First this update from ABC News on the September 18 rally in DC. This rally is a follow up of the January 6 rioting. It is being hailed as “showing support for the so-called J-6 rioters held in illegal Federal custody.”
Most of the 610 rioters have been charged, with some 60 behind bars as flight risks and more surely will follow.
The rally organizer is Matt Braynard (short video clip here) is of particular
of interest as seen in the article that follows this update. In a word: J-6 was
a flop…
The “Justice for J-6” rally is being billed as a protest for
defendants being detained in connection with the January insurrection at the
Capitol. At least 610 individuals have been federally charged for their
involvement in the deadly January. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC
– that according is to the DOJ.
Most of the roughly 60 who remain behind bars are suspects that
Federal prosecutors and various judges have identified as posing a credible and
ongoing threat to the public's safety. Many of the same far-right groups and
individuals who promoted the original January 6 rally-turned insurrection are
this time warning supporters to avoid the demonstration at all costs.
With the House and Senate both out, no lawmakers are
expected to be at the Capitol on Saturday. But preventative security measures
are still being taken, including the reinstallation of temporary fencing around
the Capitol complex. Braynard, a former Trump 2016 campaign staffer, has said violence isn't
welcome at the rally.
Trump wrote that the rally was “setup to make him look bad.”
He also released a statement supporting those charged and again projecting his
false claim — the very one that drove the insurrectionists to the Capitol on
January 6: That the election was stolen from him – Trump’s statement (here from Politico):
“Our hearts and minds are with the people being persecuted so unfairly relating to the January 6th protest concerning the Rigged Presidential Election. In addition to everything else, it has proven conclusively that we are a two-tiered system of justice. In the end, however, JUSTICE WILL PREVAIL!”
Saturday’s rally has reignited concerns about another wave of violence as law enforcement prepares for the event. It is planned by “Look Ahead America,” a nonprofit led by a former Trump campaign staffer as a peaceful protest (i.e., more about him is below).
------------------------------------------------------
Building a case of voter fraud in advance of the 2020
election in case Trump were to lose … in this astonishing article from MIT (Technology Review Center) with this headline:
“How claims of voter fraud were supercharged by bad Science”
Messy
data and misrepresentations are rife in voting studies.
Here’s
how those mistakes have helped drive one of the most damaging conspiracy
theories in presidential and American political history
During the 2016 primary season, Trump campaign staffer Matt Braynard had an unusual political
strategy. Instead of targeting Republican base voters — the ones who show up
for every election — he focused on the intersection of two other groups: people
who knew of Donald Trump, and people who had never voted in a primary before.
These were both large groups.
Because of his TV career and ability to court controversy, Trump was already a household name.
Meanwhile, about half America’s potential
voters, nearly 100
million people, don’t vote in presidential elections, let alone primaries.
The overlap between the groups was significant. If Trump could mobilize even a
small percentage of those people, he could clinch the nomination, and Braynard
was willing to put in the work. His strategy, built from polls, research,
and studies of voting behavior, focused on two goals in particular.
The First Goal: Registering,
engaging, educating, and turning out non-voters, the largest electoral bloc in
the country and one that’s regularly ignored.
One recent
survey of 12,000 “chronic non-voters” suggests they receive “little to
no attention in national political conversations” and remain “a mystery to many
institutions.” One way to turn out potentially sympathetic voters would
be to use a call center to remind them, which would also help with his second
goal.
The Second Goal:
To investigate and expose voter fraud.
Braynard said in this story’s interview: “If you’re trying
to do systematic voter fraud, you’re going to look for people who haven’t or
are not going to cast their ballot, because if you do cast a ballot for them
and they do show up at the polling place, that’s going to set up a red flag.”
So the plan was that after the election, the call centers
would contact a sample of the people in the state who had voted for the first
time to confirm that they had actually cast a ballot.
Not only was pursuing voter fraud popular with prospective
donors, Braynard says, but it was also an endeavor supported by the academic
literature, adding: “I believe it’s been
documented, at least scientifically in some peer-reviewed studies, that at
least one senator in the last 10 years was elected by votes that aren’t legal
ballots.”
This single voter fraud study has become canonical among
conservative, and many of today’s other claims of fraud — such as through
mail-in voting — also trace back to it.
A study like this does in fact exist, and it and is
peer-reviewed. In fact, it goes even further than Braynard remembers. Published
in 2014 by Jesse Richman, a political science professor at Old Dominion
University, it argues that illegal votes have played a major role in recent
political outcomes.
In 2008, Richman argued, “non-citizen votes” for then Senate
candidate Al Franken, “likely gave Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote
needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health care reform.”
The paper has become canonical among conservatives. Whenever
you hear that 14%
of non-citizens are registered to vote, this is where it came from. Many of
today’s other claims of voter fraud — such as through mail-in voting — also
trace back to this study.
It’s easy to see why it has taken root on the right:
Higher turnout in elections generally increases the number of Democratic voters, and so proof of massive voter fraud justifies voting restrictions that disproportionately affect them.
Academic research on voting behavior is often narrowly focused and heavily qualified, so Richman’s claim offered something exceedingly rare: near certainty that fraud was happening at a significant rate.
According to his study, at least 38,000
ineligible voters — and perhaps as many as 2.8 million—cast ballots in the 2008
election, meaning the “blue wave that put Obama in office and expanded the
Democrats’ control over Congress would have been built on sand.
For those who were fed up
with margins of error, confidence intervals, and gray areas, Richman’s numbers
were refreshing.
They were also very wrong.
If you want to study how, whether, and for whom people are going to vote, the first thing you need is voters to ask. Want to reach them by phone? Good luck calling landlines: very few people pick up.
You might have a better chance with cell phones, but
don’t expect much.
Telephone surveys are “barge in” research says Jay H. Leve,
the CEO of SurveyUSA, a
polling firm based in NJ. These phone polls, he says, happen at a time that’s
convenient to the pollster, and “to hell with the respondent.” For that reason,
the company aims to limit calls to four to six minutes, “before the respondent
begins to feel like he or she is being abused.”
Online surveys are preferable because respondents can
complete them when they want, but it’s still hard to motivate people. For that
reason, many survey companies offer something in return for people’s opinion,
typically points that can be exchanged for gift cards.
Even if you’ve found participants, you want to make sure you’re asking good questions, says Stephen Ansolabehere, a government professor at Harvard. He is principal investigator of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), a national survey of more than 50,000 people about demographics, general political attitudes, and voting intentions — and the data set used in Jesse Richman’s voter fraud study. “It’s easy to generate bias in your results by wording your survey questions poorly,” Ansolabehere said.
There’s a new crowd of would-be oracles, determined not to
replicate the mistakes of their predecessors.
Ansolabehere further says for example: “We’ll try and be
literal and give brief descriptions, and we generally don’t do things too adjectivally,
But what about when the bill you’re asking about is called something
inflammatory, like the “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act? So, we don’t
use that title.”
Another problem with opinion polling is that what somebody
thinks doesn’t really matter if it’s not going to translate into a vote. That
means you have to figure out who will actually show up to the polls.
Here, demographic data is helpful. For example:
· Women vote slightly more than men.
· White people vote more than people of color.
· Those 65 and older vote at rates roughly 50%
higher than those 18 to 29.
· Advanced degree holders up to nearly three times
as often as those with or without a high school diploma.
However, even if you ladle on the enticements, some
demographic groups are simply less likely to respond to survey requests, which
means you’ll need to adjust the numbers coming out of your survey group.
Most polling firms do this by amplifying the responses they
get from underrepresented groups: a survey with a small sample of Hispanic
voters, say, might weight their responses more heavily if trying to predict
behavior in a battleground state like Arizona, where 24% of voters are
Latino.
One 2016 presidential poll conducted by USC in California and the LA TIMES recruited 3,000 respondents from across America, including a young Black man living in the Midwest who turned out to be a Trump supporter. Because he represented several harder-to-reach categories — young, minority, male — his responses were dramatically over-indexed.
This ended up throwing the numbers off: at one point the
survey estimated Trump’s
support among Black voters at 20%, largely on the basis of this one man’s
responses. A post-election analysis put that number at 6%.
The media, grasping for certainty, missed the error margins
of the study and reached for the headline figures that amplified these over-weighted
responses. As a result, the survey team — which had already made raw data,
weighting schemes, and methodology public — stopped releasing sub-samples of
their data to prevent their study being distorted again. Not all researchers
are as concerned about potential misinterpretation of their work, however.
Until Richman’s 2014
paper, the virtual consensus among academics was that non-citizen voting didn’t
exist on any functional level.
Then he and his coauthors
examined CCES data and claimed that
such voters could actually number several million.
Richman asserted that the illegal votes of non-citizens had changed not only the pivotal 60th Senate vote but also the race for the White House. His paper also stated: “It is likely though by no means certain that John McCain would have won NC were it not for the votes for Obama cast by non-citizens.”
After that publication, Richman then wrote an article for the
Washington Post with a similarly provocative headline that focused on the
upcoming 2014 midterms: “Could
non-citizens decide the November election?”
Unsurprisingly, conservatives ran with this new support for
their old narrative and have continued to do so. The study’s fans then included
President Donald J. Trump, who used it to justify the creation of his short-lived
and failed commission on voter fraud (which also included at the time
(2018) VP Mike Pence and KS Secretary of State Kris Kobach – both Republicans)
and whose claims then about illegal voting are now a centerpiece of his
campaign (as of 2021 and still in full thrust).
But most other academics saw the study as an example of
methodological failure. Ansolabehere, whose CCES data Richman relied on,
coauthored a response to Richman’s work titled “The
Perils of Cherry Picking Low-Frequency Events in Large Sample Sizes.”
For starters, he argued, the paper overweighed the non-citizens in the survey — just as the Black Midwestern voter was over-weighted to produce an illusion of widespread Black support for Trump. This was especially problematic in Richman’s study, wrote Ansolabehere, when you consider the impact that a tiny number of people who were misclassified as non-citizens would have on the data. Some people, said Ansolabehere, had likely misidentified themselves as ineligible to vote in the 2008 study by mistake — perhaps out of sloppiness, misunderstanding, or just the rush to accumulate points for gift cards.
Critically, nobody who had claimed to be a non-citizen in both the
2010 survey and the follow-up in 2012 had cast a validated vote.
Nearly 200 social scientists echoed Ansolabehere’s concerns
in an open
letter, but for Harold Clarke, then editor of the journal that published
Richman’s paper, the blowback was hypocritical, saying: “If we were to condemn
all the papers on voting behavior that have made claims about political
participation based on survey data, well, this paper is identical. There’s no
difference whatsoever.”
As it turns out, survey data does contain a lot of errors — not least because many people who say they voted are lying.
In 2012, Ansolabehere and a colleague discovered that huge numbers of Americans were misreporting their voting activity.
But it wasn’t the non-citizens, or even the people who were in Matt Braynard’s group of “low propensity voters.”
Instead, the researchers found: “Well-educated, high-income
partisans who are engaged in public affairs, attend church regularly, and have
lived in the community for a while are the kinds of people who misreport their
vote experience when in fact they haven’t voted at all.”
Which is to say: “high-propensity” voters and people likely
to lie about having voted look identical. Across surveys done over the
telephone, online, and in person, about 15% of the electorate may represent
these “misreporting voters.”
Ansolabehere’s conclusion was a milestone, but it relied on something not every pollster has: money.
For his research, he contracted with
Catalist, a vendor that buys voter registration data from states, cleans it,
and sells it to the DNC and progressive groups. Using a
proprietary algorithm and data from the CCES, the firm validated every
self-reported claim of voting behavior by matching individual survey responses
with the respondents’ voting record, their party registration, and the method by
which they voted. This kind of effort is not just expensive (the Election
Project, a voting information source run by a political science professor
at the U. of FL said the cost is roughly $130,000.
But, it is also shrouded in mystery since third-party
companies can set the terms they want, including confidentiality agreements
that keep the information private.
In a response to the criticism of his paper, Richman admitted his numbers might be off, writing: “The estimate of 2.8 million non-citizen voters is itself almost surely too high. There is a 97.5% chance that the true value is lower.”
Despite his
admission, however, Richman continued to promote the claims. In March of 2018,
he was in a courtroom testifying that non-citizens are voting en masse.
That same Kris Kobach
(mentioned above) was defending a law that required voters to prove their
citizenship before registering to vote. Such voter ID laws are seen by many as
a way to suppress legitimate votes, because many eligible voters — in this
case, up to 35,000 Kansans alone — lacked the required documents.
To underscore the argument and prove that there was a
genuine threat of non-citizen voting, Kobach’s team hired Richman as an expert
witness. Paid a total of $40,663.35 for his contribution, Richman used
various sources to predict the number of non-citizens registered to vote in the
state.
One estimate,
based on data from a Kansas county that was later proved to
be inaccurate, put the number at 433. Another, extrapolated from CCES data,
said it was 33,104. At the time, there were an estimated 115,000 adult
residents in Kansas who were not American citizens — including green card
holders and people on visas.
By Richman’s calculations, that would mean nearly 30% of
them were illegally registered to vote. Overall, his estimates ran from roughly
11,000 to 62,000. “We have a 95% confidence that the true value falls somewhere
in that range,” Richman testified.
The judge ended up ruling that voter ID laws were unconstitutional
and wrote in her opinion: “All four of Richman’s estimates, taken individually
or as a whole, are flawed.”
One consequence of this unreliable data — from citizens who
lie about their voting record to those who mistakenly misidentify themselves as
non-citizens — is that it further diverts attention and resources from the
voters who lie outside traditional polling groups.
Now enter Matt Braynard
who in his internal memo for the Trump campaign: “For the low-propensity crowd
it is a vicious cycle. They don’t get any voter contact love from the campaigns
because they don’t vote, but they don’t vote because they don’t get any voter
contact. It is a persistent state of disenfranchisement.”
Campaigns focus on constituents who are likely to vote and likely to give money, says Allie Swatek, director of policy and research for the NYC Campaign Finance Board.
She experienced this bias firsthand when she
moved back to NY in time for the 2018 election, saying: “Though there were
races for U.S, Senate, Governor, and State Congress, I received nothing in the
mail. And I was like, ‘Is this what it's like when you have no voting history?’
Nobody reaches out to you?”
According to the Knight Foundation’s survey of
non-voters, 39%
reported that they’ve never been asked to vote — not by family,
friends, teachers, political campaigns, or community organizations, nor at
places of employment or worship. However, that may be changing.
Braynard’s mobilization strategy played a role in the 2018 campaign for governor of GA by Democrat Stacey Abrams. She specifically targeted low-propensity voters, especially voters of color, and though she ultimately lost that race, more Black and Asian voters turned out that year than for the presidential race in 2016.
Abrams’s former campaign manager wrote in a New
York Times op-ed: “Any political scientist will tell you this is not
something that happens. Ever.”
Richman was asked earlier this summer if we should trust the sort of wide-ranging numbers he gave in his study, or in his testimony in Kansas.
He answered no, not necessarily adding in an email: “One challenge is
that people want to know what the levels of non-citizen registration and voting
are with a level of certainty that the data at hand doesn’t provide.”
In fact, Richman said he “ultimately agreed” with the judge
in the Kansas case despite the fact that she called his evidence flawed,
adding: “On the one hand, I think that non-citizen voting happens, and that
public policy responses need to be cognizant of that. On the other hand, that
doesn’t mean every public policy response makes an appropriate trade-off
between the various kinds of risk.”
Behind the academic
language, Richman was saying essentially what every other expert on the subject
has already said: Fraud is possible, so how do we balance election security
with accessibility?
Unlike his peers, however,
Richman reached that conclusion by first publishing a paper with alarmist
findings, writing a newspaper article about it, and then testifying that
non-citizen voting was rampant, maybe, despite later agreeing with the decision
that concluded he was wrong.
Experts preparing for November 3, 2020 election to
generate some results, some waiting, and a lot of disinformation. You should be
ready too. Whatever Richman’s reasons for this, his work has helped buttress
the avalanche of disinformation in this election cycle.
Throughout the 2020 election campaign, Trump has continued
to make repeated, unfounded claims that vote-by-mail is insecure, and that
millions of votes are being illegally cast. And last year, when a ballot
harvesting scandal hit the GOP in NC and forced a special election that led to
a Democratic win.
Trump operative (Matt Braynard) went on Fox News and accused the left of encouraging an epidemic of voter fraud, saying: “The left is enthusiastic about embracing this technique in states like California. Voter fraud’s been one of the left’s most reliable voter constituencies.”
However, Braynard is unlike some voter fraud evangelists,
for whom finding no evidence of fraud is simply more evidence of a
vast conspiracy.
He at least purports to be
able to change his mind on the basis of new facts. This suggests that there may
be a way out of this current situation, where we project our own assumptions
onto the uncertainty inherent in voting behavior.
After leaving the Trump campaign, he founded “Look Ahead
America,” a nonprofit dedicated to turning out blue-collar and rural voters and
to investigating voter fraud. As part of the group’s work, he and 25 other
volunteers served as poll watchers in Virginia in 2017.
The process wasn’t as transparent as he would’ve liked. He
wasn’t allowed to look over poll workers’ shoulders, and there were no cameras
to photograph voters as they cast their ballots.
But even though he wasn’t absolutely certain that the
election was clean, he was still confident enough to issue a press release the
following day saying: “At least where we were present, the local election
officials faithfully followed the lawful procedures. We did observe a few
occasions where polling staff could benefit from better education on the
relatively recent voter ID laws. Nonetheless, they worked diligently to ensure
the election laws were followed.”
My 2 Cents: I admit it’s a very long article – but one that is a good and easy-to-read bookmark for your “Trump Phony Fraud File” just like I labeled mine (smile).
Plus, the
data and information comes from a very reputable source (MIT). I enjoyed the research
and I hope you will, too.
Thanks for stopping by.
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