Continued (Part 2 of 2)
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Allegheny County:
In mail-in data, the initial clustering in precincts where fewer ballots were cast spans a larger range of vote share percentages than in Philadelphia, ranging from around 60–95% for Harris and 5–40% for Trump. As Allegheny encompasses both Pittsburgh as well as some smaller surrounding semi-rural communities, this broader range of vote share could conceptually be caused by geographic differences.
While not an entirely linear visual representation, mail-in voting data does eventually appear to average out around the 60% vote share mark for Harris and the 40% vote share mark for Trump.
However, in Election Day data, there is a more pronounced shift toward a higher vote share for Trump and a lower vote share for Harris. This trend appears to become visible in precincts with around 250 votes.
The result is a very heavy upward skew towards 60% vote share for Trump and downward to 40% vote share for Harris in precincts where more votes were cast. The shift is more visible when the candidates’ charts are broken out separately.
This Election Day data does not align with expected voting patterns. Essentially, one candidate benefited, unexpectedly and disproportionately, in precincts where more votes were cast.
Notably, the ETA has documented striking similarities to the patterns seen in Pennsylvania in our analysis of Clark County, Nevada.
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Erie County
Lastly, we examine vote share by vote count in Erie County.
Erie County is a much smaller community than Philadelphia or Pittsburgh, meaning there are far fewer data points. As Erie is similar in population size to San Mateo, these two sets of charts should conceptually be easier to compare with each other.
In mail-in data for Erie, a largely linear pattern is observed when represented visually, along with expected human variation in voting patterns.
Our expectation for unmanipulated voting data would be to see a similar pattern in Election Day voting data, with a pair of “straight(ish) lines” horizontally across the chart. It would be expected for Election Day results to show a higher vote share for the Republican candidate, but for this trend to be largely consistent across all precinct sizes.
Instead, there is a relatively sharp increase in vote share in precincts where more votes were cast and counted.
The shift in pattern appears to become visible in precincts where over around 400 votes were counted.
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What Could Cause This Pattern?
Hypothesis 1: Votes From Two Different Populations (But Only On Election Day)
The divergence of results shown in Philadelphia in particular is reminiscent of what might occur if the votes cast on Election Day originated from two distinct populations. The complicating factor is that these trends are so pronounced on Election Day only and not in Mail-In Voting.
What different populations could these be?
A next step in our analysis is intended to be plotting precincts using a tool that can provide additional information about each precinct point (i.e. location, machinery used, etc.) This will allow both our team and the broader public to explore the data more easily and freely.
Hypothesis 2: Different Voting Types = Different Voting Patterns
Hypothesis 3: “More Republicans Just Showed Up on Election Day” (But Disproportionately in Larger Precincts)
Hypothesis 4: Vote Manipulation Targeting Precincts With More Votes
(Does Unusually Large Turnout Benefit One Candidate Disproportionately?)
There is also a notable difference in Philadelphia, Allegheny, and Erie county voting data patterns when comparing Mail-In Voting and Election Day turnout relative to:
In this report, “turnout” specifically means the percentage of voters who cast a ballot relative to the number of registered voters. In Pennsylvania, precinct-level voter registration data is available – so we have calculated turnout percentage by precinct.
Why Analyze Turnout?
To some extent, different voting patterns in different vote types might be expected: there are differences in the populations who tend to vote using these different methods. As mentioned previously, in the U.S., particularly since the 2020 COVID pandemic, Democrats are broadly more likely to vote by mail and Republicans are more likely to vote in-person on Election Day. (Source: Michigan Institute of Technology)
However, patterns present in Philadelphia, Allegheny, and Erie county election data displays a trend that has been observed in other elections internationally where vote manipulation is suspected: one candidate or party receiving a disproportionately high number of votes in areas that report unusually high turnout.
Multi-year studies have shown that in Western democracies, the relationship between turnout (how many voters go to the polls) and vote share (the percentage of votes a particular candidate receives) is surprisingly predictable and stable. While there is natural variation in these two factors (turnout and vote share), when represented visually, the overall shape of those two factors is “remarkably stable” across elections. (Sources: Borghesi and Bouchaud 2010, Klimek et al 2012, Behrens 2023)
In particular, high recorded voter turnout correlating with disproportionately large numbers of votes (or share of the vote) for one candidate/party can be an indicator that the candidate/party may be benefiting from vote manipulation.
Moreover, the ‘shape’ created by forms of manipulation such as ballot-stuffing can cause the shape of the represented data to change in specific ways.
Per Klimek et al 2012:
A different strategy for detecting signals of election fraud is to look at the distribution of vote and turnout numbers [...]. This strategy has been extensively used for the Russian presidential and Duma elections over the last 20 years. These works focus on the task of detecting two mechanisms, the stuffing of ballot boxes and the reporting of contrived numbers. It has been noted that these mechanisms are able to produce different features of vote and turnout distributions than those features observed in fair elections. [...]
Here, it was also observed that ballot stuffing not only changes the shape of vote and turnout distributions but also induces a high correlation between them. Unusually high vote counts tend to co-occur with unusually high turnout numbers. (emphasis added)
Put simply: if a candidate receives a high percentage of votes cast, but disproportionately receives those votes in places where there was very high voter turnout, it may be an indicator that some of those votes were artificially inflated.
This next section compares turnout relative to number of votes received by Mail-In Voting and Election Day voting data in all three counties through the use of histograms.
Histograms and Global Comparisons
One challenge with scatterplots is that it can be difficult to see how the “occurrences” (the coloured circles that represent precincts) are distributed among the two candidates. Particularly if there are a large number of data points (in our case, precincts), the actual volume can become challenging to discern.
Normal data that is not manipulated and follows natural variability often forms a bell curve, or ‘normal distribution.’
When data forms a bell curve, most ‘values’ (the things that we’re measuring) fall close to the average (the ‘middle’ of the bell curve). The further away from the average a value is, the less likely it is. When representing data visually, whether or not the data you are representing ‘fits’ a bell curve can be an indicator of whether something unusual or unexpected happened.
Evidence of manipulated election data in other countries has been identified through this approach. One known indicator of unfair elections is an anomalous deviation from normal distribution, wherein one candidate receives a disproportionate number of votes in areas where turnout is high. Referred to as a ‘Russian tail’, such a spike may indicate election result falsification, particularly if only one candidate benefits.
Source: Sergei Shpilkin, Elections Statistics Roundtable 2017
(title cards and markup added)
Note that in the bottom right-hand corner of the charts displaying Russian election results, there is a ‘bump’ coloured in with pale pink hatching. The hatching highlights the votes that Shpilkin deems were likely the product of ballot-stuffing efforts, increasing the turnout in the areas where ballots were stuffed while only benefiting one candidate.
As line graphs are often used to represent temporary fluctuations (i.e. market fluctuations) rather than finalized data, our team has opted to use histograms in our analysis.
Histograms are another way to represent data visually. Histograms merge data into a simpler view than scatterplots, allowing us to show a ‘higher level’ impression of certain trends. While histograms should also display a ‘bell curve’
In the charts below:
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Philadelphia is an overwhelmingly Democratic city, having voted for the Democratic Presidential candidate by 81.44% in 2020, 82.53% in 2016, and 85.2% in 2012. As such, the majority of precincts voting mostly Democratic is in line with expectations.
When ‘stacked’ on top of each other, we can see the ‘shape’ of both candidates’ votes received in relation to how many registered voters cast a ballot.
With Mail-In votes, the results for both candidates align with normal distribution – they largely follow a pair of bell curves. While the Democratic candidate received more votes in Philadelphia than the Republican candidate, the respective histograms ‘peak’ at about the same level of turnout (around 15%-25%).
Neither candidate appears to benefit disproportionately from areas with unusually high turnout.
In the Election Day results for Philadelphia, there is a noticeable shift. In the charts showing the candidates’ respective Philadelphia Election Day results below, observe what happens to the Trump distribution as reported by precincts that measured high levels of voter turnout:
At the 58% turnout threshold, there is a spike in the number of votes for Trump.
This is the only time that Trump exceeds Harris’s number of votes received relative to turnout. The dashed line shows the point at which the number of votes received by Trump exceeds the number of votes received by Harris – which only happens at high turnout level, above the 58% turnout mark.
The ETA has also represented and shared this data in line graph form. For comparison with the Shpilkin turnout analysis above, here is Philadelphia Mail-In and Election data election result data represented in line graph format:
Allegheny
The same pattern is present in Allegheny county.
In Mail-In voting, we see normal distribution – the expected bell curve for both candidates. Once again, neither candidate appears to benefit at higher levels of Mail-In Voting turnout.
In Election Day, however, at higher levels of turnout Trump begins to benefit disproportionately. This is most clearly seen when the two distributions are layered overtop of one another
In Erie, the shift in distribution is possibly the most stark among the histogram representations. For Mail-In voting data, each candidate’s distribution appears largely as expected.
On Election Day, the fact that a larger number of Republicans voted compared to Mail-In Voting is expected. What is unexpected is the extent to which this increased levels of Republican votes disproportionately appear concentrated in precincts that reported unusually high voter turnout.
Once again, greater numbers of Trump votes appear to only overtake the number of Harris votes at high turnout levels, in this case at about 52% turnout as shown by the dashed line. It is unclear why increased enthusiasm for Trump would not manifest on Election Day in precincts where there were fewer votes cast and counted.
Ultimately, in Erie County Trump won 50.05% of the vote (68,866 votes total) compared to Harris’s 49.03% (67,456 votes total). This aligned with state and national election outcomes, meaning Erie County appeared once again to have made good on its bellwether status.
In Pennsylvania election results data, the following turnout trends are present:
For the purpose of visualization, we can easily see the difference between the degree of Trump vote share relative to Harris vote share in precincts that recorded below or above 70% turnout:
Note:
As part of our turnout analysis, the ETA also developed two sets of turnout-related scatterplots:
To prevent this report from becoming too long for our web provider to accommodate, these two sets of scatterplots will be available for viewing shortly in a discrete appendix ('Additional Pennsylvania Charts').
Hypothesis 1: “More Republicans Just Showed Up on Election Day” (But Disproportionately in Larger Precincts)
Independent election observer, data analyst, and forensic expert Roman Udot describes the change in Armenian election results pre- and post- Velvet Revolution:
“I gave lectures [in Armenia] on how rigged elections look. The authorities used to claim, ‘You don’t understand, that’s just how people in the villages vote — high turnout, and they love the government.’ Then the ‘Velvet Revolution’ happened, and the election commissions didn't follow Pashinyan’s orders, so he came to power without fraud. As a result, the [Russian Tail in the election result data] immediately disappeared, like a dog’s tail falling off. Now, there are no more unusually high turnouts in the mountain regions. Before, they were just fabricating the numbers, reporting inflated figures to please their superiors, and taking advantage of the fact that no one went there to monitor.”
Hypothesis 2: Geographic Differences Causing Turnout Difference?
Hypothesis 3: Vote Manipulation, Such as Electronic Ballot-Stuffing, Resulting in Inflated Turnout in Only Some Precincts
Truth matters. Confidence in the integrity of our elections is essential for a successful democracy. Here are some of our immediate next steps:
Call for Audits
We urge voters and election officials in the state of Pennsylvania to seek additional hand audits of paper voting records from the November 5th, 2024 General Election. We believe there are too many statistical anomalies in this election to not investigate further. If the cost of a hand recounted audit and use of taxpayer funds to pay for those costs is a barrier, our organization is willing to enter into discussions about a cost-sharing agreement. We have sent a summary of our findings to state and local officials, and will be sharing that letter publicly in the coming days.
Replicate and Corroborate
We are seeking others to recreate our analysis, review our work, and interrogate our findings. We believe you will reach the same conclusions about these statistical anomalies, but it’s important for third parties to review this work thoroughly.
Election Truth Alliance (April 2025)
Three Counties in Pennsylvania
Development and Drafting Leads:
Lilli M. & William B.
Featured Charts:
William B. & Thomas EK
Chart Formatting:
Tasha M. & Lilli M.
Posted: April 7, 2025
Last Updated: April 10, 2025
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