A Peer-Reviewed Statistical Analysis of the 2020 Election

Stephen Dinan of the Washington Times reported on a new peer-reviewed paper that analyzes the results of the 2020 election and found Biden received 255,000 excess votes. It has been accepted for publication by the journal Public Choice and was written by Dr. John R. Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center. The linked pdf may not match the final printed version of the paper that will appear in the journal, but it is the copy that was peer-reviewed.

Both Dinan’s article and the paper are worth reading. Unfortunately, statistical analysis doesn’t prove anything, but I found Lott’s analysis impeccable and compelling. His discussion of the problems in several states with mail-in and absentee ballots is interesting and informative. He makes the following points very clearly.

  1. Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin did not match signatures on the outer mail-in envelopes to the official registration records. Some states, like Pennsylvania accepted ballots that were not enclosed in outer envelopes. These acts are in violations of the laws in many states and make it impossible to verify a vote’s legitimacy.
  2. Lott compares votes in adjacent voting precincts, where one of the precincts is accused of voter fraud, as with Georgia’s Fulton County, and finds statistically significant evidence of abnormal mail-in and absentee ballot results. In short, Trump’s absentee ballot share in the Fulton County precincts was depressed, compared to adjoining precincts. The largest estimate of depressed Trump votes was more than Biden’s margin in Georgia.
  3. In Pennsylvania and other states, numerous voters trying to vote in person were told they had already voted absentee, suggesting that someone else had voted using their name. The differences found to be statistically significant in Georgia were not significant in Pennsylvania, but Pennsylvania was missing some essential data for the study, which was a problem.
  4. In Nevada, 42,000 people voted more than once, 1,500 dead people voted, and 19,000 did not have a Nevada residence.
  5. In Wisconsin 28,395 people voted without identification.
  6. In Georgia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, the rejection of improper absentee ballots in 2020 were a fraction of those rejected in 2016.

The most serious problems in the 2020 election were the procedural changes made, generally illegally, in absentee and mail-in voting. This type of voting is discouraged by the Jimmy Carter and James Baker, 2005 voting commission (Carter & Baker, 2005, pp. 46-47). The past problems with absentee voting in Europe have been much worse than in the U.S., at least prior to 2020, and as a result the practice is banned in 35 of 47 countries in Europe. In ten of the countries that allow it, the voter must show up in person and present a photo id, to pick up their absentee ballot. The remaining countries temporarily allowed voting in limited cases. Europe learned the hard way what happens when mail-in ballots are not secured, just as we did.

Lott concludes that his study underestimates the extent of voter fraud because it assumes that no voter fraud occurred with in-person voting. He also concludes that there were 142,000 to 368,000 total excess Biden votes, enough to swing the election. The statistical methods used for the study look valid to me, but as noted above, statistics are not proof. They do suggest that the election should be investigated, and the study shows that the permissive, and mostly illegal, absentee, and mail-in ballot procedures used in 2020 should never be repeated. I recommend everyone read Dinan’s article and the paper.

Works Cited

Carter, J., & Baker, J. (2005). Building Confidence in U.S. Elections. Retrieved from https://www.legislationline.org/download/id/1472/file/3b50795b2d0374cbef5c29766256.pdf

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n.n
March 31, 2022 7:35 am

Irregularities, fraud, misinformation, and disinformation determine democratic progress in our ostensibly first-world nation. Demos-cracy, democracy are aborted in darkness and at the Twilight Fringe (i.e. emanations from penumbras).

MR166
March 31, 2022 7:41 am

Welcome to 3rd world voting. When the end wanted by the few justifies the means a nation is in its last stages. Every year I say the “This is the most important election ever.” and every year it is true. As far as I can see 2022 is make or break for the draining of the swamp and the continuation of elections that are not predetermined.

Tom.1
March 31, 2022 8:00 am
  1. The charge of election fraud is only meaningful in the context of a political party or some organization acting on their behalf orchestrating it.
  2. If any party was going to do such a thing, I have little doubt it would be the Democrats; running things just means more to them than any other party.
  3. Election laws are created and run by state and local governments.
  4. Any party having control will attempt to manipulate voting rules and regulations to make them more favorable to themselves. For Democrats, that means making it easier to vote, which may facilitate cheating by individuals or local party officials. It is up to the opposing party to keep an eye on this and prevent or expose it where it exists. This is the way the game is played.
  5. An actual conspiracy to commit widespread fraud would be very hard to conceal.
  6. Republicans have failed to produce anything but circumstantial evidence of meaningful fraud, but they keep making the claim. Until they can produce some real evidence, I have no sympathy for them.
Derg
Reply to  Tom.1
March 31, 2022 9:18 am

You don’t want to look do you 😉

Tom.1
Reply to  Derg
March 31, 2022 9:23 am

When I first became interested in this, I went to this website and reviewed a lot of their data. It mostly looked like individual voters committing acts of fraud on their own. I haven’t seen anything to convince me that it is anything else.
Voter Fraud Map: Election Fraud Database | The Heritage Foundation

MarkW
Reply to  Tom.1
March 31, 2022 10:41 am

You’re opinion of one web site, early on in the investigation is definitive and therefore everything else is to be ignored.

Keeping an open mind isn’t your forte, is it.

paul courtney
Reply to  MarkW
March 31, 2022 5:06 pm

Mr. W: Sometimes, his mind is so open, he comments and then researches, and comes back to tell us he’s now looked into it. His forte is gaslighting, and he’s not good at that.

Alpheus
Reply to  Tom.1
March 31, 2022 10:32 am

“An actual conspiracy to commit widespread fraud would be very hard to conceal.”

With regards to this point, (1) no one is claiming conspiracy to commit widespread fraud — the fraud happened in about six States, and one or two counties per State, and (2) even then, we don’t consider it that well-concealed.

“Republicans have failed to produce anything but circumstantial evidence of meaningful fraud”

Circumstantial evidence isn’t something to shake a stick at — indeed, people have justifiably been convicted of murder with nothing but circumstantial evidence, and what’s more, the alternative — eye witness evidence — is also known to be fairly unreliable in and of itself. Furthermore, there’s been plenty of evidence, including video showing poll workers being denied the ability to watch the counting, and eye-witness testimony to irregularities, that are being ignored (and in some cases outright censored by Big Tech) — so “only circumstantial evidence” is a ridiculous claim to make, too.

Democrats who say that Republicans “need to produce some real evidence” have simply refused to open their eyes. I have no reason to believe they are sincerely interested in examining the possibility of fraud, and considering that they want to take away as many voting safeguards as possible — and that they want to do this nationally — forces me to conclude that they want to make cheating universal.

MarkW
Reply to  Alpheus
March 31, 2022 11:38 am

Nothing is hard to conceal, when nobody is permitted to look.
In more than one state, election officials are refusing to release records.

MarkW
Reply to  Tom.1
March 31, 2022 10:40 am

It’s to find anything when you refuse to look.
I take it you didn’t actually read the article, since it presents much of this evidence that you keep claiming doesn’t exist.

Clyde Spencer
Reply to  Tom.1
March 31, 2022 2:46 pm

I’m down-voting you for items 5 & 6 primarily. “Republicans” don’t individually have the power and authority to obtain prosecutable evidence. There are organizations such as the Department of Justice and the FBI, and Congress, that have the organizational tools and experience to search for evidence and none have been willing to do so. Thus, there is no evidence. Had any of the responsible agencies done a diligent search for evidence and not found any, it may have removed the cloud over the legitimacy of the election. However, nobody wanted to touch the accusations. Wouldn’t it have been in the best interests of the country to do an investigation? So, why didn’t they? And don’t give me a circular answer of there not being any evidence!

Tom.1
Reply to  Clyde Spencer
March 31, 2022 3:37 pm

It is good of you to explain your disagreement. In general crimes require more concrete evidence than statistical voting anomalies. Often there are witnesses or physical evidence, which cannot be ignored. Nothing is ever going to happen because of voting “irregularities”. Where are the elected Republican office holders and voting officials who have come forward with credible complaints? I’m sorry if this seems circular, but as the saying goes “politics ain’t beanbags”. It’s going to take something a bit more real than the complaints of one Donald Trump who tried his best to brow-beat everyone he could to change things and it didn’t work. None of the court cases that were brought got anywhere; why is that? On top of this, you have a coterie of completely blinkered and credulous people like the ones on this thread who swallow the stolen election line without question. I am not some left-wing goof ball, and I have probably voted for more Republicans for POTUS than most of the people criticizing me. I was born at night too, but not last night.

Carlo, Monte
Reply to  Tom.1
March 31, 2022 5:45 pm

Because the courts nearly always took the easy way out and declared the plaintiffs to not have legal standing.

There was tons and tons of evidence presented at the state legislators, obviously you didn’t pay any attention.

MarkW
Reply to  Tom.1
March 31, 2022 6:23 pm

There have been hundreds of credible complaints. The article which you have yet to read documented 10’s of thousands of instances of illegal voting. It’s a lot more than complaints from Trump, as you well know, however you have to minimize the complaints of those who disagree with since you are still incapable of actually addressing, much less refuting the facts being presented.

Clyde Spencer
Reply to  Tom.1
March 31, 2022 6:59 pm

If you find that your bank account doesn’t balance, and it isn’t your fault, then you have a problem. It is time to escalate and have an auditor or bank examiner find the reason.

Donald Trump isn’t the only one complaining. However, whenever the MSM even bothers to deal with the issue, they say things like “unsupported” or simply accuse the person of lying. It is difficult to know where the truth lies when obvious irregularities aren’t investigated, and the Fourth Estate insults those who dare raise the question of possible fraud.

“It’s going to take something a bit more real than the complaints of one Donald Trump who tried his best to brow-beat everyone he could …”

Why is that? If a woman goes to the police to file a complaint about being raped, do the police ask for witnesses or all the evidence necessary for a conviction before accepting the complaint? No! If there appears to be reasonable evidence that a crime has been committed, the police have an obligation to investigate. The problem seems to be that there are no ‘Election Police.’

Paul Penrose
March 31, 2022 10:09 am

I predict this paper will get little, if any, mention in the MSM.

MarkW
Reply to  Paul Penrose
March 31, 2022 11:40 am

It will get less mention than the fact that Hunter Biden’s laptop turned out to be real and contained e-mails implicating Biden in decades of corruption.

Robert of Texas
March 31, 2022 10:45 am

Voting is one of the most important rights we have, and we do nothing to protect the validity. I can’t wait for the Republicans and Independents to own all branches of government so we can start fixing problems like this.

Reply to  Robert of Texas
March 31, 2022 3:11 pm

I can’t wait for the Republicans and Independents to own all branches of government so we can start fixing problems like this.

Hopefully it’s a new breed of Republicans. They’ve never been effective in the past under the same circumstances. At least not for a long time.

Clyde Spencer
March 31, 2022 12:42 pm

They do suggest that the election should be investigated, …

The most egregious aspect of the whole debacle is that the courts uniformly declared the complaints had no standing because there was no evidence presented along with the complaint.

All Hell would break loose if a woman went to the police with a complaint of being raped, and was turned away without investigating, based on the excuse that she couldn’t provide the name, address, DOB, and social security number of the assailant.

The fact that FJB and the DNC were not anxious to clear the cloud hanging over the legitimacy of the election, so that FJB could declare that he was operating with a mandate, suggests to me that they knew full well what would crawl out into the daylight if they started overturning rocks.

Carlo, Monte
March 31, 2022 12:55 pm

And there is this today about CTCL and Zuckerbucks:

https://slaynews.com/news/evidence-mark-zuckerberg-350m-election-spend-helped-democrats-win-2020/

New evidence has emerged that shows Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s $350 million in donations during the 2020 election overwhelmingly helped Democrats to win.

The infusion of cash into certain jurisdictions — those that leaned heavily Democrat — drove up voter turnout in blue districts and allowed partisanship to weasel its way into the part of elections that is supposed to be non-partisan.

This will help prevent Zuckerbucks or other private funding from being used to shield shady election officials who knowingly violate state election law to benefit the Left.

Zuckerbucks taught voters and policymakers a tough lesson: Even seemingly non-partisan grants can improperly impact elections if those funds are inequitably disbursed and targeted only to counties or districts that support the donor’s preferred candidate.

To avoid a repeat of 2020, private funding and “expert advisors” like those deployed to Wisconsin must be kept out of the business of election administration by banning Zuckerbucks, and by passing additional reforms such as that passed in Florida.

And Simon the Shill mocked me when I brought the subject of CTCL in front of his face.

MGC
March 31, 2022 6:01 pm

“In Pennsylvania and other states, numerous voters trying to vote in person were told they had already voted absentee, suggesting that someone else had voted using their name”

A more likely explanation is that the same person was trying to illegally vote twice. And given the data we already have of *confirmed* fraudulent voting, they were also more likely to be voting for Trump.

Carlo, Monte
Reply to  MGC
March 31, 2022 8:29 pm

they were also more likely to be voting for Trump.

Cite, mr. sockpuppet?

Reply to  MGC
April 1, 2022 11:32 am

Trump told his supporters to mail their vote but to check it by also voting in person, if their vote had been counted then they wouldn’t be able to vote in person.

Izaak Walton
March 31, 2022 7:10 pm

This paper doesn’t prove anything. On top of which it is biased towards finding evidence of democratic fraud. Note that the author states:
“the results are equally consistent with vote fraud in Republican counties and the destruction of Democrat absentee ballots. But no allegations of such fraud have been made for Republican counties.”
so in other words if somebody had alleged that republicans had been destroying ballots to favour Trump then this analysis would prove it as well. And any analysis that can prove that either Trump cheated or Biden cheated clearly doesn’t prove anything.

It is also worth noting the large selection bias involved in the study. Lott starts by stating that “I gathered precinct-level data for Fulton County and four Republican-majority counties that border it wherein no allegations of fraud” so again he his choosing which precincts to compare and not surprisingly there is a difference in voting behaviour between counties that voted for Trump and counties that voted for Biden. And given that the counties are different is it surprising that they preferred to vote in different ways — Trump voters were told repeatedly that mail-in ballots were fraudulent while Biden votes were told that they were a safe and secure way of voting. Given these different messages is it surprising that the voters in each county voted differently?

Carlo, Monte
Reply to  Izaak Walton
March 31, 2022 8:28 pm

Another shill weighs in…yawn.

March 31, 2022 8:00 pm

This nonsensical post has nothing to do with climate or science. Please keep this political crap off this very useful website.

Harry Passfield
Reply to  James Hopson
April 1, 2022 8:28 am

I thought statistics was a science. They are the bread and butter of the model-makers, are they not?

Reply to  James Hopson
April 1, 2022 1:09 pm

The article fits in with the mission statement of this site too bad that distresses you so much.

MGC
Reply to  James Hopson
April 2, 2022 2:46 pm

About the only thing this WUWT website is “useful” for is the dissemination of anti-science propaganda to so-called “skeptical” sheep.

Carlo, Monte
Reply to  MGC
April 2, 2022 3:50 pm

Oh the irony is deep today.

David S
March 31, 2022 8:19 pm

You could also look here for more evidence https://frankspeech.com/

Sturmudgeon
March 31, 2022 10:15 pm

Thanks for this. It just adds Truth to Mike Lindell’s efforts, computer experts, and videos. There is ABSOLUTELY no denying the extent of voter fraud in the 2020 election, and it has most likely been ongoing for several elections (my opinion).

Gregg Eshelman
April 1, 2022 3:12 am

There’s also the place in Georgia where ballot box stuffing was caught on a security camera. There was a claim of a gas leak so everyone had to leave. But not everyone left. On the video you can see there’s one table with a black cloth over it. After the poll workers are out, a box is taken from under that table, ballots taken from it and run through the counting machine.

Election fraud in plain sight.

How about the county in Michigan that recorded (IIRC) two votes for Trump and one of those voters said he knew there had to be more because he knew everyone in his family eligible to vote had voted for Trump?

In the 2016 election in one of the primaries, a similar event was caught on video of poll workers shoving a whole bunch of ballots into one of the boxes. Had to ensure Hillary got the nomination. (Nevermind the DNC shenanigans in awarding Hillary more delegates after some primaries where Sanders won the vote.)

There have been many cases of local elections where the winner’s number of votes were larger than the population of people in the town, county etc they were running in for the office.

Election fraud exists at all levels of elections in the USA but is rarely investigated, and even less often is there any prosecution for it.

Tom.1
April 1, 2022 3:59 am

This is the abstract from the study (emphasis mine- how can this be considered compelling evidence).
This study reports three tests measuring vote fraud in the 2020 US presidential election, although they provide inconsistent evidence. To isolate the impact of a county’s vote-counting process and potential fraud on candidates’ vote margins, I first compare voting precincts in a county with alleged fraud to adjacent precincts in neighboring counties with no allegations of fraud. I compute the differences in President Trump’s vote shares on absentee ballots in those adjacent precincts, controlling for the differences in his vote shares on ballots cast in person. I also control for registered voters’ demographics and compare data for the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. When I examine Georgia and Pennsylvania separately, weak evidence of vote fraud on absentee ballots is found. However, combining the samples produces significant results and implies at least 10,000 additional votes for Biden in Pennsylvania’s Alleghany and Georgia’s Fulton counties. I then apply the same method to provisional ballots in Alleghany County, where, contrary to state law, voters were allowed to correct alleged defects in absentee ballots by submitting provisional ballots on Election Day. My analysis finds that such permission contributed to a statistically significant additional 6,700 votes for Biden. Finally, vote fraud can show up as artificially larger voter turnouts. Fraud can take many forms: higher rates of filling out absentee ballots for people who hadn’t voted, dead people voting, ineligible people voting, or even payments to legally registered people for their votes. The estimates for Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin combined indicate an average of 255,000 excess votes for Biden.

Tom.1
April 1, 2022 4:07 am

This is from page 8 of the report (emphasis mine) So, the Trump undervote could be zero or 11.53 percent. This is not the stuff of which overturning elections is made of.
The empirical results imply an unusual drop-off in Trump’s share of the absentee ballots for Fulton County, which ranges from zero to 11.53 percentage points. Given that 145,267 absentee ballots were cast for Trump and Biden in Fulton County, the largest estimate of 11.53 equals approximately 16,749 votes, which is 32% more than Biden’s margin of victory over Trump

Carlo, Monte
Reply to  Tom.1
April 1, 2022 5:39 am

Still running away from points put to you.

No surprise.

Ruleo
April 1, 2022 12:15 pm

Five states Trump winning by wider margin immediately “stopped counting” at mindnight, only to resume 3 hours later with Biden ahead with 100,000 ballots coming in at 90% for Biden during that “not counting” period.

That, right there, is fking proof. Anyone who said Biden won is a naive loser.

April 1, 2022 6:24 pm

It’s extremely disappointing to see so many people completely blinded by the truth because of their politics.
Tribalism now trumps science, authentic evidence, data and facts for BOTH sides:

Indisputable corruption perpetrated by Trump and those on his side:
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/80894/#80938

Indisputable corruption used AGAINST Trump:
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/80894/#80939

Incredibly, instead of people being able to recognize the blatantly obvious corruption in both cases, most people can only see the corruption in 1 of those cases……while being convinced that the other case was based on real truth……..totally based on their political affiliation.

A person’s political affiliation now determines what the truth is. Not just in all things politics but science and even in the most extreme cases of their own party’s abhorrent corruption and DIS/MIS information campaign’s.

Want to know a person’s view on the election of 2020?
Just ask them what party they are from.

Or the election of 2016 and the Mueller investigation?

Your guy won? It was fair and legit.
Your guy/gal lost? It was rigged or fraud or colluding with Russia caused it.

Want to know what a person’s view is on the vaccine or COVID(science and medicine)?
Good chance their political affiliation is all you need to know!

Want to know a person’s view on the fake climate crisis?
Political affiliation is the biggest determinant of the view NOT the authentic science!

Tom Abbott
Reply to  Mike Maguire
April 2, 2022 5:52 am

“A person’s political affiliation now determines what the truth is. Not just in all things politics but science”

I would say this is not the case when it comes to climate science. Too many Republicans believe in this human-caused climate change scam. They are just like Democrats when it comes to this subject. Climate Change Cluelessness crosses party lines.

Reply to  Tom Abbott
April 2, 2022 11:24 am

I agree with that Tom.
The ratio of those bamboozled in a sample of 100 is a function of party affiliation.

Tom Abbott
Reply to  Mike Maguire
April 2, 2022 7:05 pm

I agree with that, Mike. 🙂

April 3, 2022 9:19 pm

Having read the “down thread” and seen some pretty strong reactions, it seems this statistical project has rattled a threesome of individuals beyond all reason. They are just the tip of a politically nervous “ice burg” that has to have some serious misgivings about the election outcome, and elections to come. They are representations of a core of political extremists who, incredibly, have screwed their thinking into believing Joe Biden is doing a good job. These three are unable to stand the unsettling implications of the inquiry and therefore revealing their extreme nervousness about the election. I think they do protest WAY too much, and it is very informative. Informative as a warning, anything is possible when this level of agitation is in play. Let’s hope none of them are in a high place of authority or responsibility.