patrick.net

The key evidence is as follows:

⦁ On Thursday November 5th at 9:09am a large batch of 90,022 mail/absentee votes get added that has over 95% support for Biden, but total votes to go up by only 9,534, implying that in-person votes actually went down by 80,488. On its own, this is a very strange irregularity, as ballots cannot disappear, and in-person ballots cannot become mail ballots. Something is wrong in the reported data, the only question is what.

⦁ The new batch of 90,022 mail ballots looks nothing like existing mail ballots. If the update is a data error, it must be a complicated error along multiple dimensions and is unlikely to be a simple typo. The new batch is improbable on four separate dimensions:

⦁ It has a level of support for Biden (over 95%) that is statistically impossible to have come from the same distribution of mail ballots counted up to that point (74.9% for Biden)

⦁ Every comparison of pairs of candidates shows improbable changes. This is important, as it helps rule out the possibility that a single typo in the data drives the pattern.

⦁ Irrespective of the old distribution, the new batch is extremely unlikely on its own terms, as it has a ratio of support for Jorgenson relative to Trump (20%) that is higher than virtually every county in America. The last fact is consistent with aiming to get Biden’s vote share “high but not impossibly high” while simultaneously trying to not give any more votes to Trump than absolutely necessary.

⦁ The distribution of the ballots being removed from the in-person counts is even more implausible (98.1% Biden), making it difficult to explain the overall vote update as being due to genuine mail ballots having been previously incorrectly classified as in-person.

⦁ Anomalies of this magnitude are extremely rare in the NYT database. Montgomery’s reduction of 80,488 in-person votes is the fourth highest vote reduction in the entire database. Over half of these involve changes of less than 100 votes, and 28% involve changes of just one vote. Of the remaining errors, many can be easily understood as examples of exactly the phenomena ruled out above (e.g. simple vote-type misclassifications).

⦁ Independent confirmation of the two numbers suggests Edison’s numbers are accurate reflections of the County data. Edison’s report of total absentee ballots counted in their update at 5:43am Wednesday November 5th is very close to (and slightly below) media twitter reports of total absentee ballots counted a few minutes later in the county data, suggesting that these early Edison absentee vote totals are likely accurate reflections of the underlying county data. Meanwhile, Edison snapshots on November 8th precisely match County snapshots on November 10th.

⦁ To test this hypothesis further, and to help rule out the possibility that this is all due to NYT/Edison data errors, after the initial anomaly was uncovered, we scraped multiple snapshots of the county’s own data at the precinct level. The changes between the two snapshots reveal that the earlier arriving mail ballots (which included the anomalous update) show a significantly higher vote share for Biden than the mail votes which were counted later in the same precinct. This shows that something is changing in the distribution of mail ballots counted within each precinct, and the earlier ballots showed a stronger tendency to favor Biden.

Adding all this evidence together, there is a strong case for the following interpretation:

-Some time after election night, a very large batch of mail ballots were counted that showed an enormous advantage for Biden-This batch looks nothing like the mail ballots counted up to that point in the NYT data, and also looks different from the mail ballots counted later in each precinct as measured using the county’s own data
-The batch looks implausible on its own face, in terms of relative vote shares of Libertarian and Republican votes
-The updates are difficult to reconcile with simple data errors like genuine mail ballots being mis-classified as in-person, or a single candidate total being incorrectly entered as a typo.