FiveThirtyEight looked at the claims and could not find any correlation between voting method and the outcomes in eight states and could only find a thin possible link between voting method and results in two states — Wisconsin and Texas.
We found no apparent correlation5 between voting method and outcome in six of the eight states, and a thin possible link between voting method and results in Wisconsin and Texas.
Now, before you start screaming “But see, there’s a chance!” or even worse “The Russians are coming!” keep in mind this isn’t one way:
The use of any machine voting in a county was associated with a 5.6-percentage-point reduction in Democratic two-party vote share in Wisconsin but a 2.7-point increase in Texas, both of which were statistically significant.6
But, that doesn’t matter because as soon as you weight the results by population, the statistical significance vanishes:
More than 75 percent of Wisconsin’s population lives in the 23 most populous counties, which don’t appear to show any evidence for an effect driven by voting systems.7 To have effectively manipulated the statewide vote total, hackers probably would have needed to target some of these larger counties. When we included all counties but weighted the regression by the number of people living in each county, the statistical significance of the opposite effects in Wisconsin and Texas both evaporated.8
All evidence points to there being nothing here. Running around claiming that the election was rigged by evil hackers that nobody can see or some other vast conspiracy theory is just that — Conspiracy Theories. Which honestly at one time where banned from being discussed here and hopefully will be again soon. I couldn’t agree more with 538’s conclusion:
But at a time when the number of voters without confidence in the accuracy of the vote count is rising, the burden of proof ought to be on people claiming there was electoral fraud.
Our democracy has enough problems now that we have the orange headed chimpanzee about to take office, we don’t need to do further damage to it and voter turnout by undermining confidence in the accuracy of the results through wild conspiracy theories without any actual evidence.
I strongly suggest if you have any doubts about the election and think there’s cause for Clinton to demand a recount on the basis of hackers you read 538’s analysis and realize that’s never going to happen. Demographics, Not Hacking, Explain the Election Results. (fivethirtyeight.com)
The fact that a conspiracy theory is one of the most shared articles here in DailyKos on social media is disgraceful. We pride ourselves on being a reality based community, it’s time we started facing reality again.