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What Does a Crooked Election Look Like? In the search for electoral fraud, researchers use forensic tool kits to detect statistical signs of ballot stuffing and voter rigging -- An even more basic challenge faces researchers who want to use forensic tool kits to analyze U.S. elections—getting the data. “The way elections take place and are administered in the U.S. is not really up to the quality standards in other countries,” says Klimek, who tried and failed to apply some of his methods to the 2008 election. “The data quality was not good enough.” In most states, access to voter...

[AIER Editor’s note: the article and video discussed below have been pulled by Johns Hopkins Newsletter. You can read the announcement here. An additional explanation is here. The claims made by the economics professor will clearly require more investigation, as the announcement says. That said, AIER is publishing this in the interest of objective science and open discussion.]Article originally published by AIER.At the time of this writing, the United States currently maintains the highest number of Covid-19 deaths and ranks 11th for the highest deaths per capita. There have been approximately 262,000 recorded Covid-19 deaths in the United States, which...

An analysis of voting data from Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Data Source: New York Times and Edison Research. 2/ METHODS🚨 Before diving in to the specific data, I wanted to provide samples of the graphs I have put together to show examples of states with clear victories for each of the candidates. These graphs make it easier to notice anomalies in other states. 3/ BIDEN WIN🚨 Let’s start with Minnesota. Votes after election day should be randomly sampled votes received by mail and the percentage of votes for a specific candidate should stay roughly constant. Here you can see...

Executive Summary We find considerable evidence consistent with the possibility of electoral fraud in vote counts in Montgomery County, PA. In particular, we examine a highly anomalous update to mail vote totals in the NYT/Edison data which enormously benefited Biden, and which looks suspicious on a number of dimensions. At a high level, our results are suggestive of a new and highly suspicious batch of mail ballots being added to the count sometime between Wednesday early morning and Thursday morning. These ballots are drawn from an implausible distribution that enormously favored Biden and simultaneously harmed Trump (the latter being done...

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/pennsylvania-voters-describe-irregularities-mail-absentee-ballot-process

New analysis of Pennsylvania election data buttresses the Trump campaign’s assertions that a host of voting irregularities and potential fraud contributed to a victory in the critical swing state for Joe Biden. A new report seen by The National Pulse begins: “This scientific analysis of the reported Pennsylvania (PA) 2020 Presidential voting results, is a non-partisan effort by unpaid citizens and volunteer experts. Our only objective is to play a small roll in helping assure that all legal PA votes are counted, and that only legal PA votes are counted.” The report concludes: “These statistical analyses do not prove fraud,...

Benford’s law, often known as Newcomb-Benford law, is an observation about the frequency distribution of leading digits of unconstrained numeric data in the real world. The intuition behind the law dates to the 1880s when an American Scientist, Simon Newcomb started to discover a pattern among the log tables. He noticed that people usually have a lot of markings on numbers starting with small digits like 1 and 2. He didn’t research much about his observation, so after 50 years, Benford continued his research on this phenomenon and found out many interesting things by applying it to populations, length of...

Af­ter the 2016 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, Re­pub­li­can Party of­fi­cials cred­ited Face­book Inc. with help­ing Don­ald Trump win the White House. One se­nior of­fi­cial sin­gled out a then-28-year-old Face­book em­ployee em­bed­ded with the Trump cam­paign, call­ing him an “MVP.” Now that key player is work­ing for the other side—as na­tional de­bate in­ten­si­fies over Face­book’s role in pol­i­tics. James Barnes left Face­book this spring, and said he is now ded­i­cated to us­ing the digi­tal-ad strate­gies he em­ployed on be­half of the Trump cam­paign to get Pres­i­dent Trump out of of­fice in 2020. Mr. Barnes, who had been a life­long Re­pub­li­can, has reg­is­tered as...

Freelancer's Top 50 report looks at what employers want now -- and tech skills are at the top of the list. It's always good to be wanted. And, if you posses the key skills of data analytics, Microsoft Office , copy typing, or a virtual assistant, you are wanted very much. From just the previous quarter of 2019, employer demand has grown to 58% for data analysts, according to Freelancer's Q3 2019 Fast 50 Report, which chronicles the world's fastest growing and declining jobs on the global market place, and culls from posts from its more than 38 million users,...

On September 24, 2019, there was a public meeting being hosted by the Public Health division of the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare to receive comments on the issue of changing sex on Certificates of Live Birth – changing history as it were. In April of 2017, a case was filed (1:17-cv-00170-CWD) in the United States District Court for the District of Idaho against the Idaho Department of Public Affairs, the Administrator of the Division of Public Health and the State Registrar and Chief of the Bureau of Vital Records and Health Statistics asking for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief...

Tonight you will hear from the man President Donald Trump appointed as his 2020 re-election campaign manager. His name is Brad Parscale, and he got the job because - as we first reported in October - Parscale was the president's secret weapon in his 2016 run for the White House. 42-year-old Parscale was one of the campaign's top decision-makers, operating largely out of public view. He was hired to run the digital team, but over time he came to oversee advertising, data collection and much of the fund-raising. He says his main task was competing with the Clinton Campaign's huge...

Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden ripped Facebook in a tweet Saturday after the social media giant suspended Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm which worked worked for President Trump’s campaign. Facebook accused the firm on Friday of not deleting data it had improperly harvested from Facebook users, which number in the tens of millions, but Snowden pinned the blame squarely on Facebook and lumped in other social media companies for being just as reckless. "Businesses that make money by collecting and selling detailed records of private lives were once plainly described as 'surveillance companies,'" Snowden said. "Their rebranding...

Analytics is how Obama and his Google-taught number crunchers intend to take back the presidency Up for grabs in 2018 Midterms: the voter base of President Donald Trump, about to be confiscated by analytics savvy Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the fighting-their-way-back-from-exile Democrats. ‘Analytics’ is the tekkie word for VOTER TARGETING, and history proves that voter targeting always works. Analytics, aka voter targeting, is exactly how Obama captured the 2012 election. The Obama campaign team was able to access massive data, which in turn allowed them to identify the vote, transmit to voters the messages they wanted to hear. Analytics...

A few weeks ago I met with, and interviewed, Alexander Nix, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica. His company has been credited with helping Donald Trump win the US Presidency. It’s also been associated with many other controversial political campaigns globally and accused by some of aiding the UK’s exit from the EU. He addresses all of these subjects in detail (a shorter summary is here). The interview, which was recorded, was conducted in private at the IT Arena conference in Lviv, Ukraine. The is the transcript of the interview, which was 50 minutes long: Mike Butcher (MB): You think that...

We have entered the era of the individualized campaign. Data analytics allows large reams of data to influence how we reach the individual voter. This development doesn’t make polling obsolete, it just means it’s not omnipotent. Not everyone agrees with this approach. In fact, we’re see a reinvigorated debate over polling and analytics taking place among top practitioners. It breaks down roughly like this, is it better to rely the emerging field of “big data” and predictive analytics, or fallback more established data solutions such as survey research? The debate was reignited back in September after Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg...

Why did Hillary Clinton lose the election? There are numerous reasons fair game for finger-pointing, but to truly leverage any of those elements required data and know-how. Russia clearly used both to help influence an election. They and others may have used that knowledge to spread fake news. One of the best catalysts for spreading the message — fake or otherwise — and reaching voters at the heart of their concerns was Facebook, which was right there with the campaigns, trying to help. But did one campaign accept more help than other other and, in doing so, help to sabotage...

Brad Parscale told 60 Minutes that Facebook employees worked right alongside the Trump 2016 campaign workers to help President Donald Trump win the presidency. Parscale is Trump’s digital director – and as seen in the below 60 Minutes video, Brad called Facebook the “500-pound gorilla,” taking up 80 percent of the digital budget. Meanwhile, people on Facebook and Twitter are calling it troubling that Parscale spoke of micro-targeted Facebook ads that helped Trump win the presidency. Especially troubling to folks unfamiliar with social media strategizing is the notion that Facebook employees were “embedded” in the Trump 2016 campaign, according to...

As a former lawyer, Garth Lagerwey knows about the value of evidence-based reasoning. Now he's trying to apply that same line of thinking to the professional soccer club he helps manage. Lagerwey spoke about this philosophy at the Sounders Sports Science Weekend in Seattle, an event that focuses on the latest innovations in sports science and analytics. The Sounders have long been pioneers, at least among Major League Soccer teams, in using sports science to help make on-field improvements. The club, which won its first MLS Cup last year, utilizes a variety of gadgets like GPS trackers and heart rate...

Donald Trump derided the use of data and technology tools for his presidential campaign -- but those techniques might well have propelled him to victory. Trump's stealth digital campaign, thrown together hastily in the final months of the campaign, allowed the Republican billionaire to fine-tune his message and reach voters in crucial Rust Belt states that gave him an Electoral College majority. During the primaries, Trump dismissed as "overrated" the kinds of data analytics and "micro-targeting" successfully used by President Barack Obama. But after winning the nomination, he quietly developed a digital strategy led by a political neophyte, his son-in-law...

If you were watching The Walking Dead this season and thought, "I sure am seeing a lot of ads for Donald Trump," it's because you actually were. In an interview from Forbes, Jared Kushner, head of Trump's campaign data, explained that he created a unique program to reach certain audiences. Instead of spending money on ads for most of television, this program found out what people in each area liked about Trump's campaign, what TV shows they watched, and correlated the two. Kushner's dialogue here got fairly technical, but Forbes helped make the strategy a little easier on the eyes....