Code for The Economist's election model for 2020
github.com
github.com
A piece of it:
https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1294263127668924416...
Well, once he rose to popularity, 538 has been part of the mainstream media, affiliated with the NYTimes, then owned by ESPN, then transferred within the Disney Empire to ABC News. But, sure, it's pretty consistently been one of the better (not just election) statistical forecasting shops in the mainstream media.
We're saying, "he's better at predicting things than the mainstream media!" The issue is that the mainstream media's bar is so low, there is no bar. And the reason this guy is somewhat respected is because his bar is only slightly higher than rat shit, which seems amazing compared to what we're used to.
The guy sucks at actually modelling outcomes. Because everyone does. He just sucks very slightly less than everyone else. Maybe the issue isn't that Nate Silver is slightly better than average, maybe the issue is that we shouldn't be sharing this garbage on the news, since it's not reflective of reality.
It's like saying, "sure, Cuba is a human rights nightmare, but it's okay to trade and interact with them, cause at least it ain't the Congo!"
I think he does a better job at emphasizing the uncertainty while still showing that polls can be pretty reliable.
Why was it a fundamental failure? A 5% chance is one in twenty, it happens.
95% is “Obama vs a dog”. Maybe in another country. Every 20 elections, Obama is bitten by the dog and doesn’t make it.
That's what it was, don't forget how impossible it seemed at the time, it was a giant upset and shock.
> You think if Hillary went up against Trump, America would choose her 19 times out of 20?
If you are using "Hillary" and "Trump" figuratively about future elections with similarly matched candidates, then yes, see above.
Only in your filter bubble.
I wouldn't take his not being prepared as evidence of anything.
I'm not saying she ran a bad campaign (though she did). I'm talking about her "negatives". Decades of scandals. (Yeah, Trump had them too, but at a minimum it meant that Hillary couldn't use Trump's scandals against him. Also, Hillary's scandals got a lot more national coverage when they happened than Trump's did.) Benghazi. The email server (and with it, the impression that she thought that rules were for other people). The impression that she thought that she was owed the presidency, rather than having to earn it. The way the DNC chose her over Sanders, overruling the will of many of the primary voters. And on and on.
It wasn't obvious at the time, because much of the press was pro-Hillary. But she was a terrible candidate. I think if the Democrats had run anyone else, they probably would have won against Trump.
Biden isn't disliked as much as Hillary was. In that sense, he's a better candidate. (Trump is disliked as much as Hillary was, and then some. Perhaps that was your point.) But Biden doesn't generate any enthusiasm, except that he's "not Trump". (In fairness, some of the support for Trump was that he wasn't Hillary.)
1. Trump is no longer an unknown.
2. Biden is far more popular than Clinton was at her peak.
3. Biden is male (which is sadly very relevant in US elections).
4. We are no longer in the biggest economic expansion in US history. We may be in a historic recession.
5. There is a pandemic that has killed 60x the number of Americans that died on 9/11, and it is no under control in the US at all.
6. Kamala Harris is not like Tim Kaine.
7. Lots of anti-Trump voters are afraid to be complacent this time.
8. Suburban women, true independent voters (those who dislike both candidates), and older Americans are either breaking for Biden or have substantially switched to Democratic support after going for Trump in 2016.
A better question would be: is anything the same this time around?
4. But the biggest (longest, anyway) economic expansion was largely under Obama. That wasn't a reason to vote for Trump in 2016.
The rest of your list I agree with, with the possible exception of 8. I'm not sure that we can tell. I think the climate is so polarized, and the Democrats have the microphone to such a degree, that people who support Trump aren't willing to say in public that they do so. But you could in fact be right. We'll see.
For #4 the economic growth was under Obama but it meant that at the time of the election people were (mostly) fat and happy; the cost of taking a chance seemed to be lower and it was easier to tell yourself that 'this guy is a businessman, he could not fuck up this strong economy and might even do better.' Now people can see what a catastrophic mistake it was to make this assumption, but I can almost understand the reasoning. I think the point of claim #4 was basically that the most that any candidate could claim about the economy is that they would have recovered it better or done it faster -- another important claim that could be made about it would be that you would make sure that the 'right people' got more benefits from the rising economy and not those elites; the basic populist economic playbook.
So, 538 did actually change their error estimate during the 2016 campaign to better account for problems of correlation. From a purely mathematical standpoint that is kinda the wrong thing to do, but it is arguably better in line with what the readers expect an error estimate to be.
Either they spin it that they were perfectly correct in those 95% of cases where they get it right, or they spin it that they were the least wrong (and therefore the most correct) in the other 5% of cases where everyone gets it wrong.
There's a joke that you should always express 60% confidence in your predictions, since if the prediction pans out, you can claim to be right, but if it fails, you can bring attention to the "two times out of five wrong" part.
There is not enough data to back-test their model on a single election which happens every 4 years, so the claim that a 60% prediction is fundamentally very different from a 95% prediction is statistically dubious.
[ADDED: Or maybe something like that really is a few percent probability and you can end up with a 95% probability anyway. It just feels as if there's some upper limit to what you can measure using polls.]
Was it? What's the likely hood that someone who was polling as well as Clinton losing? 15% like The Upshot at the NY Times had? ~7% like with Sam Wang's model? Even 7% is around 1 in 14, not something shockingly improbable.
People often act like Silver's prediction was good because it gave Trump a higher probability of winning than many of the others, but that's not how probability works. If you say there's a 1/6 chance of rolling a die and getting a 2, and I say there's a 5/6 chance of rolling a 2, and we roll and get a 2, that doesn't mean that I'm correct. I don't think we've had enough rolls of elections resembling 2016 to really have a good grasp of where the percentages should be.
In general I question the value of assigning probabilities to election outcomes. This is especially true when you look at the probabilities a few months earlier - for instance, 538 had Clinton going from 49.9% on July 30, 2016 to 88.1% on October 18, 2016. Look at the probabilities they gave during the recent Democratic primaries, and they're also very bouncy. These probabilities lead people to believe that there's a much better understanding of the state of the race than what actually exists, to the point where I'd argue it edges up against pseudoscience.
Therefore I think it's fair to say that the weight an election forecast assigns to the actual winner is a direct indicator of the accuracy of its model. We aren't trying to guess at how a set of dice are weighted, knowing they'll only be thrown once—we're trying to get as close as we can to knowing who is going to vote and who they are going to vote for, and (absent some large disaster or upheaval) a misforecast will be largely attributable to systematic errors in our methodology.
who is "he" in your last sentence? ty
The page is still up, you don’t have to pull that number from memory. At the end, it was also nowhere near 95-98%. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/
His 2016 model and he himself were much more predictive of the trump EC win, he repeatedly stated it was a possible outcome, something the vast majority of other forecasters completely missed.
These polls also never factor in things like "social acceptability of admitting that one voted for an unpopular candidate" or "groupthink among media organizations which aligns to their side of the isle." The entire polling fiasco should be interpreted as the limitations of quantitative data, as opposed to qualitative data.
Our final forecast, issued early Tuesday evening, had Trump with a 29 percent chance of winning the Electoral College.1 By comparison, other models tracked by The New York Times put Trump’s odds at: 15 percent, 8 percent, 2 percent and less than 1 percent. And betting markets put Trump’s chances at just 18 percent at midnight on Tuesday, when Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, cast its votes.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-fivethirtyeight-gav...
Good luck measuring those.
Consider this on the individual poller level. Every four years you get a new batch of pundit driven ideas about what "really" driving the voters. Suppose you add a question that's meant to magically reveal hidden voter preferences that are hidden by shame. What do the results of that question mean for the bottom line? Well, you're probably going to need multiple election cycle to find out. And by the time you do, the pundit have a new pile of bullshit for you to implement.
Now take it up a level. You've got a bunch of pollsters of caring predictive quality. Let them figure out what works best and include an estimate of their quality in how you process their results. I have no idea is pollster X's new question about cheese preferences is predictive, and honestly neither do they until a couple more cycles pass. All you can do is wight by past performance.
KISS wins in these situations.
Not sure why you are getting downvotes. This phenomenon has been academically researched and documented under the name “preference falsification” with many past examples. If anyone is interested the 1995 book “Private Truths, Public Lies” is on this research.
IMO LSE is a negative signal of someone's mathematical / statistical skill. I once interviewed someone that was doing a PhD in Math at LSE, and couldn't program or solve simple math / probability questions.
It's quite obvious why - if you want to study math in London, you go to Imperial. LSE isn't probably even a second choice.
..and that's only presidential elections. See https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/checking-our-work/ for their quantitative reflections on accuracy. Looks pretty good.
Yeah, that’s what you’re supposed to do - use new evidence to update your beliefs.
There are also tools and websites out there that people can use to make predictions and track their own calibration over time. They're pretty fun in terms of encouraging one's own sense of rationality.
>In that sense, the best tip-off that the forecasts are different is they have Biden at 97% to win the popular vote, and have sometimes been as high as 98% (and 99% before they revised their model) whereas we are at 82%. You're getting up to 97-98%, you're getting VERY confident.
Silver made the same point about probability before the 2016 election, and got into a similar Twitter argument (https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/nate-silver-huffingto...). One guess on who proved to be correct.
This isn't actually true. The probability of winning is based on aggregation of regional probabilities. The same national vote probability distribution can lead to very, very, different election probability distributions due to regional variation. The electoral college essentially guarantees that the national probability distribution is worthless for actually predicting who will be President.
If candidate B then wins, it does not mean that our analysis was "proved to be [in]correct". By itself, it doesn't actually say anything about the quality of our analysis. After all, we explicitly pointed out that this was a possibility, and it would be strange to argue "your analysis said this might happen, and then it did, so your analysis was incorrect". There's just not enough information to draw any conclusions.
How about 100 times? 10 times? 2 times?
At what point does evidence cease to 'say anything about the quality of our analysis'? The answer is never. Every datapoint can be used to update your priors according to bayesian statistics.
Especially for someone who titles them-self "Chief Scientist"
Aren't regional probabilities just conditions on the national distribution? Building the national Presidential election distribution from the conditioned distributions versus just using the sampled national distribution is bayesian statistics.
>The probability of winning is based on the popular support for a candidate
This was the argument you made. And I don't see how this is Bayesian vs frequency when all I am saying is that the same national popular vote distribution can have large variance in regional conditional distributions which leads to large variance in election outcome distribution due to the electoral college.
Sounds pretty bayesian to me.
But in 538's case they use the similar methods to forecast many individual contests like presidential primaries, presidential elections, senate elections, house elections, governor elections, club soccer, college football, March Madness men and women, MLB-NBA-NFL games and playoffs, etc.
Multiple-year track records over many events so you can compare their forecasts to actual results over time.
Get the data and compute your own error rate here: https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/checking-our-work-data
Most of the linked thread isn't about his own work or the Economist model, but about the false description of their forecasts as being pretty close, made as part of the (true) description that fairly small changes in intermediate results in the Economist model would lead to the same bottom line forecast as Silver's model.
Or I guess another way to put it is, given the highly polarised two party system in the US, elections tend to be fairly balanced and small differences have an inflated impact on the results.
But whether you see the difference as small (1% difference in popular vote) or large (3x difference in chance of victory), the models are different, and one of them must be better, although it’s probably impossible to tell which it is!
Comparing models across multiple elections and calculating the Bayesian regret is one way to do it. The models get tweaked each election so this isn’t exact, but it could give a sense of the skill of each forecaster.
Does anyone have links for previous election forecasts from Morris and/or Gelman?
As long as the same inputs aren’t fundamentally unavailable (and even then if the model has systematic handling of missing data, though the validity of that comparison is less clear) you can run the tweaked model on past elections (the main problem there is since those are probably the data used to generate them, it rewards overfitting; you might do better by running them against past elections with differing sets of random dropout of input data points [individual instances of particular polls, etc.] to mitigate that.)
I'm with Nate Silver on this one, 72% and 89% are as close as 75% and 50% in terms of being double the likelihood for a Republican win.
We will likely never know which model is more accurate but given Nate Silvers history on these predictions I trust him a bit more than others.
In a postscript (P.S.) Andrew Gelman clarified that the forecast distributions are close and not the probabilities of winning [0].
> "I’m not saying that 72% and 89% are close in probabilistic terms. I agree that there’s a big difference between 8-1 odds and 3-1 odds. What I’m saying is that the large difference in these probabilities arises from small differences in the forecast distributions. Changing a forecast from 0.54 +/- 0.02 to 0.53 +/- 0.025 is highly consequential to the win probability, but as uncertainty distributions they are similar and they are hard to distinguish directly. You can get much different headline probabilities from similar underlying distributions."
[0]: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/08/14/new-fiveth...
Then there's the one - off problem of evaluating how good the prediction was. If you think it's 95+ for one side then yes, you're embarrassed when it goes the other way. If you think it's 75 then you should be wrong one out of four anyway, but people will still think you messed up.
Impressive work regardless, I always enjoy these stats things.
Even without the political fight over USPS funding, it is going to be extremely hard for them to turn around in < 1 week as required in many states, there are also the issue with votes that which are postmarked earlier but delivered later than election date( this is with good reason as you don't want results delayed if you wait for votes to come in)
I am not sure how anyone, without detailed data access to postal operations can accurately predict how much of this going to be a problem.
https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2020/06/12/modelled-citiz...
The podcast is for a general audience so it doesn't go into details of statistical modelling used in this model, but it does touch on polling, failures of polling to accurately predict results.
Here's the last poll Google collected in Wisconsin in 2016: https://datastudio.google.com/s/kcPRGFaMaO0
Even though there were more people supporting Trump in Wisconsin (or rather any non-left candidate), they couldn’t tell that in polls openly because is goes against vocal minority.
E.g. Poll on cnn.com and fox.com will give you opposite results.
Also different age/wealth/profession groups have particular leanings on political spectrum and particular average level of computer proficiency.
E.g. a farmer in Idaho would likely to vote for any Republican candidate and simultaneously less likely to participate in any online polling.
"Unskewing" polls dates back to 2012 (Dean Chambers and UnskewedPolls.com). He was doing what you describe - applying his own likely voter model to all polls, based on party affiliation. It did not work. Better to use each pollster's likely voter model as it is, since then you have an ensemble and possible cancelation of error.
The only question is which way does the majority lean, while the edges pull further apart.
One party is on record as saying that their own successful efforts in voter suppression last election won them the rust belt and as a result the presidency.
After seeing it being so successful at tipping the scales last time it appears it will be even more heavily relied on this year.
There are the most recent familiar hints in the news regarding mail in ballots, but so many more examples since the overturning of the voting rights act. How this isn't more of a scandal our democracy is frankly shocking.
It's extremely difficult to talk about this in a purely non-partisan way because there really a case of "both sides are doing it". One party is effectively utilizing this to obtain, maintain and increase their hold on govt positions.
> None of this is a coincidence. Republicans responded to the election of Barack Obama in 2008 not by trying to broaden their own base or appeal to a changing nation, but by modernizing voter suppression tactics out of the old Jim Crow playbook. Chief Justice John Roberts’s shameful 5-4 decision in 2013’s Shelby County v Holder ripped the heart out of the prime enforcement mechanism of the Voting Rights Act. Roberts argued that the South had changed, and such protections were no longer necessary. 1965, Roberts suggested, was a long time ago, in a different nation, across a changed South. The tens of thousands of Georgians whose voting precincts were closed, forcing them to endure six-hour lines to vote during a pandemic would like a word with him Roberts’s calamitous ignorance has done grievous damage.
"Crosscheck" app/system which is frequently run against democratic counties was found to have a 200 to 1 false positive to true negative rate. It's still being heavily pushed.
> Crosscheck is a national database designed to check for voters who are registered in more than one state by comparing names and dates of birth. Researchers at Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and Microsoft found that for every legitimate instance of double registration it finds, Crosscheck's algorithm returns approximately 200 false positives.[108] Kobach has been repeatedly sued by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other civil rights organizations for trying to restrict voting rights in Kansas.
> Often, voter fraud is cited as a justification for such measures, even when the incidence of voter fraud is low. In Iowa, lawmakers passed a strict voter ID law with the potential to disenfranchise 260,000 voters. Out of 1.6 million votes cast in Iowa in 2016, there were only 10 allegations of voter fraud; none were cases of impersonation that a voter ID law could have prevented. Only one person, a Republican voter, was convicted. Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate, the architect of the bill, admitted, "We've not experienced widespread voter fraud in Iowa."
We're reaching a very concerning threshold of election integrity that is being under appreciated. Our image of ourselves versus our reality is starting to diverge drastically.
https://time.com/5852837/voter-suppression-obstacles-just-am...
https://www.npr.org/2018/10/23/659784277/republican-voter-su...
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-ackno...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/08/new-postal-service-p...
There was a action. That action was a effective repeal of the voting rights act. The Supreme Court performed that action.
A political party responded to that act by rolling back voting rights.
Do you have a link to the record where that party says this?
“"Many Blacks didn’t go out to vote for Hillary ‘cause they liked me. That was almost as good as getting the vote, you know, and it was great,” the president-elect said, according to an audio recording of the meeting shared with POLITICO.”
This is Trump making an assertion about the possible motives of non-voters.
It is not at all a smoking-gun admission of voter suppression.
I’m sympathetic to the idea that voter suppression is a predominantly Republican strategy, as there does seem to be plenty of circumstantial evidence for it, but declaring a slam-dunk proof “on record” like in the GP post is overstating the evidence and ultimately harms their cause as it makes them look untrustworthy.
(That is, unless there is some better evidence for the claim than the link above!)
I don't know what quote the OP was referring to, but a couple of searches turn up dozens of quotes from Trump, Trump advisors, and major Republican operatives that might fit the bill. The problem is that they might not fit your bill -- which is really why you should be the one doing the Googling, rather than having someone hunt down quotes so you can reject them.
The first two results that popped up (there are dozens of others):
https://www.businessinsider.com/leaked-audio-trump-adviser-r...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/30/trump-republ...
I think that's called "being honest".
From 2012:
> House Majority Leader Mike Turzai (R), who said even more clearly in a 2012 speech that voter ID would help Romney carry his state.
> "Voter ID, which is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania: done," Turzai said while listing his legislature's accomplishments.
From 2016:
> "We battled to get voter ID on the ballot for the November '16 election," Schimel told conservative host Vicki McKenna on WISN (1130 AM) on Thursday.
>"How many of your listeners really honestly are sure that Senator (Ron) Johnson was going to win re-election or President Trump was going to win Wisconsin if we didn’t have voter ID to keep Wisconsin’s elections clean and honest and have integrity?"
It is well established that voter ID is not preventing any form of widespread in person voter fraud because there is essentially none. Even the president's own commission couldn't find anything of note. But it is extremely effective at suppressing voting of certain groups. For example Texas where valid forms of Id were military Id and concealed carry permits (thinks more likely held by republicans), but invalid forms were state employee photo IDs and university photo IDs (things more likely to be held by those voting democratic).
From prior studies voter roll purges like Crosscheck, eliminate 200 false positives from voter rolls for every 1 true positive. So instead of stopping it, it was rolled out nation wide.[3]
Or just check out wikipedia.[4]
[1] https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2018/04/13/atto...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/07/re...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/07/20/this-...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...
Absurd. Maybe we should just call it "mind-reading"?
Name Address Photo And critically an EXPIRATION DATE
Texas Handgun licenses has all 4, University ID's and Employee ID's lack an expiration date thus are not elibible as a valid form of ID
That is not Voter Suppression
Further if you happen to not have one of the 7 Accepted forms of ID (which is unlikely given all the different circumstances that a person needs to have one of these to get a job, open a bank account, fly on a plane, rent an apartment or 1000's of other thing that you need an ID for) the State of Texas Also allows you to fill out a declaration of why you do not have said ID, and use a Utility Bill, Bank Statement, Government Check, PayCheck or Birth Certificate to vote. [1]
This hardly sounds like an unreasonable burden to vote
[1]https://www.sos.state.tx.us/elections/forms/id/poster-11x17-...
Seems to me the only disenfranchisement is people that can not legally vote in the first place
If you want voter IDs; that's fine. And if you can really just walk to any grocery and get a voter ID, that's fine too. But let's take Iowa's planned voter ID law of 2007 as an example; this requires a drivers license or a passport or a US birth certificate. If you don't have such documentation (and surprise; poor people are more often lacking such documentation) then you have to invest time and effort.
You seem to think that voter impersonation seems to be a problem. It has been shown that this is not the case[0]. So, what problem exactly are voter IDs supposed to solve?
you have to invest time and energy into everything in life (including voting itself), this is not a valid argument at all in my opinion.
If you can not invest the very small amount of time and energy needed to get an ID, then you certainly are not investing the time and energy to research and understand the people you are voting for and/or the initiatives that appear on the ballot
>But let's take Iowa's planned voter ID law of 2007
I am not sure what the "planned" law in 2007 was, nor do I really care what is was since you use the terminology of "planned" I assume it did not actually pass. Looking at the actual law of Iowa[1] any voter that does not have a Drivers License is automatically mailed a voter ID card when they Register to vote, and Iowa also allows for Election Day Registration for which you can use an Existing ID or Proof of Residency [2] such as Residential lease, Utility bill (including a cell phone bill), Bank statement, Paycheck, Government check or other government document
So again I do not find this law, that is actually on the books to be burdensome
Can you point to an Actual law, on the books today and activity enforced, that has the burdens you claim to be sure deterrents to raise to the level of suppression or are you just reading too many NYTimes stories about the evils of Voter ID to actually research the topic yourself?
>>You seem to think that voter impersonation seems to be a problem
Point to any statement I have made that says or even implies that? Every other interaction I have with the government requires ID I fail to see why Voting should be exempt from this requirement.
[1] https://sos.iowa.gov/elections/voterinformation/voterIDfaq.h...
[2] https://sos.iowa.gov/elections/voterinformation/edr.html
You might consider yourself privileged, then. Because there is extensive research about the costs that are associated with voter id laws[0].
> or are you just reading too many NYTimes stories about the evils of Voter ID
NYT is fine, although not my favorite. I prefer The Intercept.
> Point to any statement I have made that says or even implies that?
It was my impression, that's why I wrote "You seem" instead of "You say [...]" or "You write [...]".
So; what is the problem do you want to solve with voter ids?
[0] https://today.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Ful...
This is all subjective and not even really worthy of response as the entire concept of "privilege" is itself political.
Every single person in the US would be considered privileged by people in nations with extreme poverty (living on less than $1 per day).
The "costs" your study talks about has been mitigated in any number of ways I have outlined in at least 4 comments now. you seem to simply want to ignore these things to push your political cause, that is fine but I am not going to keep addressing the same point over and over again
>NYT is fine
NYT is political biased to an extreme degree to authoritarian and collectivist ideologies and has been for decades though the last few years or so it is gotten a lot more bias dropping even the appearance of subjectivity as the bias as spread from its isolated section of the opinion pages to the actual "news" reporting
>So; what is the problem do you want to solve with voter ids?
it is not a matter of solving a problem. The need for ID happens in all facets of life and fail to see a compelling reason that voting should be excluded from this. You need an ID for all manner of other government and private interactions, you need an ID to rent a car, open a bank account, stay in a hotel, collect government / social services, and a whole host of other things
It is implausible to me that a large number functioning adult in modern society does not have any of the forms of ID allowed under Voter ID laws, and to the extent that a person does not have said ID the solution is to make obtaining an ID easier and less costly not to simply prohibit voter ID.
You believe Voter ID laws disenfranchise poor people, I think poor people not having access to an ID is far far far more likely to disenfranchise them, therefore providing easier and greater access to ID's for the poor, disabled and other groups will in the end be a net positive for people not a negative
I agree. I therefore propose we limit this discussion to the US (and possibly western/central Europe).
> NYT is political biased to an extreme degree to authoritarian and collectivist ideologies
That's interesting. What make you think that? According to Media Bias/Fact Check[0] the NYT is considered center-left, hardly the of domain authoritarian ideologues. What do you think?
> you seem to simply want to ignore these things to push your political cause
You makes me curious! What do you think my political cause to be?
> The "costs" your study talks about has been mitigated in any number of ways I have outlined in at least 4 comments now.
If there is no need for voter ids, every cost related to them is an unnecessary barrier for the populate to fulfill its obligation to vote an thus to participate in democracy. Yes; the costs are mitigated to a degree, but as you agree yourself; why bother at all, especially if they risk to weight especially on poorer people that might otherwise be discouraged to vote?
> The need for ID happens in all facets of life and fail to see a compelling reason that voting should be excluded from this.
That's a strange formulation. But anyway; I fail to see why an ID should be necessary for most facets of life, as you put it. Why should it?
> You believe Voter ID laws disenfranchise poor people, I think poor people not having access to an ID is far far far more likely to disenfranchise them [...]
So why erect further barriers rather than removing the need for an ID in all these cases? Especially a government-issued ID?
Thanks for this interesting exchange so far!
"The president acknowledged in a 2017 meeting with civil rights leaders that he benefited from Black voters staying home."
Combined with Trump campaign's deliberate (they bragged about it in the press) paid media to convinced AfAm voters to sit the election out it's pretty damning.
Might not be as direct a quote as you're looking for but it's literally the first off the top of my head, from today only!
Another good recent one is a lot of vote-by-mail quotes from Trump.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/21/trump-black-voters-...
https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/27/13434246/donald-trump-ta...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/03/30/trump-vot...
That says nothing about voter suppression.
A couple go out on a picnic with a young man. The moment they set out, the young man begins predicting rain. The couple begin to hate him for his gloomy disposition. They meet an old man on the road. He scrounges up his face, looks up at the sky, and says there wont be any rain. He has seen many days like this in his long life and it usually clears up. The couple cheer up at once and praise him for his wisdom.
No sooner had they set up their picnic, then it begins raining heavily. On the drive back completely drenched, they look at the young man with anger. Like somehow he was responsible for the rain. They think of the old man fondly, "well atleast he tried".
Thats human psychology.
However, they went much further and burned legitimate ballots and even made fake ones.
The difference here is the PRI actively used (fake) predictions to discourage voters.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_Mexican_general_electio...
"It definitely didn't happened the way it was portrayed in the series. I saw it first hand.
The election was managed from Gobernacion (Ministry of Interior) which was subservient to the PRI. We didn't have the same controls as we have today. The PRI had representatives in every little town in the whole country. My father was one of these and I accompanied him that day. The evening on the election day, they gather all the booths in the region at the mayors office. They had a team of people changing the paper votes. Removing some and adding some and changing the minutes accordingly. The PRI already had this election fixing infrastructure. In 1988, they had already been in power for 59 years. They knew how to fix the election. They had it down to a science. But in 1988 my father told me that this was the first time they had to do it because they may lose. All years before that, they did it just to get better participation numbers.
The PRI was a state Party. For many, many years it had complete control of every town, every state, every district. All the Governors, representatives, senators, mayors, judges in the country belonged to the PRI. May be some Narcos helped in some regions. But the PRI didn't really needed them. They had comprehensive control of the national territory. And they were able to manipulates the votes, specially in the rural areas.
The way it is portrayed in the series is really stupid. Gobernacion was in complete control of the computer systems, they didn't need a Narco to tell them how to break it.
TLDR; The fraud happened but it wasn't organized by the Narcos. At most they had a minor involvement."
I suppose there are PR firms acting in the shadow to sell their candidates to the media, but nonetheless it seems there's a lot of randomness at play.
They registered me as Republican, and I received an unexpected voter id with my name misspelled on it in the mail.
I view this as similar to polls or predictions. They'd use the same data, e.g. "In Florida, 29% of voters are registered as Republicans," in an attempt to make other people feel 'safe' joining them.
With voting, some people want to feel a moral victory, that they voted for the winning team, and knowing that there are 29%, instead of 26 or 24 or however much they'd have without cheating (I'm making these numbers up for the example), would have some marginal psychological effect on people to believe that Florida is a partly Republican state, and you're not a complete nutball if you vote for a Republican in Florida.
As an aside, I was actually able to vote with that id, and I'm not sure if that should have given me more or less confidence in the system. More in the sense that, despite someone else messing with the system, I was still able to cast my vote. Less in the sense that, I voted with an incorrect name, and I wonder how easy it might be to conjure up nonexistent people or use dead people to vote.
Just wanted to give another example of how this is true, and the scummy lengths people will go to, to affect an election outcome.
But no evidence of voter fraud exists.
Therefore, this story is not true.
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-35350419
[2]: https://www.hkupop.hku.hk/english/report/freedom/FTP_2012.pd...
How many people are going to lie about or refuse to admit voting for a candidate like Donald Trump?
I would expect this bias to be greater today than in 2016.
More polls have also moved from live interviews to automated system, where it's less likely that anyone will be "shy".
People are also more paranoid today than in 2016. If the communists take over, you do not want to be on some voted—nazi list.
That's not really true. The state-level polls were generally within normal polling error, although there was a systematic error due to educational attainment. In 2020, more pollsters have incorporated educational attainment into their weighting, so this source of error should be reduced.
Since 2016 the far left has gone insane with conspiracy theory and cancel culture
There are all kinds of reasons to believe people would lie to pollster calling them up
That is with out getting into the real sampling problems they have as when you look into the data they over-sample Democrats a good deal and I do not believe they properly account for this over sample largely because they do so on a base ratio, the problem with that is I believe they are also massively oversampling never trump republicans so they have an inaccurate republican sample for which to re-balance the polling
They are not polling Trump's base, or Trump supporters or really the moderate middle
They are getting Democrats and Never Trump republicans in their polls
Of course, you can argue that those people are not the same groups of people. But there's no evidence that this thing exists, even when people have looked for it in the past (see "shy Tory effect").
I do not think one should equate Tory and Trump either. Like I said, it is a new variable.