Guest Post by Mike Shedlock
Salil Mehta, founder of Statistical Ideas comments on Hillary’s recount odds in his post Losers Who Won’t Lose.
Mehta says “Based on statistical randomness of re-assessing voter intent, the chance of Hillary emerging as the victor is far less than 10%.”
I believe Mehta overstates Hillary’s odds (and I bet he agrees with my analysis).
First let’s see what Mehta has to say (emphasis his) …
The only viable path for a Hillary Clinton victory at this stage is to astoundingly uncover a wide-spread (across three states) fraud. And that’s equally unlikely, since the basis for the voting aberrations occurred in less populated counties and anyway the three states employ three different voting mechanisms, so the fraud would have had to somehow jointly occur through different transmission vehicles (paper voting, and electronic voting) and we would require a speedy judicial resolution for states such as Pennsylvania that sidestepped back-up recordings from their direct voting equipment.
We should note the following statistical facts about the electoral vote in the three recount states:
- 10 votes, Wisconsin (Trump leads by 0.9 percentage points)
- 20 votes, Pennsylvania (Trump leads by 1.1 percentage points)
- 16 votes, Michigan (Trump leads by 0.2 percentage points)
Given that Mr. Trump won by 74 electoral votes, Ms. Clinton would need to flip all three states noted above, in order to liquidate this deficit (i.e., >74/2 = >37 votes). The leads described above however, among 4.4 million voters from these three states, is highly statistically significant on a state-level (and certainly when all three states are combined). It would be remarkably unlikely (>5σ event) that we would arbitrarily second-guess every one of these millions of voters’ intents and, convert any (certainly let alone all) of these three states.
Hillary must be cognizant of this improbability, and so instead is foolishly piggy-backing off of the second most reasonable recount rationale: not that errors in intent occurred, but rather straight-fraud on such a scale that would flip most of these states. While tempting for Democrat supporters, this fraud scenario is of course dubious and a humiliating ploy at this stage. Because for it to work, we would need to suppose that such fraud occurred in three different ways at once:
- Michigan is a paper-ballot state (no equipment hacking possible) so electronic fraud is virtually unlikely to come about
- Wisconsin does have paper back-ups recorded though the counties that are most heterogeneous, are lesser-populated and not so wildly-off probabilistically
- Pennsylvania has similar issues to Wisconsin, except they haven’t recorded all of their votes in an auditable back-up so rife judicial hurdles must be overcome
The bottom line is everything must go right here, in all three state recounts (between proving fraud and getting mathematical support from wide-spread “voter intent errors”), in order to better align towards a Donald Trump downfall. And even if this all occurred, accounting for all of these statistical adjustments, the probability of a Hillary Clinton triumph is still quite low.
Continue reading “Assessing Hillary’s Recount Odds”
