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What Is Up with the Critics of the Critics of the 2020 Election?
Do the voting systems really use fractions to report votes–like 100 votes, with Biden getting 55% of them? Do they really report impossible results–like 101 votes, with Biden still getting 55%? People say that sort of thing, for example Just a Mom here. And some old news called the Ramsland Affidavit here talks about using vote ratios to cheat.
Now it would be a really big deal if the critics of the 2020 election were correct that statistically impossible vote ratios occurred in the vote updates–like a string of new vote-counts from numerous different times and places having the same ratio down to 8 or 9 decimal points. It’s even somewhat of a big deal if all we have is the fractional reporting in the first place. It’s just weird to convert an addition of 5 votes for Trump and 4 votes for Biden to a fraction instead of just . . . adding them. It’s unsettling. This isn’t how you’re supposed to do elections. One vote is supposed to just be one vote.
While continuing my quest to figure out the 2020 election, I recently did some Google searches to see if anyone had refuted the claims about the statistically impossible ratios from Just a Mom and others.
Maybe I’m not Googling hard enough. Google led me here, and I was flabbergasted. It’s a blog post on Medium.com. In internet time, it’s ancient–January 2021. It addresses the Ramsland Affidavit’s claims about vote ratios, and it argues that our election technology is not counting votes as fractions.
I initially thought that the post was telling us to not believe that the voting technology uses fractions to report votes. But now I think it was probably just telling us not to believe that they do any harm by it. In other words, when it says “fractional voting” isn’t real, the term “fractional voting” does not refer to the use of fractions in the vote-counts; it refers to a use of fractions that reduces some votes to mere fractions of votes.
I’ve had to rewrite this post with this new interpretation in mind. I’m still a bit surprised, although more circumspect about how I might be misinterpreting the blog post’s (somewhat unclear) writing.
What surprises me is not that Google didn’t lead me to any refutations of Just a Mom, et al.; I’ve grown sadly accustomed to not finding refutations of some claims about the 2020 election–although one does sometimes find refutations of other claims. What I find surprising is this bit in the beginning of the post to which Google did lead me.
People noticed that the ‘running total’ percentage share of the vote in the output from Dominion’s voting machines was given as a fraction of 1 — standard practice when writing computer code. They used this to allege that the system was ‘weighing’ votes of a particular candidate — multiplying the vote totals by a weight to ensure a Biden win without being detected.
The post then copies an image of the voting data on which Ramsland bases his views.
Notice that this is an acknowledgment that this evidence is real.
I hate to think in memes, but I think we have to on this one, if only for a moment:
If you don’t want us to believe that votes are being reduced to fractions of votes by means of a vote-counting system that uses fractions, then you have one job: Tell us that this evidence from the voting records is not real.
I don’t understand why someone would accept this evidence, seemingly never questioning it, and then assure us that this thing isn’t happening.
The post does give this argument:
The strongest argument against the fractional voting theory is the paper trail that has to follow every vote — referred to here — and how can a ‘fractional’ vote correspond to a paper ballot?
How indeed? Coincidentally, the critics of the 2020 election have been wondering the same thing.
There is also this Ockham’s Razor argument at the end:
It is very hard to comment at greater length, because the evidence for the fractional voting allegation is so thin. Fortunately, Dominion and Smartmatic are suing, so we may be seeing some more detail — or speedy retractions, similar to the ones we have already seen.
A fair point: not much information (at least in January 2021), and if there really isn’t much evidence then that sure is a point against believing it!
But one wonders–if votes aren’t being reduced to fractions of votes, why isn’t there a ton of evidence against it? Some evidence would be incomprehensible to normal people. (This is a rare respect in which I count as normal.) But I can understand the evidence of denials in expert testimony from government officials, voting technology people from manufacturers all the way down to Edison Research, university scholars, and so on.
How hard is it for journalists to hunt down some of that testimony? Why is Google sending me to a blog post from January 2021 that doesn’t say a thing against the evidence for it? I should have hundreds–nay, thousands–of search results from hordes of officials and other gatekeepers of information drenching me in evidence that this sort of thing is no more real than, for example, Hobbits.
At this point, I’ve heard so much about fractions of votes that an Ockham’s Razor argument, which may have made some sense three years ago, doesn’t apply anymore: Nerds citing the data have been telling us about it for years, and I don’t know where to find evidence against it. At this point, the lack of said evidence is evidence that it’s a real thing.
Now, I don’t want to pick on this particular blog post too much. I have no reason to think its author personally had the responsibility to dig up some evidence as early as January 2021. But I am puzzled by the apparent acceptance, by someone telling us not to believe in something, of that evidence for it which should be the first thing refuted.
That is–if the evidence is any good. But you tell me! Follow the link; interpret the chart. I think that first row is telling us about 64 votes of which 0.534 were for Trump. So Trump got 34.176 votes that time–makes sense, right? Stop asking questions about an election, conspiracy theorist!
And it’s surprising that Google led me to something so remarkably uninformative instead of to some useful response to the critics of the 2020 election. And it sure looks like votes are being counted using fractions of a total; it even looks like some fractions of votes are being counted. And I don’t know where to find the refutations, if they even exist, of far worse allegations than this. We are in a very bad place.
Postscript:
A little more Googling this morning turned up this. Take it with a grain of salt if you like–it appears to be a December 2020 document given to a court in Michigan by some critics of the election. It says that an expert on the other side of the debate admitted to the existence of fractions of votes in the records and speculated that it was just a rounding error when “workers at Edison Research multiplied total votes cast by vote shares that had been rounded” (a quote recognized by neither Google nor DuckDuckGo searches). Perhaps the Ockham’s Razor argument was already outdated in January 2021.
Published in Elections
A couple of decades ago, Google was a search engine. Now it does that just enough to serve as an intelligence asset to identify who is asking the wrong questions. Welkome to Amerika, Komrade. Enjoy your stay.
First they’d have to want to.
Google also presumes to know what question you should have asked in place of the wrong one you submitted.
It’s so nice to have Big Brother looking out for me.
Google was once great. Then it realized it could sway elections by, what, 16 percent? And it started swaying public opinion on every subject except model trains and knitting (I’m not sure about the knitting). I don’t know any good search engines anymore.
In software engineering, we treat integers and fractions very differently.
Integers simply count. Fractional numbers are treated like a decimal fraction, such as 1.125, but represented in binary instead of in decimal, so that would be 1.001.
We all know how some fractions cannot be accurately represented as a decimal, like 1/3 is 0.333333…, repeating forever. And with a limited number of digits, 3 times 0.333333… will not equal 1.0.
Same with binary fractions.
The simplest weird example is 0.1 + 0.2 = 0.30000000000000004 on most computers.
This is because 1/10 in binary is 0.000110011…, repeating forever, so when you have a limited number of bits representing, it’ll be off.
Software engineers are intimately familiar with this. And they go out of their way to avoid fractional number representations in binary. That’s standard practice.
So it would wildly inappropriate for a software engineer to represent a naturally integer value as a fraction.
When you refer to integers and fractions, is that the same as FORTRAN Integer vs. Real or Double Precision declarations?
Some hand calculators truncate decimals and others do not. Why would election machines have to truncate?
Edited: wouldn’t replaced with would
What – you mean Hobbits aren’t really real?
Aristotle:
Every machine must truncate unless it stays symbolic through the calculation.
Too bad this fraction business got misrepresented — badly — by our side. We have a lot of illiterate, innumerate friends. The left has more, but they have the media changing diapers for them.
This fraction thing does look deeply stupid. Play with fire, get burned. But it isn’t what our friends were saying.
Yes. But this can be done. Can’t it?
Interesting. Now do the negative Trump votes.
I believe you’re referring to a topic in a future post.
But the long version of it is here, in chapter 9.
Is that like a thumbs down Dislike? I can’t keep up with the digital age.
Inappropriate, but perhaps profitable! The machines/software can be made totally transparent and secure or corrupted. It is up to the purchaser to specify what they want. Clearly, many states choose corruptible machines and I assume they worst.
My first thought when I started reading Saint Augustine’s OP and I read he was doing his 2020 election integrity research using Google as his search engine was …. using one of the (D)/FBI’s primary
useful idiotscompliant censors as his information source will prove to be the opposite of helpful.What is the alternative?
Yes, and it’s more expensive than not doing it. The far better answer would have been to simply report counts instead of half-assing this cat and cow arrangement.
It smacks of fraudulent intent. Why would a system be designed this way? It does NOT show weighting of votes, which like the one guy in a klan suit at any gathering, will be the only thing reported about that gathering.
I understand just enough of this business to duck as it grazes my balding head.
I believe that SA is an honest broker, doing his best to understand and convey what he has learned. I appreciate that he always provides links to his sources. But, alas, his sources are not helpful when I can barely make sense of the executive summary.
As always, many thanks to SA for his continuing efforts. I will continue to follow along as best I can.
Google, as it was originally formulated, vastly reduced the cost of open source intelligence. State intelligence agencies could not tolerate this and intervened. It’s one of many reasons why Google is way worse than it used to be. And no search engine will ever be permitted to achieve that previous functionality.
I think the electronic voting systems are shoddy products developed by vendors awarded lavish contracts based on political connections. Most of the principals in these companies are former political functionaries and not computer programmers.
Yes. (Though I haven’t touched FORTRAN for 40-something years.)
Hand calculators and desk calculators work in decimal.
(Because it’s much more difficult to convert to binary, perform one calculation, and convert back to decimal again to display the result.)
It’s been 28 years since I used FORTRAN and even more since I worked with a machine that required us to use REAL/Floating Point variable declarations for what we knew would be integers. Reason being that the potential values for the data were greater than could be represented in 16-bit integers. I don’t remember any failures or inaccuracies of a magnitude that caused problems. I suppose today almost all machines are 64-bit, but that was not always the case.
Also, the larger the whole number/integer part of the number, the fewer bits remain to represent any fraction, which makes the fractions even less accurate.
The lawsuits by the voting machine companies seem to be an unconstitutional infringement upon free speech. They may be private companies, but should that mean that we can’t criticize or speculate about the voting system used in public elections?
It’s like when Ray Epps sued Fox News. Yes he’s a private individual, but the questions that Fox was focusing on weren’t really about him personally, but rather about the lack of interest in his actions by law enforcement, and what that meant about possible government involvement in Jan. 6.
These lawsuits effectively prevent people from talking about matters of public importance.
OSCAR, the Oregon State Calculating Aid to Research, running on the CDC-3300 system up through at least the early 80s, used to do that. You got different results depending on how you input the equation.
Everybody has been using IEEE Standard 754 Floating Point representation for a long time now. This has been incorporated into the languages, the libraries, and the hardware.
But regardless, fractional numbers are inherently approximations. And to use them to represent an integer value in a reporting process is clearly a sign of wrongdoing.