Figures don't lie, but...

 I want to compare two charts, one is famous, the other is not, yet...

First, let's look at the chart that Donald Trump was pointing to when someone took a shot at him. This is a little fuzzy, because it's from a screenshot.

The first thing I want you to notice is that the chart has a big arrow at the bottom pointing to the end of Donald Trump's admnistration, marked "TRUMP LEAVES OFFICE". Note where it is pointing on the time scale, around March of 2020.

Except Trump didn't leave office in March of 2020. (If he did, then who was acting as President?) He left office on January 20, 2021. March of 2020 was 7 months before the election, and almost 10 months before Trump left office.

 That's odd.  You would think that if there was any date that the Trump campaign would get right, it would be the date he left office.

The second thing I want you to notice is the date marked "TRUMP Tariff threat leads to Mexican cooperation."  That's May of 2019.

Let's look at the second chart, the less famous one:

Yeah, this one's also a screenshot, so it's fuzzy too.  I'll update with clearer images when I can source them. This chart does two things that the first one doesn't:

• Corrects the date when Trump left office to January 2021.
• Adds data through September of 2024 (so far.)

Notice the rise in illegal immigration since the low point the original chart called the end of the Trump administration. That's a roughly 85,000 person increase in the monthly rate of illegal immigration from that low point. Even if you attribute some of that increase to the November election, and Biden becoming President-Elect, most of it happened before November, and the rate of increase tapered off in November.

So the decline in Illegal immigration started around May of 2019 and reversed around March of 2020. It's possible that Trump's actions and policies caused that dip, but those policies were still in force during the rise in most of 2020. Could there be another cause at work?

How about a global pandemic? It may be coincidence, but the decline started around the time that lockdowns began, and reversed around the time that vaccines became widely available in the US. Latin America was about a year behind the US in vaccine availability and the rate of vaccination.

Could the decline in illegal immigration have been a pandemic response, and the rise in illegal immigration late in Trump's return in fact a return to what the rate of illegal immigration have been without the pandemic? Could the Trump campaign be knowingly taking credit for something the Trump administration had nothing to do with? Stranger things have been done and said in politics.

Now let's look at the decline late in the Biden administration. What could have caused that?  Well, in 2023, in response to the surge in immigration, the Biden administration got Mexico to station troops to stem immigration into the US. It worked.

By the way, that cooperation was established in a 2022 "Summit of the Americas" in Los Angeles. A Declaration from that Summit (released June 10, 2022) did the following:

• Got Costa Rica, Colombia and Ecuador to offer legal immigrant status for Venezuelans crossing their borders. The situation in Venezuela drove a lot of immigration to the US, that is now being stopped in other countries.
• Got Mexico, Belize and Costa Rica to place tighter restrictions on Venezuelans flying into their countries.
  

 It was the Biden administration that got Mexico to pay for a wall, by stationing Mexican troops to enforce the border from their side. It was the Biden administration that got other countries to create a series of smaller "walls" to do what the Trump administration promised, but failed, to do.

Yes, a lot of people get into this country bypassing the legal process.  Why is that? Well, the legal system is swamped, so thousands of immigrants a day are crossing the border, asking for asylum, and getting briefly detained and, if there isn't an obvious issue, released, bypassing the Asylum process.

Why is the legal system swamped? Well Congress failed to act. Constitutionally, it is Congress' job to write laws and fund the enforcement process. The Congress had a bipartisan fix, or the start of one, before them last year.  It didn't pass, because the Republican support for it pulled out at the last minute.

That kept illegal immigration a live topic for this year's election. There was a way to start resolving the issue, and the Republican party chose politics over signing off on legislation that they co-wrote. They did the political thing, rather than the right thing.

You can build a wall, or you can work on better solutions. Take your pick.

In simple fact, the immigration situation is far more complex than a simple graph is ever going to show. 

Especially when that graph has carefully selected wrong data.

Figures don't lie, but they sure can be manipulated to sell a false narrative.

The 2020 Election: Was there a "Steal" to Stop?

OK, I generally try to not stray too deep into the miasma that is politics these days, but there is something that is worrying me. I’m seeing people, bright, intelligent people whom I respect, still buying into the “voter fraud” argument. If you’re one of those people: I hate to say this, but I truly do love you, and love sometimes has to speak the truth:

Y’all have been gaslighted. I don’t say that lightly, and I’m trying not to be mean about it, but that’s the only thing I can find to explain the phenomena.

I have two different explanations for why the 2020 Election couldn’t have been stolen: One Logistic and one Statistical. We’ll take the Logistic first.

The Logistics problem begins with this simple fact: Every voting precinct has a different slate of candidates, offices, and issues. Not every state, or every county, every voting precinct. For example, in my precinct, I vote for a different school board than the one for the city I live in, because I’m part of that school district. The school district doesn’t follow city boundaries.

Each voting precinct has a different ballot, which means that the encoded data will be different. Each precinct’s mail in ballots will be different as well. Wikipedia reports that in 2020, there were 176,933 precincts in the United States. That doesn’t have to be an exact number, though. Managing to fraudulently manipulate the results from anything over a few thousand different voting precincts rapidly becomes a logistical nightmare. Anything over 100,000 precincts in a 24 hour period? Logistically impossible. What about with a computer? Well, you would have to find a way to program a computer to invisibly manipulate different ballots, captured by different means, all within 24 hours.

What about AI? Well; (1) AI was not that advanced in 2020, and (2) AI requires a huge sample of text and images (multiple millions of samples) to be able to even recognize a ballot reliably, let alone decipher hundreds of thousands of different forms and formats, and successfully manipulate them. I'm pretty sure that someone would have spotted all those samples being accumulated.

Now, on to Statistics: I’m deep down a “numbers and logic” guy, so let’s take a logical look at some numbers. I’m using two sources of information: A 20 year MIT database of observed voter fraud as of 2020, and a table of 2020 state-by-state vote counts from Dave Lep’s Atlas of US Presidential Elections.

First, the MIT database shows, over the past 20 years, just over 1,200 cases of voter fraud, 204 of which involved mail-in ballots. That is a rate of voter fraud of 0.00006%.

Now let’s look at Dave Let’s Atlas. I didn’t pick this site because of any particular political bent, it just happened to be the first one I found that had a handy table. First, let’s look at the popular vote. The margin of popular vote victory for the Biden/Harris ticket is 3,078,287 votes. In order to make it a “dead heat”, half of those (1,539,543) would have to be fraudulent. There were 158,590,015 total votes cast across all 50 states, so a “dead heat” popular-vote election would require that there was a fraud rate of just under 1%

That is 16,000 times the rate of voter fraud observed at MIT, just to get to a dead heat. A victory for Trump/Pence by the same margin would require a fraud rate of 1.94% of all votes cast, about 32,000 times what MIT observes.

Ah, but a few key states for the Electoral College were close! What about those? Basically, we’re talking here about Arizona (11), North Carolina (15) and Georgia (16). For the sake of discussion, let’s assume that all 3 actually should have gone to Trump/Pence. The next closest state, by a “% of fraudulent votes to make it a dead heat” measure is Wisconsin, with 0.31%. That is still 5,000 times the MIT observed rate. Let’s assume that Wisconsin should have gone to Trump/Pence by the same margin (10,000 times MIT’s rate of vote fraud). Now you’re at a dead heat in the Electoral College at 269 each.

That’s what you have to assume to imagine that voter fraud made it a dead heat. 10,000 times the observed rate of voter fraud.

Not a clear victory for Trump/Pence, just a dead heat in the Electoral College. You have to assume that every one of the 4 closest states to a dead heat should have gone to Trump/Pence.

For a clear victory (by the same vote margin) you would have to throw in Pennsylvania (the next closest state after Wisconsin) with an assumed a rate of fraud in of 12,000 times the MIT observation.

To be clear: To buy the argument that voter fraud manipulated a loss for Trump/Pence, you have to assume that either; (1) a campaign to affect the vote through fraud at 12,000 times the observed rate of fraud has so far gone totally undetected by the people responsible in both parties, or (2) MIT’s data only reflects unsuccessful fraud, and the successful fraud isn’t caught. (That’s called “ascertainment bias”, where you don’t know reality because your sample size misses too much.)

Dealing with the first point, some may argue that it is all a product of a massive conspiracy to cover up the fraud. In response, I would point to Chuck Colson’s comment about his belief in the Resurrection:

“I know the resurrection is a fact, and Watergate proved it to me. How? Because 12 men testified they had seen Jesus raised from the dead, then they proclaimed that truth for 40 years, never once denying it. Every one was beaten, tortured, stoned and put in prison. They would not have endured that if it weren't true. Watergate embroiled 12 of the most powerful men in the world-and they couldn't keep a lie for three weeks. You're telling me 12 apostles could keep a lie for 40 years? Absolutely impossible.”

Regardless of how you may feel about the Resurrection, Mr. Colson’s point about conspiracy is valid: The Watergate conspirators couldn’t collectively keep a secret for 3 weeks. The more collaborators there are in a conspiracy, the more possibility that someone would break, especially when their careers and even their lives are being threatened. A cover-up on this scale would have to involve thousands of people, at many levels, any of whom would be able to bring forward evidence to prove the conspiracy, any time in the past almost 4 years. Nobody has come forward, nobody has confessed, despite the threats, and despite the opportunity to be a hero by saving some court cases.

Didn’t happen. That dog don’t hunt.

Now, let’s think through that second possibility for a moment, because “Survivorship bias” and Ascertainment bias both happen. MIT’s data when I referenced it covered 20 years of observations (1999 – 2019)*.

The assumption that the data is that massively flawed, and that the real rate of fraud is underreported by a factor of 12,000, calls into question every election in the past 20 years, regardless of who won.

So, if you want to believe that Trump’s loss in 2020 was a result of undiscovered voter fraud, you would have to accept that his victory in 2016 was a fraud as well.

Either; (a) there has been massive fraud for the past 20 years, that the MIT survey doesn’t pick up on, or (b) the 2020 election had a rate of voter fraud that exceeded the historical precedent by a factor of 12,000, and that with all the tens of thousands of people responsible (see my logistical argument) either missed it, or lied, and nobody has ‘fessed up.

That’s why I’m saying that, if you, bright person whom I respect, buy the “voter fraud” argument about the 2020 Election, you have been successfully gaslighted.

The numbers just don’t work. The logic is faulty. I’m sorry to say it, but your perception of reality has been distorted.

* I originally wrote this in late 2020, and have only minimally updated it since.