Nate Silver finally gets it

I have to ask: Why would an audit/recount of the vote in WI, PA and MN even be controversial? If it were up to me, we would conduct such measures in all 50 states as a matter of routine. We would also conduct the elections themselves in a far more transparent and verifiable fashion. Double-checking the results should be a matter of simple democratic hygiene.

Nate Silver seems to have finally come around:

The first proviso: Let’s not call it a “recount,” because that’s not really what it is. It’s not as though merely counting the ballots a second or third time is likely to change the results enough to overturn the outcome in three states. An apparent win by a few dozen or a few hundred votes might be reversed by an ordinary recount. But Donald Trump’s margins, as of this writing, are roughly 11,000 votes in Michigan, 23,000 votes in Wisconsin and 68,000 votes in Pennsylvania. There’s no precedent for a recount overturning margins like those or anything close to them. Instead, the question is whether there was a massive, systematic effort to manipulate the results of the election.

So what we’re talking about is more like an audit or an investigation. An investigation that would look for signs of deliberate and widespread fraud, such as voting machines’ having been hacked, whole batches of ballots’ intentionally having been disregarded, illegal coordination between elections officials and the campaigns, and so on. Such findings would probably depend on physical evidence as much or more than they do statistical evidence. In that sense, there’s no particular reason to confine the investigation to Wisconsin, Michigan or Pennsylvania, the states that Hillary Clinton lost (somewhat) narrowly. If the idea is to identify some sort of smoking gun indicating massive fraud perpetrated by the Trump campaign — or by the Clinton campaign, or by the Russian government — it might be in a state Clinton won, such as New Hampshire or Minnesota. Or for that matter, it might be in a state Trump won fairly easily, like Ohio or Iowa.

He goes on to argue that the burden of proof ought to be high. This goes without saying. As noted in the previous post, any claim or allegation that might favor a Democratic candidate/politician/point-of-view routinely has to meet an extremely high burden of proof. By contrast, a conservative who cries "It's a conspiracy!" need offer no proof whatsoever -- as the Orange One himself demonstrated in recent tweets (and as Alex Jones demonstrates on a daily basis).

Such are the rules under which our society now must operate.

I'll be honest: I have no hope that Hillary Clinton will ever be president. Nevertheless, the search for truth must continue, for at least three reasons:

1. If we can demonstrate that Trump's win was illegitimate, he will have less credibility. Few will believe him if he resorts to a "Reichstag Fire" strategy to increase his power. Republicans will have fewer qualms about impeachment.

2. If we can demonstrate that Russia undertook covert action to change American history, we will awaken the citizenry to a threat which many still do not take seriously.

3. The search for truth is, in and of itself, an absolute good.

The turnout mystery. Although I have not yet heard today's "Bradcast," his interview segment seems to be of particular interest:

We are joined by long-time election fraud investigator and author Richard Hayes Phillips, to discuss all of that and his detailed report about the unusually large apparent voter turnout numbers in many rural WI municipalities and the difficulty citizens have in verifying and overseeing those numbers. As Phillips explains, there are horrible public reporting requirements for both results and for same-day voter registration provisions in the state.

"At a minimum, the problem is a lack of transparency," Phillips tells me today. "We have no way of knowing how many registered voters there are [in WI]. If you don't know how many registered voters there are, you don't know if too many ballots were cast." His report finds that, based on the latest state-reported voter registration numbers, there were "193 towns with turnout of 90% or better, 25 towns with turnout of 95% or better, and 7 towns with turnout of 100% or better." Those exceedingly high turnout numbers are likely lower in reality, due to same-day registration in WI, but the lack of reporting requirements for those numbers is "unacceptable".

How can a town have a turnout of more than 100 percent?

Wisconsin is a strange place. Did you know that some Wisconsinites have spotted ghost elephants in the woods near Baraboo? There's also "Chicken Alley" outside of the small town of Seymour, where one can see ghost chickens as they, uh, cross the road. (Don't ask me why.) So maybe those mysteriously high turnout numbers can be explained by ghost voters.

Welcome to Trump country!