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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of curious statistics about ballot counts in a few swing states, including a record-breaking 90% turn-out in Wisconsin.

https://theredelephants.com/there-is-undeniable-mathematical...

(Ignore the flame-bait headline, and go right to the charts.)

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Look, you seem like a bright and engaged fellow, but this right here is a perfect example of how easy it is for false information to get magnified.

This claim started as a tweet by Donal Trump Junior but can be easily fact checked by looking up the voter count for 2020 and the voting population of Wisconsin (3.2M against 4.5M), or in a desperate time a quick Google.

I expect better from the community here and from you personally.

What specifically in the post is false?

Voting population is not registered voters. Apparently Wisconsin had a truly unprecedented night with same-day registrations, mostly voting for nobody but Joe Biden.

We need a more auditable electoral system if we want people to have faith in the system. We just came off four years of claims of a hacked election, and it looks like that may be the new norm.

Why do you say “apparently”?

When we hear a claim and the reaction is “that’s incredible and unprecedented”, the reaction we should have should not be to accept that claim but to default to critical thinking.

In this case the public records are available and easy to access. It took me less than 10 minutes to get to primary sources. This an easily falsifiable claim.

The only way we enable the norm to be claims of stolen elections is by failing to access claims like these critically.

Again, I hold you and this community to a higher standard.

Hi there. You are comparing one fraction where the denominator is the number of total eligible voters with another fraction where the denominator is the number of registered voters. The post claims turnout jumped 30%. This is false.

I’m genuinely interested in understanding how we can agree on this, so could you tell me how you feel about this explanation?

The nearly 90% number is of registered voters. 72% of eligible WI voters voted in the 2020 election, which is about average, e.g. 2004 was 72.9%.

Just so you know, that's still an incredible turnout that as a democracy proponent we should emulate throughout the land -- but I also know from local elections... I'm hard pressed to understand how that happened.

Genuinely curious how you're hard pressed to understand how it happened. Are the GP's numbers wrong? Are you saying WI has been fraudulent for many decades but went undetected? Is there a component I'm missing?

At the moment we really don’t have every piece of information needed to say it’s without a doubt fraudulent — as in how many new voters registered just in time for the election and are not in the denominator.

I’m saying if I were to run an election and have 90% of registered voters turn out for a state, I’d be a hot commodity for many campaigns. That’s an achievement like no other...

Yes, you're understanding is it's a hot commodity and an achievement like no other but what I don't understand is what lead you to that conclusion. Even looking nationwide (not just at a battleground state in a hot election year) over the last 50 years I can't find anything backing your claims https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/FT_17... particularly in the last 20 years. Again I'm curious how you've come to your conclusion not trying to understand what your conclusion was, are we looking at different data? Are you thinking out of eligible population or total population instead of registered population?

Either way voter registration and turnout gets reviewed pretty heavily both before and after each election, I'm just curious what is making you think either is out of the ordinary this year.

Wow — definitely not my state, and looking nationwide when talking about states, and counties, is kinda apples to oranges right?

Well... this is sorta what I'm asking you to tell me about :).

matthewmcg provided numbers that when looking at eligible voter turnout WI hasn't jumped this year and I provided numbers that the ~90% is quite reasonable for registered voter turnout for typical states so that half of the number isn't a surprise either.

What I've been asking you is what information leads you to the claims you're making. If the above information has somehow been apples to oranges then great, then please show me the oranges that lead you to think WI turnout % was anomalous!

thy are calculating turnout improperly.

Historical data uses votes/voting eligible population

The 90% number comes from votes/registered voters.

If you calculate turnout the way wisconsin has historically done it, turnout is in line with past elections.

It’s only curious because you and the author misunderstand the data.

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