Hillary Clinton Won

Brett Afloweroutofstone
Prestigious University that can be namedropped by people who like the results of my study
and want it to appear legitimate

Abstract: Give up already.

I, random internet person, officially declare Axel Geijsel and Rodolfo Cortes
Barragans paper Are We Witnessing a Dishonest Election?: A Between State Comparison
Based on the Used Voting Procedures of the 2016 Democratic Party Primary for the
Presidency of the United States to be wrong, and also poorly named.
This conclusion is based upon the evidence contained in their summary that 1.) the
authors somehow thought that delegate distribution is a suitable proxy for vote count, 2.)
they refused to define what a primary states paper trail means in this context, 3.) their
failure to explain how a paper trail would be harder to falsify than electronic voting
records, not to mention by what degree it would be easier, 4.) the completely false claim
that [b]y the very nature of caucusing procedures, caucus results are generally thought to
be more trustworthy, 5.) a refusal to identify the source of their exit poll data, 6.) the fact
that exit polls are themselves notorious for being wildly inaccurate and, thus, invalid
measurements for research 7.) their comparison to a whole one other Democratic primary
as an apparently conclusive confirmation of their findings, 8.) the mind-blowingly
overconfident conclusion of these data suggest that election fraud is occurring in the 2016
Democratic Party Presidential Primary election despite the fact that their problem-ridden,
non-peer reviewed paper would even at its best only suggest the possibility of voter fraud.
After mentioning that paper and then failing to link to the Berkeley study
suggested in the headline, Higgins News Networks article Odds Hillary Won Without
Widespread Fraud: 1 in 77 Billion says Berkeley, Sanford Studies seems to base the next
part of its analysis1 on the fact that certain polls (many of which werent even asking who
will you vote for, but were simply favorability and approval polls,) didnt match up with
actual electoral outcomes, implying that widespread, covert vote manipulation is a more
likely outcome than occasional incorrect polling.
The next part is then based on the New York Times live vote counter, which they
dont seem to realize is not an accurate visualization of votes as they are cast, but instead of
visualization of votes as they are reported. I think their point here is that a number of states
showed Sanders likely to win but eventually tilted towards Clinton as time went on, in
1

It seems like Higgins News Network is literally just reposting stuff from other websites, so it isnt actually their
analysis, just analysis theyre sharing. Check the article itself for proper attribution.

some cases becoming hers only at the last minute. This is clearly not a result of, say, dense
urban areas with large Clinton voter bases reporting their results last, but is instead clear
proof of manipulation done to weight certain observations in order to ensure a certain
outcome. Amirite?
Oh, great, then for the next part theyre back to the exit polls thing again. The copyand-pasted text acknowledges that [p]oorly informed experts frequently argue that the
statistical analysis of exit polls can be misleading because it assumes that real life data is
randomly distributed (as in the Gaussian curve) when thats not always the case. Those
experts are right. Their answer to this charge is that [a]fter 59 years of fine-tuning this
process in countless elections around the world statisticians have reached a point where
exit polls have become extremely reliable. So, wait. The statisticians and political
scientists who all say that exit polls are unreliable are idiots, because they fail to
understand that the statisticians and political scientists who craft exit polls are
geniuses? What?
Look, the logistical voting system (or lack thereof, since federal coordination and
monitoring of elections is sparse) in the United States is broken as fuck, and there are in
fact big holes in the system that could be used to manipulate outcomes on the margins. Id
be willing to believe there was some dirty play during the 2016 Democratic primary (see:
Brooklyn voter purge). But the analysis presented here is full of shit. I can tell you that
without even checking the numbers. More importantly, there is nothing at all to suggest
that there was systematic voter fraud designed to ensure the victory of Hillary Clinton. She
won the Democratic nomination, and she would have won it even if it was spotlessly clean.