My state just legalized marijuana and I kept wondering if that fact alone is causing my logical and mathematical faculties to deteriorate, because I am having great difficulty understanding the thinking behind a New York Times article. I am not questioning any type of political bias they have, just the math.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/t...gan-votes.html
The article is referenced by Facebook fact checkers and others to ban many other posts and news stories about the Michigan vote. The Times article aims to explain or debunk an anomaly reported by a Matt Mackowiak. I wanted to check Mr. Mackowiaks original claim on Twitter, but he has been banned for pointing out this anomaly in the election.
As many of us have heard, the vote count for Joe Biden got a huge bump at just after 6 am on Wednesday morning. Here is the graph demonstrating that anomaly:
The graphs shows the number of votes as they came in over time during the night. As the lines go up, that reflect the number of votes coming in. That 6 am bump should have raised a lot of red flags and should demand an explanation, which the Times set out to do:
For a moment, that seemed like a fair explanation, but they my mind started to think of what this would look like on a graph. To correct the mistake, one should have subtracted 138,339 votes from Biden’s total. But instead, the graph seems to show that this amount was added to his total, doubling the error. Now, Joe Biden has received 276,678 extra erroneous votes, half of it due to the error in Shiawassee County and the other half due to the attempt to correct the error. The correction to the Shiawassee error should have widened Trump’s lead at that time, not narrowed it. Here is a close up of the graph (left), and what the graph should have looked like if the error was properly corrected(right):In reality, Mr. Biden didn’t receive those votes. They were briefly added to his unofficial totals on an election map because of a typo in a small Michigan county that was caught and corrected in roughly half an hour.
“All it was is there was an extra zero that got typed in,” said Abigail Bowen, the elections clerk in Shiawassee County in Michigan, just northwest of Detroit. “It was caught quickly,” she added. “That’s why we have these checks and balances.”
When Ms. Bowen and her team sent the county’s unofficial vote counts to Michigan officials early Wednesday, they accidentally reported Mr. Biden’s tally as 153,710, when it should have been 15,371, she said. About 20 minutes later, she said a state elections official called her to ask if the number was a typo; Shiawassee County doesn’t even have that many residents. Ms. Bowen said she corrected the figure and the number was updated.
According to Politico, these are the final numbers of votes in Michigan:
If those numbers include the errors from Shiawasse County and the error in correct it, then Biden’s final total should really be 2,513,970, which is lower than Trump’s 2,644,528, which means Trump has won the state.