In light of the tight results of the presidential race in some states, many social media users have alleged that voter fraud has skewed the …
In light of the tight results of the presidential race in some states, many social media users have alleged that voter fraud has skewed the tallies. But some of the examples circulated online have turned out to tell a different story than what they initially appeared to be. Around 5 a.m. on Nov.4, data firm Decision Desk HQ updated the vote count for Michigan, adding 138,339 votes to former Vice President Joe Biden, but zero to President Donald Trump. The statistical impossibility of such a scenario prompted people to speculate that votes were illegally injected into the tally. Within 40 minutes, however, Decision Desk HQ posted another update which subtracted 110,796 votes from Biden’s total and added 16,638 to Trump’s. It later said a clerical error in Shiawassee County caused the distribution of incorrect data and has since been fixed. At 5:54 a.m. and 6:05 a.m., the firm posted two more updates for the Michigan race that didn’t appear to show anything unusual. Then, at 6:18 a.m., the firm posted another update, which added 158,902 votes to the Biden tally and 29,295 votes to Trump’s. Those votes split roughly 85 percent for Biden. That is still an exceptionally high ratio. One explanation could be that those votes came from a deep-blue county and only included absentee ballots, which were expected to heavily favor Democrats. The problem is, even absentee ballots in Washtenaw County, which went for Biden by the largest margin, split in his favor by less than 82 percent. And the candidate only picked up 125,927 absentee votes there, so many would have had to come from another, less pro-Biden county. Another explanation could be statistical clustering, meaning Biden ballots just happened to cluster together by chance. A spokeswoman for the Michigan Secretary of State didn’t immediately respond to questions about these particular votes. One Twitter account claimed that more than 14,000 dead people voted in Wayne County, Michigan, which includes Detroit. But there were several issues with the claim. The source provided in the tweet is a list of what appears to be 14,550 registered voters in Wayne County with birth dates between 1901 and 1920.
