Is It Time For Algorithms That Flag Potential Election Fraud? -- Please Answer Both Questions.

[Poindexter]

What would be the point.Your example assumes something that is not true in the particular reality of the Florida vote count. So the assumed situation is not applicable to Florida's count, though you want to suggest it is. In the reality of the Florida count the additional 10K votes are not a true representation of the remainder of the population of votes and there is no apparent reason why they necessarily should be!!! They may have been mostly or completely mail in ballots, or ballots mailed at the last minute, or from military overseas, or provisional ballots, etc. So while the difference you find in your specific example, assuming your assumption to hold, could be an indicator of fraud, the assumption you made in your example does not hold in the Florida case. So what is your point other than to try and mislead and waste our time.

Your post contributes nothing of value to consideration of whether there is fraud occurring in the Florida voting or vote count. The most likely reason that no one has yet found any evidence of fraud in the Florida voting or vote count, is of course, that there isn't any. But not finding any evidence, and we can be assured someone is looking for it, does not mean there isn't any. Just as not being able to locate God in a particular cloud doesn't mean God isn't in some other cloud. I'm afraid the best you can do, so far, is to assume the vote count is fraudulent despite absence of evidence. And that, to put it mildly, is not very convincing.

What part of "minus bluster and strawman arguments" didn't you understand? CNN County is not in Florida, nor does it exist anywhere in the United States.

How about simply providing the answers to questions 1 & 2, and then we discuss them without you pretending you can read my mind?

 

[Poindexter]

Nobody wants to take a shot at the answers? OK. Here they are. With a brief preamble.

Let's drop the strawmen. This is not about trying to "prove" fraud in Florida. But news reports from Florida got me thinking and I started this thread to show how counter-intuitive vote count probabilities can be.

Why? If votes are suddenly "found" that deviate significantly from overall ratios (e.g. from 2:1 to 3:1) there had better be good reasons. Because the odds of it happening by chance alone are astronomically small.

If liberal Unicorn Village's sealed ballots were accidentally misplaced for a few hours, no problem. But a suspicious scenario would be if a large number of ballots breaking 3:1 or more are suddenly "found" that had been randomly set aside throughout the day because of random machine breakdowns in otherwise 2:1 areas.

The problem, as stated in the OP, is answered using the binomial CDF. For perspective I'll answer questions 1 & 2 in terms of the odds of winning the Powerball Jackpot (approx. 1 in 292,000,000 with one ticket).

Answer to Question 1: 333 expected republican votes versus 250 or less actually obtained is no big deal, right? Wrong! You're more likely to win the Powerball Jackpot with just two tickets.

Answer to Question 2: 3,333 expected republican votes versus 2,500 or less actually obtained is nothing to be concerned about, right? That's even less likely... a lot less. You have a better chance of winning the Powerball Jackpot 8 times in a row with just one ticket per drawing.

If you object to the problem as stated in the OP because in real life we'd be sampling without replacement from a finite population, fine. In that case the hypergeometric distribution would apply. The probabilities don't change much and the above answers would still be correct.

 

[wildchild]

Is It Time For Algorithms That Flag Potential Election Fraud? -- Please Answer Both Questions.

Algorithms exist for almost everything else from credit card theft to consumer preferences. So why not for election fraud? Not to change or negate counts, but to flag highly unlikely results for further investigation.

An article I read a few days ago got me to thinking about this... it said something to the effect that new ballots were discovered in Florida that favored democrats 3 to 1 in an area that was previously 2 to 1.

There may very well be legitimate reasons for the shift. But if not, how likely is that due to chance?

Please provide your intuitive responses to the following two questions before I post the answers (or you calculate them). Elections are not random processes like drawing colored balls from urns and this is an artificial oversimplification. But it does serve a useful purpose that I'll explain after replies are posted.

Again, I'm looking for intuitive responses only. Please do not calculate anything.

Situation: CNN County has an endless supply of voters and they favor democrats 2 to 1. Voting has ended. 500,000 votes were cast that favored democrats almost exactly 2 to 1.

Question 1: 1,000 more votes are found. Assume all 1,000 voters who cast them are a random sample of the CNN County population. What is the probability that those 1,000 votes favor democrats 3 to 1 or better?

Question 2: 10,000 more votes are found. Assume all 10,000 voters who cast them are a random sample of the CNN County population. What is the probability that those 10,000 votes favor democrats 3 to 1 or better?

Why would the democrats allow this?

You want to eliminate election fraud? Democrats think that is racist.