, that people who support Trump aren't willing to say in public that they do so. But you could in fact be right. We'll see.
#2 is categorically true. Biden has consistently held a larger lead, maintained a larger absolute share of the poll, and had better favorable/unfavorable ratings. There is no way that you can claim that Clinton was ever more popular than Biden except perhaps for that brief period before she actually declared herself to be a candidate.
For #4 the economic growth was under Obama but it meant that at the time of the election people were (mostly) fat and happy; the cost of taking a chance seemed to be lower and it was easier to tell yourself that 'this guy is a businessman, he could not fuck up this strong economy and might even do better.' Now people can see what a catastrophic mistake it was to make this assumption, but I can almost understand the reasoning. I think the point of claim #4 was basically that the most that any candidate could claim about the economy is that they would have recovered it better or done it faster -- another important claim that could be made about it would be that you would make sure that the 'right people' got more benefits from the rising economy and not those elites; the basic populist economic playbook.
I'd argue that 538's model likely overestimates uncertainty, because it is a benefit to them both ways.
Either they spin it that they were perfectly correct in those 95% of cases where they get it right, or they spin it that they were the least wrong (and therefore the most correct) in the other 5% of cases where everyone gets it wrong.
At no point did 538 make such a high forecast: their highest forecast was 88%.
There's a joke that you should always express 60% confidence in your predictions, since if the prediction pans out, you can claim to be right, but if it fails, you can bring attention to the "two times out of five wrong" part.
Their calibration is good in the context of this article, but there is a reason this article doesn't use their Presidential election model - there isn't enough data to do this calibration here.
I'm not saying this was intentional, but there is a very high incentive for them to deliver this type of outcome.
There is not enough data to back-test their model on a single election which happens every 4 years, so the claim that a 60% prediction is fundamentally very different from a 95% prediction is statistically dubious.
It's not a benefit to them both ways, it's only useful to them if there's a substantial amount of those 5%s in which case they're probably right that everyone else is underestimating uncertainty.
In reality, I'm not sure I believe there's such a thing as a 95-98% probability of one major party winning in a country like the US. One can argue whether it's appropriate to fudge in additional uncertainty but there are a lot of things that could happen in the week before the election (including but not limited to candidates dying) that could throw existing poll results up in the air.
[ADDED: Or maybe something like that really is a few percent probability and you can end up with a 95% probability anyway. It just feels as if there's some upper limit to what you can measure using polls.]
I don't agree, I think he speaks and writes with nuance and intelligence. What is your issue with his Bayesian statistical approach? He went to UofC and LSE so he clearly had top notch training.
His 2016 model and he himself were much more predictive of the trump EC win, he repeatedly stated it was a possible outcome, something the vast majority of other forecasters completely missed.
Nate Silver was merely wrong, as compared to everyone else, who were spectacularly wrong. I'm not sure how that counts as a ringing endorsement.
These polls also never factor in things like "social acceptability of admitting that one voted for an unpopular candidate" or "groupthink among media organizations which aligns to their side of the isle." The entire polling fiasco should be interpreted as the limitations of quantitative data, as opposed to qualitative data.
Our final forecast, issued early Tuesday evening, had Trump with a 29 percent chance of winning the Electoral College.1 By comparison, other models tracked by The New York Times put Trump’s odds at: 15 percent, 8 percent, 2 percent and less than 1 percent. And betting markets put Trump’s chances at just 18 percent at midnight on Tuesday, when Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, cast its votes.
Consider this on the individual poller level. Every four years you get a new batch of pundit driven ideas about what "really" driving the voters. Suppose you add a question that's meant to magically reveal hidden voter preferences that are hidden by shame. What do the results of that question mean for the bottom line? Well, you're probably going to need multiple election cycle to find out. And by the time you do, the pundit have a new pile of bullshit for you to implement.
Now take it up a level. You've got a bunch of pollsters of caring predictive quality. Let them figure out what works best and include an estimate of their quality in how you process their results. I have no idea is pollster X's new question about cheese preferences is predictive, and honestly neither do they until a couple more cycles pass. All you can do is wight by past performance.
> social acceptability of admitting that one voted for an unpopular candidate
Not sure why you are getting downvotes. This phenomenon has been academically researched and documented under the name “preference falsification” with many past examples. If anyone is interested the 1995 book “Private Truths, Public Lies” is on this research.
No doubt they would try, but their prediction is bound to be at best as good as predicting the preference without asking the preference, which makes it profiling and not polling anymore. And as OP suggests, they failed at this spectacularly.
IMO LSE is a negative signal of someone's mathematical / statistical skill. I once interviewed someone that was doing a PhD in Math at LSE, and couldn't program or solve simple math / probability questions.
It's quite obvious why - if you want to study math in London, you go to Imperial. LSE isn't probably even a second choice.
I believe they got every single state right in three consecutive elections before 2016? And even in 2016, their predictions align reasonably well with the outcome, easily beating all competitors.
For anyone with a history of probabilistic predictions, the goal is to be well-calibrated. For predictions that have 70% likelihood, you want to be right 70% of the time. 90% likelihood, you want to be right 90% of the time. There's a mathematical way to analyze an entire set of predictions and determine how well-calibrated that set of predictions is. Silver claims 538's predictions are well-calibrated.
There are also tools and websites out there that people can use to make predictions and track their own calibration over time. They're pretty fun in terms of encouraging one's own sense of rationality.
I was very unimpressed with his democratic primary model, which he basically fine tuned every week when new data came in in order to get a result that was closer to his own preconceptions of the race.
I don't mean he allowed the model to update from new results, I mean the model would update, he'd be unhappy by its results so he'd change it so the outcome reflected his own biases. If you do that you produce a bunch of mathematical rationalizations for probability distributions that you invented from scratch.
> He’s been consistently more right (less wrong?) than the mainstream media.
Well, once he rose to popularity, 538 has been part of the mainstream media, affiliated with the NYTimes, then owned by ESPN, then transferred within the Disney Empire to ABC News. But, sure, it's pretty consistently been one of the better (not just election) statistical forecasting shops in the mainstream media.
We're saying, "he's better at predicting things than the mainstream media!" The issue is that the mainstream media's bar is so low, there is no bar. And the reason this guy is somewhat respected is because his bar is only slightly higher than rat shit, which seems amazing compared to what we're used to.
The guy sucks at actually modelling outcomes. Because everyone does. He just sucks very slightly less than everyone else. Maybe the issue isn't that Nate Silver is slightly better than average, maybe the issue is that we shouldn't be sharing this garbage on the news, since it's not reflective of reality.
It's like saying, "sure, Cuba is a human rights nightmare, but it's okay to trade and interact with them, cause at least it ain't the Congo!"
Asking for people to not make or publish predictions is asking for the sun to not rise. You'll never see that day. Being less wrong is the best option that is actually on the table.
Sure they can, and they can do so much better that their predictions are trusted to the point where they become a part of the narrative. Oh yeah, guess not...
Doesn't this suffer from low n? There's only been so many presidential elections, and there's only been so many in a similar environment, whatever you think the relevant factors are.
Then there's the one - off problem of evaluating how good the prediction was. If you think it's 95+ for one side then yes, you're embarrassed when it goes the other way. If you think it's 75 then you should be wrong one out of four anyway, but people will still think you messed up.
Impressive work regardless, I always enjoy these stats things.
Not at all. These models all have a multilevel structure, accounting for election level data, district data and poll data. The main source of uncertainty is probably how hard representative polling is, not to mention the polls are carried out by many different organizations.
The logistical challenges are considerable factor this election. Many people may want to vote for say Biden, but their ballots could be disregarded.
Even without the political fight over USPS funding, it is going to be extremely hard for them to turn around in < 1 week as required in many states, there are also the issue with votes that which are postmarked earlier but delivered later than election date( this is with good reason as you don't want results delayed if you wait for votes to come in)
I am not sure how anyone, without detailed data access to postal operations can accurately predict how much of this going to be a problem.
The podcast is for a general audience so it doesn't go into details of statistical modelling used in this model, but it does touch on polling, failures of polling to accurately predict results.
Models are great but doesn't this all hinge on quality of the data inputs? In 2016 polls fielded the day before the election had Clinton up by 10 points in Wisconsin. Why did the polls and the election differ so greatly?
Note that these polls are of Likely Voters. A big source of systematic error in 2016 state polls was Likely Voter models, used to weight raw poll results by voting propensity. In the Midwest in 2016, lots of people without college degrees said they preferred Trump - but based on previous elections, pollsters expected few would vote. This kind of shift is hard to predict - pollsters do not intend to make the same mistake again, but they might make another. (National polls are much less noisy because these kinds of regional errors often cancel out when averaged over the country.)
So do 538 and The Economist try to take these polls, back out their biases, and reapply different ones? Or, to borrow a phrase from Trump, "unskew" them?
No, these models weight the polls by quality (variously judged), they don't reweight by voter. This weighted average of polls is then used, along with factors like time until the election and economic conditions, to give a probability distribution over election outcomes (which no poll can give you, no matter how you weight it).
"Unskewing" polls dates back to 2012 (Dean Chambers and UnskewedPolls.com). He was doing what you describe - applying his own likely voter model to all polls, based on party affiliation. It did not work. Better to use each pollster's likely voter model as it is, since then you have an ensemble and possible cancelation of error.
Even though there were more people supporting Trump in Wisconsin (or rather any non-left candidate), they couldn’t tell that in polls openly because is goes against vocal minority.
Online surveys are even worse than in-person, because they are hosted on particular sites, having particular audience, leaning or biased in particular way.
E.g. Poll on cnn.com and fox.com will give you opposite results.
Also different age/wealth/profession groups have particular leanings on political spectrum and particular average level of computer proficiency.
E.g. a farmer in Idaho would likely to vote for any Republican candidate and simultaneously less likely to participate in any online polling.
I say this with all seriousness, the main flaw I see is the models not accounting for the levels of voter suppression being applied this year.
One party is on record as saying that their own successful efforts in voter suppression last election won them the rust belt and as a result the presidency.
After seeing it being so successful at tipping the scales last time it appears it will be even more heavily relied on this year.
There are the most recent familiar hints in the news regarding mail in ballots, but so many more examples since the overturning of the voting rights act. How this isn't more of a scandal our democracy is frankly shocking.
It's extremely difficult to talk about this in a purely non-partisan way because there really a case of "both sides are doing it". One party is effectively utilizing this to obtain, maintain and increase their hold on govt positions.
> None of this is a coincidence. Republicans responded to the election of Barack Obama in 2008 not by trying to broaden their own base or appeal to a changing nation, but by modernizing voter suppression tactics out of the old Jim Crow playbook.
Chief Justice John Roberts’s shameful 5-4 decision in 2013’s Shelby County v Holder ripped the heart out of the prime enforcement mechanism of the Voting Rights Act. Roberts argued that the South had changed, and such protections were no longer necessary. 1965, Roberts suggested, was a long time ago, in a different nation, across a changed South. The tens of thousands of Georgians whose voting precincts were closed, forcing them to endure six-hour lines to vote during a pandemic would like a word with him Roberts’s calamitous ignorance has done grievous damage.
"Crosscheck" app/system which is frequently run against democratic counties was found to have a 200 to 1 false positive to true negative rate. It's still being heavily pushed.
> Crosscheck is a national database designed to check for voters who are registered in more than one state by comparing names and dates of birth. Researchers at Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and Microsoft found that for every legitimate instance of double registration it finds, Crosscheck's algorithm returns approximately 200 false positives.[108] Kobach has been repeatedly sued by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other civil rights organizations for trying to restrict voting rights in Kansas.
> Often, voter fraud is cited as a justification for such measures, even when the incidence of voter fraud is low. In Iowa, lawmakers passed a strict voter ID law with the potential to disenfranchise 260,000 voters. Out of 1.6 million votes cast in Iowa in 2016, there were only 10 allegations of voter fraud; none were cases of impersonation that a voter ID law could have prevented. Only one person, a Republican voter, was convicted. Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate, the architect of the bill, admitted, "We've not experienced widespread voter fraud in Iowa."
We're reaching a very concerning threshold of election integrity that is being under appreciated. Our image of ourselves versus our reality is starting to diverge drastically.
I believe there was a much clearer more charitable reading of the above than assuming the person posting doesn't understand the difference between a political party and a Supreme Court.
There was a action. That action was a effective repeal of the voting rights act. The Supreme Court performed that action.
A political party responded to that act by rolling back voting rights.
While this is a possible interpretation the paragraph puts a lot of weight on the supreme court decision and doesn't seem to mention any legislative or executive decisions that were enabled by the court.
Will pull up the quote I remember, but a few additional examples showing it is by design beginning early last decade. And well known what the effects are, and it's intentional to win elections.
From 2012:
> House Majority Leader Mike Turzai (R), who said even more clearly in a 2012 speech that voter ID would help Romney carry his state.
> "Voter ID, which is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania: done," Turzai said while listing his legislature's accomplishments.
From 2016:
> "We battled to get voter ID on the ballot for the November '16 election," Schimel told conservative host Vicki McKenna on WISN (1130 AM) on Thursday.
>"How many of your listeners really honestly are sure that Senator (Ron) Johnson was going to win re-election or President Trump was going to win Wisconsin if we didn’t have voter ID to keep Wisconsin’s elections clean and honest and have integrity?"
It is well established that voter ID is not preventing any form of widespread in person voter fraud because there is essentially none. Even the president's own commission couldn't find anything of note. But it is extremely effective at suppressing voting of certain groups. For example Texas where valid forms of Id were military Id and concealed carry permits (thinks more likely held by republicans), but invalid forms were state employee photo IDs and university photo IDs (things more likely to be held by those voting democratic).
From prior studies voter roll purges like Crosscheck, eliminate 200 false positives from voter rolls for every 1 true positive. So instead of stopping it, it was rolled out nation wide.[3]
I understand that you equate voter ID with voter suppression. However, when you say someone's "on the record," you ought to use their own words. Those politicians went on the record for supporting voter ID.
I suppose if you want to give them credit for dogwhistling rather than just saying it straight up, that’s one thing. But in the face of such thoroughly established research about the low incidence of voter fraud, one is left with the conclusion that those still hawking the theory are either deluded or malicious.
For an ID to be used for voting in most states it has to have the following info
Name
Address
Photo
And critically an EXPIRATION DATE
Texas Handgun licenses has all 4, University ID's and Employee ID's lack an expiration date thus are not elibible as a valid form of ID
That is not Voter Suppression
Further if you happen to not have one of the 7 Accepted forms of ID (which is unlikely given all the different circumstances that a person needs to have one of these to get a job, open a bank account, fly on a plane, rent an apartment or 1000's of other thing that you need an ID for) the State of Texas Also allows you to fill out a declaration of why you do not have said ID, and use a Utility Bill, Bank Statement, Government Check, PayCheck or Birth Certificate to vote. [1]
This hardly sounds like an unreasonable burden to vote
It is voter suppression if it makes voting significantly harder for certain subsets of the population. Voter id laws tend to disenfranchise poor people.
This always seems like a Red Herring. In what way does is "disenfranchise poor people", the ID's are Free, most states the locations to obtain said ID are widely distributed and no harder to get to than a grocery store or any other store, and in the event there is an actual reason one could not get one then there are alternatives to the official ID that can be used
Seems to me the only disenfranchisement is people that can not legally vote in the first place
Just by the pure fact that you have to invest time and effort to get the necessary documentation, voter ID laws introduce another barrier that will disproportionately affect poor people that might not have the option of just not going to work for half a day to clear the necessary bureaucratic hurdles.
If you want voter IDs; that's fine. And if you can really just walk to any grocery and get a voter ID, that's fine too. But let's take Iowa's planned voter ID law of 2007 as an example; this requires a drivers license or a passport or a US birth certificate. If you don't have such documentation (and surprise; poor people are more often lacking such documentation) then you have to invest time and effort.
You seem to think that voter impersonation seems to be a problem. It has been shown that this is not the case[0]. So, what problem exactly are voter IDs supposed to solve?
>> you have to invest time and effort to get the necessary documentation
you have to invest time and energy into everything in life (including voting itself), this is not a valid argument at all in my opinion.
If you can not invest the very small amount of time and energy needed to get an ID, then you certainly are not investing the time and energy to research and understand the people you are voting for and/or the initiatives that appear on the ballot
>But let's take Iowa's planned voter ID law of 2007
I am not sure what the "planned" law in 2007 was, nor do I really care what is was since you use the terminology of "planned" I assume it did not actually pass. Looking at the actual law of Iowa[1] any voter that does not have a Drivers License is automatically mailed a voter ID card when they Register to vote, and Iowa also allows for Election Day Registration for which you can use an Existing ID or Proof of Residency [2] such as Residential lease, Utility bill (including a cell phone bill), Bank statement, Paycheck, Government check or other government document
So again I do not find this law, that is actually on the books to be burdensome
Can you point to an Actual law, on the books today and activity enforced, that has the burdens you claim to be sure deterrents to raise to the level of suppression or are you just reading too many NYTimes stories about the evils of Voter ID to actually research the topic yourself?
>>You seem to think that voter impersonation seems to be a problem
Point to any statement I have made that says or even implies that? Every other interaction I have with the government requires ID I fail to see why Voting should be exempt from this requirement.
This is all subjective and not even really worthy of response as the entire concept of "privilege" is itself political.
Every single person in the US would be considered privileged by people in nations with extreme poverty (living on less than $1 per day).
The "costs" your study talks about has been mitigated in any number of ways I have outlined in at least 4 comments now. you seem to simply want to ignore these things to push your political cause, that is fine but I am not going to keep addressing the same point over and over again
>NYT is fine
NYT is political biased to an extreme degree to authoritarian and collectivist ideologies and has been for decades though the last few years or so it is gotten a lot more bias dropping even the appearance of subjectivity as the bias as spread from its isolated section of the opinion pages to the actual "news" reporting
>So; what is the problem do you want to solve with voter ids?
it is not a matter of solving a problem. The need for ID happens in all facets of life and fail to see a compelling reason that voting should be excluded from this. You need an ID for all manner of other government and private interactions, you need an ID to rent a car, open a bank account, stay in a hotel, collect government / social services, and a whole host of other things
It is implausible to me that a large number functioning adult in modern society does not have any of the forms of ID allowed under Voter ID laws, and to the extent that a person does not have said ID the solution is to make obtaining an ID easier and less costly not to simply prohibit voter ID.
You believe Voter ID laws disenfranchise poor people, I think poor people not having access to an ID is far far far more likely to disenfranchise them, therefore providing easier and greater access to ID's for the poor, disabled and other groups will in the end be a net positive for people not a negative
> Every single person in the US would be considered privileged by people in nations with extreme poverty (living on less than $1 per day).
I agree. I therefore propose we limit this discussion to the US (and possibly western/central Europe).
> NYT is political biased to an extreme degree to authoritarian and collectivist ideologies
That's interesting. What make you think that? According to Media Bias/Fact Check[0] the NYT is considered center-left, hardly the of domain authoritarian ideologues. What do you think?
> you seem to simply want to ignore these things to push your political cause
You makes me curious! What do you think my political cause to be?
> The "costs" your study talks about has been mitigated in any number of ways I have outlined in at least 4 comments now.
If there is no need for voter ids, every cost related to them is an unnecessary barrier for the populate to fulfill its obligation to vote an thus to participate in democracy. Yes; the costs are mitigated to a degree, but as you agree yourself; why bother at all, especially if they risk to weight especially on poorer people that might otherwise be discouraged to vote?
> The need for ID happens in all facets of life and fail to see a compelling reason that voting should be excluded from this.
That's a strange formulation. But anyway; I fail to see why an ID should be necessary for most facets of life, as you put it. Why should it?
> You believe Voter ID laws disenfranchise poor people, I think poor people not having access to an ID is far far far more likely to disenfranchise them [...]
So why erect further barriers rather than removing the need for an ID in all these cases? Especially a government-issued ID?
“"Many Blacks didn’t go out to vote for Hillary ‘cause they liked me. That was almost as good as getting the vote, you know, and it was great,” the president-elect said, according to an audio recording of the meeting shared with POLITICO.”
This is Trump making an assertion about the possible motives of non-voters.
It is not at all a smoking-gun admission of voter suppression.
I’m sympathetic to the idea that voter suppression is a predominantly Republican strategy, as there does seem to be plenty of circumstantial evidence for it, but declaring a slam-dunk proof “on record” like in the GP post is overstating the evidence and ultimately harms their cause as it makes them look untrustworthy.
(That is, unless there is some better evidence for the claim than the link above!)
It's weird to admit you believe that something is occurring based on analysis of the situation, but to still demand an explicit single quoted admission of unsavory behavior. That standard seems almost tailor-made to make it impossible to react to harmful behavior, or to perform any sort of nuanced analysis that can't be encapsulated into a single quote on HN.
Why not Google, instead of demanding that the OP do research for you?
I don't know what quote the OP was referring to, but a couple of searches turn up dozens of quotes from Trump, Trump advisors, and major Republican operatives that might fit the bill. The problem is that they might not fit your bill -- which is really why you should be the one doing the Googling, rather than having someone hunt down quotes so you can reject them.
The first two results that popped up (there are dozens of others):
It's weird to admit you believe that something is occurring based on analysis of the situation, but to still demand an explicit single quoted admission of unsavory behavior.
Trump is really good at saying the quiet part out-loud - even if indirectly. Just today leaked quote from 2016 about lower black turnout.
"The president acknowledged in a 2017 meeting with civil rights leaders that he benefited from Black voters staying home."
Combined with Trump campaign's deliberate (they bragged about it in the press) paid media to convinced AfAm voters to sit the election out it's pretty damning.
Might not be as direct a quote as you're looking for but it's literally the first off the top of my head, from today only!
Another good recent one is a lot of vote-by-mail quotes from Trump.
A couple go out on a picnic with a young man. The moment they set out, the young man begins predicting rain. The couple begin to hate him for his gloomy disposition. They meet an old man on the road. He scrounges up his face, looks up at the sky, and says there wont be any rain. He has seen many days like this in his long life and it usually clears up. The couple cheer up at once and praise him for his wisdom.
No sooner had they set up their picnic, then it begins raining heavily. On the drive back completely drenched, they look at the young man with anger. Like somehow he was responsible for the rain. They think of the old man fondly, "well atleast he tried".
This actually happened in the 1988 Mexican election. The PRI was losing the vote and their opposition was predicted to win using live vote tabulation. They hid the results by saying the system crashed and then declared themselves as winning. This kept many people from bothering to even vote.
However, they went much further and burned legitimate ballots and even made fake ones.
The difference here is the PRI actively used (fake) predictions to discourage voters.
Recently someone asked if the fraud of 88 had been as depicted in the series. This was my response. Which I think it is important since there are not many testimonies of what really happened.
"It definitely didn't happened the way it was portrayed in the series. I saw it first hand.
The election was managed from Gobernacion (Ministry of Interior) which was subservient to the PRI. We didn't have the same controls as we have today. The PRI had representatives in every little town in the whole country. My father was one of these and I accompanied him that day. The evening on the election day, they gather all the booths in the region at the mayors office. They had a team of people changing the paper votes. Removing some and adding some and changing the minutes accordingly. The PRI already had this election fixing infrastructure. In 1988, they had already been in power for 59 years. They knew how to fix the election. They had it down to a science. But in 1988 my father told me that this was the first time they had to do it because they may lose. All years before that, they did it just to get better participation numbers.
The PRI was a state Party. For many, many years it had complete control of every town, every state, every district. All the Governors, representatives, senators, mayors, judges in the country belonged to the PRI. May be some Narcos helped in some regions. But the PRI didn't really needed them. They had comprehensive control of the national territory. And they were able to manipulates the votes, specially in the rural areas.
The way it is portrayed in the series is really stupid. Gobernacion was in complete control of the computer systems, they didn't need a Narco to tell them how to break it.
TLDR; The fraud happened but it wasn't organized by the Narcos. At most they had a minor involvement."
Before 2004, I was a "victim" of voter fraud after signing a petition at my university in a swing state. (I put victim in quotes because I did not feel particularly wronged, just annoyed.)
They registered me as Republican, and I received an unexpected voter id with my name misspelled on it in the mail.
I view this as similar to polls or predictions. They'd use the same data, e.g. "In Florida, 29% of voters are registered as Republicans," in an attempt to make other people feel 'safe' joining them.
With voting, some people want to feel a moral victory, that they voted for the winning team, and knowing that there are 29%, instead of 26 or 24 or however much they'd have without cheating (I'm making these numbers up for the example), would have some marginal psychological effect on people to believe that Florida is a partly Republican state, and you're not a complete nutball if you vote for a Republican in Florida.
As an aside, I was actually able to vote with that id, and I'm not sure if that should have given me more or less confidence in the system. More in the sense that, despite someone else messing with the system, I was still able to cast my vote. Less in the sense that, I voted with an incorrect name, and I wonder how easy it might be to conjure up nonexistent people or use dead people to vote.
Just wanted to give another example of how this is true, and the scummy lengths people will go to, to affect an election outcome.
I often notice this trend in my country. No obvious contender one year before the presidential election. Then some random politician is favorite in some poll. Then a feedback loop happens, media focus on this politician, who becomes more popular and so on...
I suppose there are PR firms acting in the shadow to sell their candidates to the media, but nonetheless it seems there's a lot of randomness at play.
Andrew Gelman, one of the authors of the model, has some thoughts about that. I can't find the earlier article right now, but the Economist model counts with that as well. See the blog post (down in the first P.S.):
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/08/14/new-fiveth...
> In 2016 Trump polled way worse than he performed in key states.
That's not really true. The state-level polls were generally within normal polling error, although there was a systematic error due to educational attainment. In 2020, more pollsters have incorporated educational attainment into their weighting, so this source of error should be reduced.
Since 2016 the far left has gone insane with conspiracy theory and cancel culture
There are all kinds of reasons to believe people would lie to pollster calling them up
That is with out getting into the real sampling problems they have as when you look into the data they over-sample Democrats a good deal and I do not believe they properly account for this over sample largely because they do so on a base ratio, the problem with that is I believe they are also massively oversampling never trump republicans so they have an inaccurate republican sample for which to re-balance the polling
They are not polling Trump's base, or Trump supporters or really the moderate middle
They are getting Democrats and Never Trump republicans in their polls
The so-called 'shy Tory' effect has been fairly conclusively proven to not actually exist; people will claim to be 'undecided' but will not claim to support X and then vote for Y. Look to size of the undecided group and then see where they break if the pollster forces a decision -- in 2020 the undecideds are smaller, and unlike 2016 they are breaking hard against Trump.
I have seen this argument most often from vocal, proud Trump supporters trying to explain away Trump's consistently low approval ratings. Why would someone so enthusiastically for Trump that they're willing to shout it to the world suddenly be circumspect about indicating their support in an anonymous poll with no human on the other side?
Of course, you can argue that those people are not the same groups of people. But there's no evidence that this thing exists, even when people have looked for it in the past (see "shy Tory effect").
I will indeed argue that these are dissimilar groups. Being a Trump supporter and reluctantly voting Republican are two entirely different positions that nevertheless lead to the same outcome.
I do not think one should equate Tory and Trump either. Like I said, it is a new variable.
A piece of it:
https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1294263127668924416...