On Lawfare April Doss offers an affirmation of an audit of the results in the Presidential election:
[The computer and election experts’] evidence and arguments are well-documented elsewhere, so I won’t rehash them here. But it is important to note that none of these experts’ opinions are tied to the political fortunes of Republicans or Democrats. These are merely computer and election security experts offering their view that there’s some evidence of a problem. While Nate Silver and other statisticians have posited other counter-explanations for the evidence, it is to be expected that different disciplines focus on different dimensions of a problem and offer different explanation. Silver’s theory that demographics and not hacking or computer error is responsible for the deviation is number is certainly plausible, perhaps even likely. But the presence or absence of other possible explanations are not a reason to not perform an audit. When faced with a potential cybersecurity problem, the purpose of the audit is to confirm or eliminate that possibility, not because it is the definitive explanation. The voices suggesting that we don’t need an audit because the results are probably correct are missing the point.
It’s not that the probability of corruption of the election systems is high, it’s that there is a chance of corruption, and that the cost of being wrong, in this particular case, of even leaving the suspicion that our computer systems were manipulated, is too high. We need to retain confidence in our election systems, or throw them out (as I’ve more or less advocated) for either better qualified computer systems, or return to old-fashioned human systems. Speaking of Nate Silver’s (well, actually Carl Bialik and Rob Arthur) reaction on FiveThirtyEight:
Without a recount, all we can do for now is look for any meaningful difference in the three states named in the New York article between votes in counties that used paper ballots and votes in ones that used machines. That quickly crossed Michigan off the list: The entire state uses paper ballots, which are read by optical scanners. So we couldn’t compare results by type of voting in that state. Instead, we checked the six other states with a margin between Clinton and Trump of less than 10 percentage points that use a mix of paper and machine voting: Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and Virginia.
For each county in those states, we looked at Clinton’s vote share and whether it was associated with the type of voting system the county used, based on voting-system data compiled by a nonprofit electoral-reform group called Verified Voting and 2016 vote data from Dave Leip’s U.S. Election Atlas and ABC News. It doesn’t make much sense, though, to just look at raw vote counts and how they differed, because we know there are many factors that affect how a county voted, both in those states and everywhere else around the country. So we separated out two of the main factors that we know drove differences in voting results: the share of each county’s population age 25 and older with a college degree, and the share of the county that is non-white.
We found no apparent correlation between voting method and outcome in six of the eight states, and a thin possible link between voting method and results in Wisconsin and Texas. However, the two states showed opposite results: The use of any machine voting in a county was associated with a 5.6-percentage-point reduction in Democratic two-party vote share in Wisconsin but a 2.7-point increase in Texas, both of which were statistically significant. Even if we focus only on Wisconsin, the effect disappears when we weight our results by population. More than 75 percent of Wisconsin’s population lives in the 23 most populous counties, which don’t appear to show any evidence for an effect driven by voting systems. To have effectively manipulated the statewide vote total, hackers probably would have needed to target some of these larger counties. When we included all counties but weighted the regression by the number of people living in each county, the statistical significance of the opposite effects in Wisconsin and Texas both evaporated.
In the meantime, disdain for the sanctity of the process is coming right from the top of the GOP – Trump claiming that illegal votes in California have cost him the popular vote, even as he is on the edge of collecting the top price (if I may be so precise as to note the Electoral College has yet to vote). His failure to encourage an audit is another lost opportunity to affirm his fealty to the democratic system we employ, thus making him that much less qualified for the job.
But how will Stein come out of this incident? Will she, or the Greens, gain popularity? Can the Greens replace the ever-shrinking GOP? If Trump implements policies that he wants, as does Ryan doing away with Medicare, the GOP will not be growing; demographically, it’s slated to shrink through simple morbidity, and if they drive seniors away by replacing Medicare with a naive system, and Trump cannot pull off a miracle … all the gerrymandering in the world won’t work. And if Fox News starts working against them… well, remember how Frodo escaped from the bondage of the orcs? Not through Sam’s heroism, but because evil eats evil.
