Ben Turner runs Fraud Spotters, a consultancy specializing in detecting insurance fraud. He noticed an odd thing when he analyzed Counties that used Dominion Voting machines– it seems on average that they moved by 2 to 3 points to the Democrat presidential candidate from the Republican compared to counties that didn’t use those machines.
He went into the analysis to assuage his own skepticism.
As a Republican, he felt that the outrageousness of the election fraud allegations made him question whether he was on the “wrong team”.
“I don’t know how to process these allegations…They sound so extreme and far-fetched that they are easy to blow off as ridiculous.” Ben Turner, in a recent blog post. “
The work found that Dominion use was associated with a 1.55 percentage point decrease in the Republican vote and a 1.55 percentage point increase in the Democratic vote in the presidential race.
The analysis controlled for the differences in county population, the number of votes cast, urban/rural population split, population growth, international immigration rate, low-education population, high “natural amenity” areas, high “creative class” population, and manufacturing dependency.
Control factors including race, voter preference, and population were added, and the analysis remained the same–the probability of the esults being a fluke decreased.
The probability that the results occurred by chance or due to some unobserved factor was about 1 in 1,000, significant enough to potentially flip elections in at least four states.
-Georgia, only about 0.24 percent of votes would need to be shifted from one candidate to the other for the state to flip.
-Arizona, only one county—the populous Maricopa County—uses Dominion, but the margin there is so thin that shifting 0.51 percent of Maricopa’s votes could flip the state.
-Wisconsin, 2.05 percent of votes in counties using Dominion would need to be shifted; in Nevada, 2.5 percent.
“If you believe the Dominion effect is real, it is not hard to believe that this effect would be greater in swing states and could have swung these four states into Biden’s column, putting the electoral college in his favor….I believe this is indicating that Georgia is the strongest case for auditing”
The analysis was also run with about 100 controls. The effect was reduced to about a 2-point shift toward Biden. He said that at this point, the statistical model started to suffer from “multicollinearity,” meaning many of the control factors were overlapping, which caused the model to provide less reliable results for any single variable, including the “Dominion effect.”
He said the results would be safer to report as a range.
“I would say the national average effect appears to be somewhere between 1.0% and 1.6%.”
Turner used prior election data from MIT Election Data Science Lab, current election data from Politico, Dominion adoption data from VerifiedVoting.Org, and demographic data from the Department of Agriculture.
To be careful, it should be noted that the findings aren’t enough to “win a court case”. A statistical analysis, no matter how sophisticated, can be wrong. But he argued the four states should allow for an audit of the machines.
If this was a suspected insurance fraud case, the results would warrant a probe, he said.
Walter Mebane, statistics professor, and election fraud expert at the University of Michigan, is dubious: “The assumptions that everything is the same over time except the machines are ridiculous.”
A former military intelligence analyst alleged in a sworn affidavit that the Dominion software was accessed by agents of malicious actors, such as China and Iran, to monitor and manipulate the 2020 election.
One county election supervisor in Georgia demonstrated that the software can change votes through its “adjudication” feature. A Georgia state election official said the adjudication creates a log through which it can trace who made any changes to a ballot.
None of us wants to believe the election was stolen, and it’s well past time for transparency. For President-Elect Biden, let’s look into this, and if nothing happened, great. But so many events have led people to believe that election fraud occurred.
We need to do the audit and analysis, and put and end to the speculation once and for all.
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