This is of concern to the community given the apparent overlap with the technical expertise of a DOGE employee, Ethan Shaotran, and his prior work for a Musk sponsored hackathon where he created software that could spoof ballot tabulation.

https://github.com/DevrathIyer/ballotproof/tree/master

Apparently, Shaotran removed his name from the repo and is now listed as a private user, but it can be found in the archive of the devpost page linked from the repo: https://devpost.com/software/ballotproof-vision

https://web.archive.org/web/20250204131222/https://devpost.c...

Info from: https://bsky.app/profile/cartwright776.bsky.social/post/3lhr...

Could this be used to spoof the results, and are there artifacts that could be discovered to directly link it or rule it out?

Here is an image from the Election Truth Alliance analysis that shows a possible artifact: https://img1.wsimg.com/isteam/ip/9087f51c-d3bd-4002-9943-797...

PDF of their analysis: https://electiontruthalliance.org/clark-county%2C-nv

The repo seems to describe something doing the opposite, no? This is someone who wanted to ensure ballots were counted, not someone motivated to spoof them, right?

EDIT: posted my concern on bsky https://bsky.app/profile/patcon.bsky.social/post/3lhrwuw6dy2...

There is nothing spooky or nefarious about the existence of that test suite.

But that this skill set gets you into E's inner circle definitely goes onto the ever-growing pile of circumstantial evidence that something is not right.

Your point is if you're interested in writing code to verify the validity of elections, that is evidence to the suspicion your employer sonehow corrupted the election? That does not sound like a sane line of reasoning.

My point is that in the context of Elon and the 2024 election, where there is objectively a lot of suspicious activity, the fact that his inner circle contains people with expertise in generating ballots is also suspicious.

Yes I will conceed that all this talk is circumstantial. It's like Lab Leak (even the desire to gaslight anyone who talks about it)

Is this going to be something we deal with after each election now? This just sounds like the 2020 election fraud conspiracies all over again.

There was no evidence found of fraud during the 2020 election despite being contested and audited. This is evidence that is being discovered now, because the election was not contested by the losing candidate in 2024 and was not audited.

Newsweek article that provides more context for the Election Truth Alliance's analysis as well as other claims (and statements by Trump alluding to it)

https://www.newsweek.com/2024-election-rigged-donald-trump-e...

Articles like this are pure chutzpah. The same side that's alleging interference in 2024 suggested that to question election irregularities in 2020 was to reject democracy itself. I don't think the authors are going to convince anyone.

"But there's evidence this time and there wasn't in 2020!" Well, the other side would argue the opposite. We're not going to get anywhere this way.

Look: regardless of the the extent to which these alleged voting shenanigans are real, we need to fix the system. The legitimacy of the state is at risk.

Just as Caesar's wife must be above reproach, our voting system must be above reproach. There are plenty of common sense things officials can take to bolster the public's faith in the system. For example, we should ban electronic voting machines. The real threat to democracy isn't election manipulation but officials who refuse to enact measures that would dispel even the appearance of manipulation.

The same side that's alleging interference in 2024 suggested that to question election irregularities in 2020 was to reject democracy itself. I don't think the authors are going to convince anyone.

The people claiming election interference in 2020 had every chance to provide any piece of evidence, and they never could.

The same side that's alleging interference in 2024 suggested that to question election irregularities in 2020 was to reject democracy itself.

It is absolutely not the position of mainstream Democrats that the 2024 election was rigged, invalid etc. This ETA organization (founded December) is some fringe weirdo and doesn't represent dems.

The position of the Democratic party shouldn't change the analysis. If there is evidence it should be analyzed on its own merits.

I'm honestly not sure that their analysis passes muster. It seems that the main consideration is that Harris underperformed compared to down-ballot races and that the underperformance was ahistoric. However, the campaign was also ahistoric: she ran as a pseudo-incumbent under an unpopular presidency without as much of the name recognition incumbency usually offers. It seems extremely likely to me that this drop off in early voting numbers is indicative of an exceptionally weak campaign as opposed to widespread (consistent across all swing states) manipulation.

Their specific claim is odd, it's that the record of every machine in the county showed an expected random pattern of votes for the first 300 or so votes ..

( "random" here means more chaotic and unpredictable )

after which there was a more correlated bias toward one candidate that had a stong early trend toward a particular outcome (consistent clumping with little bounce).

The assertion is that this rarely seen in "real free voting data".

In a single picture: https://img1.wsimg.com/isteam/ip/9087f51c-d3bd-4002-9943-797...

More specifically, their claims are nonsense and (at best) wishful thinking.

You've download the raw data and confirmed for yourself that there's no "russian tail" pattern in the data?

This is literally numerology. I don't find it persuasive, no.

A word of caution with this one.

EIN Presswire provides this news content "as is" without warranty of any kind. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. If you have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article, kindly contact the author above.

NOTE: This content is not written by or endorsed by "WCIA/WCIX", its advertisers, or Nexstar Media Inc.

This isn't news, it's a paid press release.

I hit "flag" and I'd suggest everyone else do so as well.

I strongly disagree. It should be examined (their analysis, the artifacts they discovered, and whether or not they are similar to the artifacts that could be created from software similar to the repo that was shared below). It's worth asking this community to examine and discuss it. This is clearly related to the professional interests of this community, and this community is uniquely suited to bring insight to it.

It's an extreme and divisive claim on a pay-for-publish local TV channel website. The details are unpersuasive coincidence and no reliable 3rd party has substantiated the allegations. The originator of the claims is an organization that didn't exist three months ago. These are all reasons to be pretty skeptical before amplifying.

All of your criticisms are unrelated to understanding the analysis (or software). Let's read it, work through it and discuss it, rather than dismissing it for all the wrong reasons. Flagging this submission is anti-curious. Instead of not engaging if you're not interested in doing the work, you're trying to suppress other people from doing the work. It may turn out that none of it is convincing, but we don't know that right now and what has already been presented is surprising and worth investigating.

I looked at the source blog post and decided it was pretty shoddy. I kind of agree that a reasonable person would doubt the veracity of this post, not just for the reasons loeg mentioned, but because the presented "evidence" is a single cherry-pick from data with lots of inherent variance.

I think it's valid criticism to say that you should have taken a closer look before submitting, and concluded that it was too junky for HN. In which case the flagging is appropriate.

Can you share your analysis of the data? Other commenters have included details. I think we all would be interested in more than vague value judgments that you took a look, didn't like it and therefore tried to flag to repress discussion of it

and therefore tried to flag to repress discussion of it

nice mind reading skills over there

This is not a forum for original research. Additionally, this community is not well-equipped for sober analysis of divisive topics.

Trying to repress discussion is the opposite of soberly analyzing divisive topics, so you are attempting to prove your point. There are many people who disagree with you (including me) and would encourage you to dig in and practice curiosity and open discussion

so you are attempting to prove your point

They're sharing their opinion; no proofs to be found anywhere, nor evidences.

Trying to repress discussion is the opposite of soberly analyzing divisive topics

In your opinion, right? Because under mathematical logic, the opposite of "repressing discussion" is "encouraging discussion", nothing less, nothing more.

Suppose there's a divisive topic that is posted on a forum with mostly common or at least topic-unaligned appeal. Stands to reason then that most discussion on that topic will be of low quality, since again, the community on the forum is not well-aligned to debate on the matter, right? That is the reasoning behind their opinion I'd imagine, and I can definitely agree with this personally.

And while inevitably there would be a minority of people who are well equipped to engage the topic productively, even if they post and their posts gain traction, the discussions around them will be nevertheless low quality - I think this prediction is agreeable as well at least.

Note also that nowhere in this model is the intent of the participants represented anywhere. So even though your intent is commendable:

would encourage you to dig in and practice curiosity and open discussion

... it nevertheless misses the point. You're also (supposedly) asking for topically better aligned minds to put themselves through the torture of engaging those (supposedly) overwhelmingly not, both in the sense that they're (supposedly) super not capable, and in the sense that (supposedly) there are a lot more of them in here than not.

This is further supported how for example in this thread you exercised what I refer to as mind reading in both of the comments I've seen from you.

Example #[1]:

and therefore tried to flag to repress discussion of it

They said that they flagged it because it's:

too junky

... not because they're trying to repress discussion of it. Naturally, I do recognize that the post getting flagged would prevent further discussion of it, but it is both dishonest to say that they did it with that goal in mind (their goal is in their mind, which you cannot read) and also just completely untrue (in my opinion).

Example #[2]:

so you are attempting to prove your point

In this scenario you're telling them what they're doing, which is again something only they can know. You only really know what you think they're doing, but that is not what you're saying. Consider the following alternative:

so I think that goes directly against your point.

Note the "I think" part.

These are both very standout signs (for me at least) that quality discourse, especially on divisive topics, would not be possible with you. I further think that this is true for many other people as well, in most of the threads here. I highly question if it is possible to do with me as well, particularly in specific topics, and with consistency. I'd go as far as to say that with random people, on the internet, it is essentially impossible to have productive discussion on divisive matters, if it is even a possibility at all, ever.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42996747

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42996763

Here's the website for the analysis: https://electiontruthalliance.org/clark-county%2C-nv

That is better to scrutinize than the press release.

I’m old enough to remember way back in 2023 when “election denier” was a nonstop slur for anyone right of center.

This is a pretty inexperienced analysis.

I happened to have detailed day-by-day voting and registration data for the 2024 Nevada election as it was happening. Harris losing Nevada was telegraphed in the data almost from the beginning. Forget the top line totals, the underlying structure of where and who was registering and voting in real-time made the outcome all but a foregone conclusion weeks before the actual election. Nevada was some of the easiest money on the prediction markets.

Much is explained by an unusually robust turnout of low-propensity voters for Trump. They often don't care about the rest of the ballot, so it skews results albeit in a predictable way. (This is also the risk for Republicans; they are unlikely to show up for mid-terms and may sit on the sidelines again in four years.)

Nevada has consistently clean election processes. I am only aware of a single anomaly over the last several Federal elections that was clearly inexplicable. It wasn't this election, that instance looked like a system failure rather than fraud, and it didn't change the outcome. Some other States are rife with anomalies that persist even with sophisticated analysis most cycles.

If I was going to pick a State to look for Federal election irregularities, Nevada would be pretty low on my list. It is easy for amateurs to fool themselves into thinking they've found election fraud when really they just don't understand what is required to find a signal that holds up under sophisticated analysis. Same thing happened in 2020.

I also used to live in Nevada and am pretty attuned to the local politics. There are local bellwether statistics that are traditionally pretty reliable for indicating how an election will break. Harris was upside down on these too. The tortured rationalization by Nevada election pundits like Jon Ralston to reinterpret those as "good actually" was uncritically repeated widely in the national media.

Maybe you can write this up with charts? Or at least put your data up publicly?

The data sources are public and downloadable from official sources. In the case of the State of Nevada, the total data set resolves to upwards of a hundred URLs that are not neatly organized anywhere, so there is a lot manual work to aggregate them and data engineer a single coherent data model.

I stay out of the analysis business though I know a lot about it. A friend has been hardcore in the business for over a decade as a side-hustle and drags me into it every 2-4 years to help out with data sourcing and anomaly forensics, which are more my specialty. The workload during election season is insane but you can make a mountain of money from the campaigns if you have an excellent reputation for this kind of analytic work. Most people that try botch it.

The polling used in the news media is mostly unserious. The campaigns use more sophisticated non-public voting models to predict outcomes and that has risen in stature with time versus polls. Even if the public may be surprised by the outcome a well-run campaign typically is not.

It is possible to reproduce one of the key claims in this post -- the "Russian tail" in the early voting tallies -- straight from the raw data hosted on the Clark County, NV website. This code can be run in a Colab notebook:

  # Download and extract zip file
  import requests
  import zipfile
  import io

  # Get raw data from Clark County website
  zip_url = "https://elections.clarkcountynv.gov/electionresultsTV/cvr/24G/24G_CVRExport_NOV_Final_Confidential.zip"

  # Download the zip file
  response = requests.get(zip_url)
  zip_file = zipfile.ZipFile(io.BytesIO(response.content))

  # Extract to the current working directory
  zip_file.extractall()

  # Close the zip file
  zip_file.close()

  import pandas as pd
  import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
  import numpy as np

  # Read the actual data, skipping the first three header rows and excluding downballot races
  df = pd.read_csv('/content/24G_CVRExport_NOV_Final_Confidential.csv', skiprows=3, usecols=range(21), low_memory=False)

  # Find the Trump and Harris columns
  trump_col = "REP"
  harris_col = "DEM"

  # Convert to numeric
  df[trump_col] = pd.to_numeric(df[trump_col], errors='coerce')
  df[harris_col] = pd.to_numeric(df[harris_col], errors='coerce')

  # Filter for early voting
  early_voting = df[df['CountingGroup'] == 'Early Voting']

  # Group by tabulator and calculate percentages
  tabulator_stats = early_voting.groupby('TabulatorNum').agg({
      harris_col: 'sum',
      trump_col: 'sum'
  }).reset_index()

  # Calculate total votes and percentages
  tabulator_stats['total_votes'] = tabulator_stats[harris_col] + tabulator_stats[trump_col]
  tabulator_stats['harris_pct'] = tabulator_stats[harris_col] / tabulator_stats['total_votes'] \* 100
  tabulator_stats['trump_pct'] = tabulator_stats[trump_col] / tabulator_stats['total_votes'] \* 100

  # Create subplots
  fig, (ax1, ax2) = plt.subplots(2, 1, figsize=(10, 8))

  # Plot Harris histogram
  ax1.hist(tabulator_stats['harris_pct'], bins=50, edgecolor='black', color='blue', alpha=0.7)
  ax1.set_title('Distribution of Harris Votes by Tabulator (Early Voting Only)')
  ax1.set_xlabel('Percentage of Votes for Harris')
  ax1.set_ylabel('Number of Tabulators')

  # Plot Trump histogram
  ax2.hist(tabulator_stats['trump_pct'], bins=50, edgecolor='black', color='red', alpha=0.7)
  ax2.set_title('Distribution of Trump Votes by Tabulator (Early Voting Only)')
  ax2.set_xlabel('Percentage of Votes for Trump')
  ax2.set_ylabel('Number of Tabulators')

  plt.tight_layout()
  plt.show()

This produces a figure identical (up to histogram bucketing) to the one at the end of the linked article.

Thank you! I've run the notebook and reproduced the histograms of the early votes. I'm grateful for you sharing your work. For the other commenters who have dismissed the analysis without providing details, I would recommend that you reproduce this notebook and dig in.

For others who don't know what the "Russian tail" is, here is the link within the PDF: https://www.rferl.org/a/georgia-election-manipulation-russia...

I'm writing this in response to the originator of this thread @beedeebeedee[1]. I'm posting it as a top-level comment because I believe it's applicable to the overall conversation.

According to the theory, in fair elections, turnout indicators typically follow a regular graphical representation that resembles a bell shape. If anomalies appear in the data -- for example, forms different from the bell shape or the bell "grows a tail" -- this indicates unfair elections.

There is *no* respectable statistician who would *ever* draw a conclusion from data. You could say 'may indicate evidence of unfair elections,' but it is impossible to deem whether something occurred or not with 100% certainty.

Now to address their "indicators."

While in cities the data representation mostly follows a bell shape, in the regions it is anomalously deviated

All statistics is just a representation of data, it tells us nothing of logic. Logic is also based in axioms and it's important to identify what those are.

Here the author is saying the data is "anomalously deviated" with the axiomatic assumption that all voters must follow the same distribution, but why should this assumption be held true? It ignores other logical factors that may sway these distributions.

If I'm a candidate for a political position that would give a rural precinct free money, wouldn't that heavily affect that population's voting outcomes? Surely what's said in a political campaign can sway these things, yet there's nothing in the article that mentions that.

According to the theory, if a number of stations emerge where one candidate -- the "beneficiary" -- is unusually high, this might indicate falsification. There's a high risk of manipulation where increased overall voter turnout is reflected only in support of the "beneficiary."

So the belief is that because there are 2 distributions for the number of precincts with a certain percentage of "yes" votes, that automatically "indicates falsification"? There needs to be more information than this to make a conclusion. What one holds as axioms are a matter of opinion.

The only way to get something useful out of a counterargument to this is for a proponent to exhaustively list all the votes they think are legitimate, and for the opponent to show the same patterns can occur there as well.

Similarly for a proponent to convince detractors, they'd have to show that other elections they see as legitimate *never* indicate those patterns. Otherwise this is just an opinion piece on data.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42996898

Hi derangedHorse, thanks for your insight. The anomaly is that there appears to be a heavy shift in votes only in (1) early voting, and not in (2) mail-in ballots or (3) Election Day voting. Additionally, the anomaly only appears for all tabulators after 300 or more votes are cast.

Here's the image that represents the anomaly in early voting: https://img1.wsimg.com/isteam/ip/9087f51c-d3bd-4002-9943-797...

There is no respectable statistician who would ever draw a conclusion from data. You could say 'may indicate evidence of unfair elections,' but it is impossible to deem whether something occurred or not with 100% certainty.

The originators of the analysis are claiming that this indicates manipulation. Perhaps they should have given more qualifiers in that image of their analysis, but the data is alarming and it is an up-hill battle even to get their analysis noticed (other than the press release to WCIA, only Newsweek has mentioned it). We can say 'maybe' but given the current political and media environment right now, it is likely that that qualification would have doomed their analysis from getting any coverage at all.

Here is a video from the group that discusses these issues and is worth watching because it speaks directly to your concerns and others: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOQ-GxJyJN4

Edit: I haven't fully absorbed their analysis, so I've gone back and they do make those qualifications to the data ("Data Suggestive of Vote Manipulation", etc) within the PDF: https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/9087f51c-d3bd-4002-9943-797...

"The pattern above shows an inexplicable spike in vote distribution that is statistically unlikely based on typical human voting behavior."

And while discussing alternate causes ("Deep Red" Areas) "While such a deviation in the data could potentially still emerge, this does not explain why the pattern is limited to Early Voting, as in that scenario it would be reasonable to expect the same deviation to appear in Election Day results. Instead, Election Day results indicate a normal, expected variation."

6:11 I don't find this particularly strange. I think they'd make a much stronger argument if they showed the drop-off vote for 2020. I found it strange that they only picked 2012 and 2016 given my theory that drop-off votes are probably more prominent in controversial elections. Especially given the fact Kamala entered the race somewhat last minute. I also find it odd that there are no links to explore the previous years that were shown in the video from the website linked in the video's description [1].

10:10 Another claim of irregularity that doesn't quite support their conclusion. It seems they're indicating that both plots seem irregular, which I agree, but there thesis of fraud doesn't completely address 2020's case. They could say republican cheated in 2020 as well, but then they'd have to explain why this election went any different.

11:36 Here they're trying to support the irregularity of the data with anecdote. "Does this match from your opinion with the actual demographic there?" is not a methodical approach to figuring out what's wrong. Surely not every republican would be okay with fraudulent votes regardless of who won. A contrary voice in these video would lend some credence to their claims.

13:28 Voting against one's registered party also doesn't seem crazy to me as I've had many friends who have this past election. My own anecdote doesn't affect the data and may not sway arguments, nor does my theory of controversial elections breeding "irregular" results, but hopefully it can create an equally valid opinion than the one presented in the video.

15:05 If someone was rigging the election in what way? Any security model being claimed as breached needs to define what constitutes a break and how the attack could create that break in security.

16:30 I don't understand why a '2014 Wisonsin Gov. Race' (the title of the graph) is applicable here. Maybe she just used it as a lead-in for the next part?

18:37 Why is she bringing up the random distribution of inadvertent errors?

After spending about an hour watching the video and observing the results, I'm even more skeptical of their claims.

[1] https://smartelections.us/dropoff

6:11 I don't find this particularly strange. I think they'd make a much stronger argument if they showed the drop-off vote for 2020. I found it strange that they only picked 2012 and 2016

It would have been nice to have 2020 there too, but they may not have had access to the data

10:10 Another claim of irregularity that doesn't quite support their conclusion. It seems they're indicating that both plots seem irregular, which I agree, but there thesis of fraud doesn't completely address 2020's case. They could say republican cheated in 2020 as well, but then they'd have to explain why this election went any different.

A possible explanation as to why 2020 cheating failed and 2024 did not could be that the cheating was not able to overcome how unpopular he was for his handling of Covid and other issues. For the cheating to work, it cannot be obvious and therefore must be limited. Conversely, Kamala was not as popular in 2024 as Biden was in 2020, so the cheating was successful.

Alternatively, in Trump's own words, Elon made the difference in 2024: "He knows those computers better than anybody. All those computers. Those vote-counting computers," Trump told the crowd. "And we ended up winning Pennsylvania like in a landslide." https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-elon-musk-voting-machi...

It could be that whoever was doing the cheating did not have the resources to enact it as successfully without Elon's support (Starlink, Shaotran, etc).

11:36 Here they're trying to support the irregularity of the data with anecdote. > 13:28 Voting against one's registered party also doesn't seem crazy to me

Right, anecdotal evidence and the irregularity of voting against your registered party are not conclusive evidence, but do add to the consensus that a more systematic analysis needs to be done.

15:05 If someone was rigging the election in what way? Any security model being claimed as breached needs to define what constitutes a break and how the attack could create that break in security.

That is exactly one of the next steps that should be taken. Figure out how it could have been done, now that there is evidence that points to irregularities. The possibility does not prove it happened, but it would then help go towards the further step of trying to find evidence that it did (once we know where to look and what for).

16:30 I don't understand why a '2014 Wisonsin Gov. Race' (the title of the graph) is applicable here. Maybe she just used it as a lead-in for the next part?

She is showing the percentage of the cumulative summation of votes. She has data for the 2014 Wisconsin race that is categorized based on the type of the voting machines. The green line and purple line are relatively flat, showing that the percentage of votes did not change significantly based on the number of cumulative votes. The red lines are suspicious because the percentage grows significantly after a few thousand votes. I'm not sure why they used a line graph instead of a scatterplot, but presumably they fit a line to the data for each machine.

18:37 Why is she bringing up the random distribution of inadvertent errors?

She's bringing it up to point out that it could not be caused by random errors (i.e., human errors caused by the election workers, etc), because random errors would be randomly distributed and produce roughly a flat line. The red lines aren't flat, so they are not contributing to the gain in votes.

Look at the graphs at 19:00 and 20:00 for Clark County, NV 2024 early voting. They both show increases in the percentage rate for Trump after around 300 votes for each machine. As one of the speakers says,

"If we're stuffing a bunch of tabulators at 60% for Trump, then we're going to get an asymptote at 60%," which is visible in the data for Clark County, NV in 2024

Thank you for bringing up your points, because after watching the video and with your criticism in mind, addressing them made me more confident that we need a comprehensive investigation to follow this lead. If their claim is correct, it is unlikely that we will see that investigation led by the Federal government, but citizens and states can take the lead.

There is no respectable statistician who would ever draw a conclusion from data.

This is outright pedantry, but I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt. Scientific research is literally the process of drawing conclusions from data, after repeated measurement and control of independent variables.

No benefit of the doubt is needed, I made a true statement, albeit a subjective one about who I consider "respectable".

To me, statisticians analyze data and make objective statements about what they see. The process of scientific research is a different beast altogether. The objective statements about the data can only be used to inspire or support an argument. The correctness of the argument can only be recognized if the listener is convinced.

I was able to reproduce the vote skew / batch size correlation in early voting. The average batch size for mail voting was way higher (6 machines) and election day was lower (3x machines). The fact that the vote ratio is more distributed for mail voting with way more votes per machine is what highlights incongruity for me. Stats are not always intuitive though.

Edit: Mail voting is not more distributed. You can’t analyze the distribution of a set that small using its min and max, it has to be the full range like the other sets. Distribution approaches zero as bin size increases regardless of voting source. This no longer seems surprising.