Tangled In The Rigging

New analysis reveals one key reason Trump lost Arizona — and deflates his claim of 'rigging' https://t.co/7YTRE4sJjn

— Raw Story (@RawStory) May 21, 2021

This is an excellent and thoughtful analysis/explanation of how election analyses are conducted.

To identify Republican-inclined voters, Halvorsen created a search tool to identify the ballots where half or more of the votes in these contests were for Republicans. That meant at least eight votes for Republican candidates in Maricopa County and seven Republicans in Pima County.

The search tool also identified how many ballots contained a majority of votes for Republicans—but not for Trump. It found about 60,000 such ballots in Maricopa County and slightly more than 15,000 ballots in Pima County. White said that he needed an experienced voting system programmer to help process the data.

"I don't want to trivialize this analysis because it is very difficult," White said. "You have to have knowledge of the election administration process. You have to have knowledge of the way voting machines work. You have to have knowledge of what might be available to you in all of the public records… It takes actual expertise to be able to do that."

That introduction is followed by a great deal of information explaining, still in general terms, just how such analyses are conducted.  And as the article references the Arizona "audit," it's only fair to say something about that, too.  But first, context:

The investigation by White and Moore was also using other public records to debunk another conspiratorial claim about Maricopa County's election: that 40,000 ballots were smuggled into vote-counting centers after midnight on November 4.

Using Arizona's public voter history file and eligible voter file, White found there were no unusual spikes in precinct-level turnout patterns (Maricopa County's turnout was 80.5 percent), Moore said. White also verified the identities of all but 720 voters out of the 2.1 million people who voted in the 2020 election in Maricopa, Moore said, adding the exceptions were people whose identities were protected as crime victims, law enforcement officers or public officials like judges.

"It completely checked out—all 2.1 million voters," Moore said. "There were no unknown names except for those 720… And the tool we used to explain all this [assertion] was mapping. We show by precinct the percentage turnout and the actual numbers of turnout. There's no [conspiratorial] there, there." 

Which assertions are met with a biting and analytical response:

"Of course data facts matter," [Bryan] Blehm [an attorney representing "Cyber Ninjas"] wrote on May 10. "That is why Mr. White relies on data supplied to him by government buearocrats [sic] rather than the actual real data. Hence, he questions anyone actually working with the underlying real data. I think Mr. White is pushing for a job with the Secretary of State."

At this point we have to remember Cyber Ninjas didn't understand the computer records they were given, and claimed the data had been erased, when they simply didn't know how to access it.  And they were examining the paper in the ballots for telltalle signs of bamboo, which they thought would be proof positive of interference in the Arizona elections by China.  White and Moore have a simpler explanation, and one grounded in empirical reality: Republican voters in Arizona simply declined to vote for Trump.

The finding that some number of Republican voters were turned off by Trump and did not vote for him in 2020's general election is not unique.

Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political science professor who tracks voter turnout patterns nationally, said "it seems consistent with what we've seen elsewhere concerning the suburban shift toward Biden."

"The upshot is that voters defect more the higher up the ballot the race is and the more information they have," said Thornburg, citing published research about this pattern. "This result does not surprise me."

"Fifty-nine thousand votes in Maricopa County amounts to only approximately 2.8 percent of the votes that were cast there," he continued. "Assuming (generously) that loyal Republicans made up just 45 percent of Maricopa's 2020 voters, that's only about 6.3 percent of loyal Republicans (which is in line with national exit poll results that show approximately 6 percent of Republicans and 5 percent of Democrats voted for the other party's presidential candidate)."

There was also a drop-off in Republican voter turnout in Georgia between its November 2020 election, which Trump also lost, and the turnout in early January's U.S. Senate runoffs, which Trump repeatedly said would be fraudulent and where the Democrats prevailed—returning the majority to Democrats. Trump's rhetoric has been seen as suppressing his party's turnout in the Senate runoffs.

It seems Trump really is his own worst enemy; and it explains why Democrats didn't sweep the House or the Senate, but Biden won by the largest popular vote count in American history.

You can examine the facts and explain reality ex post facto, or you can reject the facts and reject reality.  And honestly I don't think the latter approach is nearly as popular or politically powerful as tout le political Twitter thinks.