Fig. 5— 2016 Louisiana Democratic presidential prim­ary

Candidates’ vote shares vary by as much as 36% between small and large precincts

Graph by Beth Clarkson

This graph is in complete violation of the Law of Large Numbers. For a candidate to receive this level of increased support in the large precincts, each new precinct must be so heavily weighted that it defies the average of all the other precincts that have already been added together. This is a major statistical irregularity. In the small precincts, the difference between Clinton and Sanders is approximately 10% (Clinton 48%–Sanders 38%). However, in the largest precincts the difference between the candidates is 46% (Clinton 70%–Sanders 24%.) That is a difference of 36% support between the smallest precincts and the largest precincts.

The 2016 Primary

The majority of the data we examined suggests that the two candidates currently slated to accept their party’s nomination in the 2016 presidential primary races, received a different number of votes than what has been officially reported.

On the Republican side, statistical analysis indicates that Donald Trump probably received more votes than what has been reported and certified. Because he was able to overcome his opposition, even with the irregularities, his selection as the presumptive Republican nominee is supported by the data.

As we stated in the opening, this is not the case on the Democratic side. The overwhelming majority of the almost two dozen states that we analyzed, demonstrate irregularities. We found suspect statistical patterns in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary in Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia. These irregularities were significant, as we demonstrate in Louisiana, sometimes as large as 36% and could change the outcome of the election.

In almost every instance the discrepancies favored Hillary Clinton. In all likelihood the current results have assigned her a greater percentage of the vote than she may have actually received, while simultaneously under-reporting Bernie Sanders’ legitimate vote share.

We intend to report on the percentage that the race may be off, based on a statistical analysis of as many states as possible.

Recommendations

It is hard to conceive of a legitimate transfer of power following an election that has been this flawed. We recommend that many of these elections be examined, and if found to be inaccurate, decertified. Where paper ballots are available, it would be informative to count them by hand. Hand counts, historically, have also been subject to election fraud, so the protocols must establish a secure process that is open to the public, invites media scrutiny, and has strong chain-of-custody.

We understand that this is unprecedented. While the U.S. does have a long history of election fraud, we do not believe it has ever been this well-documented prior to the end of the election cycle.

Philip B. Stark, a statistics professor at UC Berkeley, who has been instrumental in designing new auditing techniques for elections agrees that, “Closer scrutiny of elections is necessary and welcome … that requires a paper trail, convincing evidence that the paper trail is complete and accurate, and a risk-limiting audit of the paper trail or a full manual tally to provide convincing evidence that the paper trail matches the announced result.”

Beth Clarkson adds, “It’s possible that to do a good audit would be more expensive and less transparent than a hand count.”

Securing Our Democracy

The lack of accuracy in our elections is truly a betrayal of our ancestors who fought and died for the democratic process. It is a betrayal of the soldiers who lost their feet to amputation in the Valley Forge winter. It is a betrayal of the women who went to prison and starved themselves to join the franchise. It is a betrayal of the civil rights workers who died for the right to register to vote. There can be no debate about whether or not the vote is accurate. We must know that it is accurate the way we know that the Earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa.

The people who win these elections will decide whether or not we go to war, how many people get what jobs, where our children attend what quality schools, the quality of the air we breathe and the water we drink, and so much more. The entire identity of our nation rests on our self-image as a self-correcting democracy whose leaders are accountable to the voters that elect them. To not know with 100% confidence that those leaders are the leaders that we actually voted for is the very essence of an existential crisis. This is a state of emergency. We must move rapidly to secure the integrity of the vote.

We need to immediately implement robust audit procedures. Then, as rapidly as possible, we must join the other legitimate democracies of the world and implement a system of paper ballots, hand-counted in a secure process that is open to the public, invites media scrutiny, and has strong chain of custody protocols. In this way, we can achieve accurate, verifiable results. Each citizen of the United States, and indeed the world, deserves this from us.

We encourage you to download and read the full report.

About the Team

Lulu Friesdat (lead author) is an Edward R. Murrow award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker. She received a Best Documentary award for her first feature-length documentary (producer/director) Holler Back — [not] Voting in an American Town, a film that explores systemic issues in our elections that discourage voter participation. Clips are available for viewing here. Her networknews experience includes editing assignments for CBS Evening News, Nightline, Sunday Morning, The Today Show, and Good Morning America. She produced and edited profiles of Democratic candidates for MSNBC, and has done long-format documentary work with NBC News and CNBC. She was on the editing team of Gideon’s Army, an Emmy-nominated documentary that follows the personal stories of public defenders in the Deep South. Her full bio is available here. Follow her on twitter @luluFriesdat.

Anselmo Sampietro (lead statistician) holds a Master of Statistics degree from the University of Bologna, Italy and has also studied at the University of Technology Sydney, in Australia and the University of Warsaw, in Poland. He currently leads a team of data analysts for a company based in London, UK. He collaborated (through ) with General Fusion, a Canadian start-up that is developing clean and reliable nuclear fusion reactors, to build a statistical model predicting plasma performance. He has specialized in the use of statistical analysis software R, the analytic tool used throughout this article.

Fritz Scheuren (collaborator) is a Senior Fellow and Vice President at NORC in the Center for Excellence in Survey Research. Scheuren has an unparalleled record of work on complex substantive tasks related to sampling and to the analysis of data from government agencies and private sector institutions. Scheuren also serves on the Statistics Faculty at The George Washington University. At GWU, he created a successful survey sampling certificate program which he still teaches. Most of his over 450 applied and theoretical papers, presentations, monographs, and books are on sampling aspects of data collection primarily in a survey context. Scheuren served at the 100th President of the American Statistical Association (ASA) and chaired the ASA Sections on Survey Research Methods. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS.)

Election Justice USA – the paper was assisted in its research and development by Election Justice USA, a national non-partisan organization of seasoned election integrity experts, statisticians, attorneys, journalists and activists, whose mission is to make sure each American's right to vote can be exercised without issue in accurate and honest elections.