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.