The Limits of Deceit
Post #959
People sometimes get distraught by thinking that most other people have not woken up to the idea that the USA is losing freedoms. They are bombarded with curated information that really does make it seem like loving freedom puts you into the minority. But before giving up, it would be good to understand the limits of deceit.
When public opinion polls come out, or when political elections are held, there is a certain amount of wiggle-room that hucksters will exploit in order to make their political party — or their pet policy — look as if it has broad public support. Recent elections in Russia reveal by how much you can depart from an underlying reality.
Here is an image from The Economist that shows that, when a polling station saw higher turnout, then the lion’s share of the extra votes went to Putin.
For those polling stations which saw an amazing 100% turnout, the highest concentration of 100% vote shares for Putin were found. These two things — higher turnout and higher vote share — happen simultaneously whenever there is ballot stuffing.
But if ballot stuffing did not occur, then the vote share for Putin would not correlate to the turnout in the individual polling stations. Whether turnout was 10% or 90%, Putin would still get roughly the same vote share (if there were no cheating). Further evidence of cheating involves visible gridlines where percentages end in a 0 or a 5.
Because human beings are mentally incapable of generating random numbers, there should not be an excess of percentage values that end in a 0 or a 5 — like those gridlines demonstrate. Only when human beings are “making up numbers” will you see an excess of them coming in at 70% or 75%, rather than, say, at 73% or 78%.
When the most recent election results came back, election forensics revealed somewhere between 21.9 and 31.6 million fraudulent votes for Putin, indicating approximately how much you can depart from an underlying reality. While the following notes are rough guesses from a news report, they serve as a benchmark:
In row 35, you can see that the declared voter turnout — using all eligible voters as the denominator — was 77.4% of elible voters turning out to vote. Rows 38 and 39 indicate the vote share going for Putin was 87.3% of the vote (and non-Putin votes were 12.7% of the vote). That works out to a point-spread of 74.6%.
But when using the high estimate of voter fraud — 31.6 million “faked” votes — rows 45 and 46 give new vote shares. Each vote shared “moved” by about 43 absolute percentage points, which indicates an upper limit on how far you can deviate from an underlying reality. The spread between votes is worth twice that value:
85 absolute percentage points of deviation from reality
To see how this much deviation from reality would play out in a public poll on whether Americans want socialism instead of capitalism, here is a hypothetical outcome which includes the empirically-verified magnitude of the deviation from reality taken from the recent Russion election:
But the high estimate of deviation in the recent Russian election illustrates the empircally-validated limits of deceit. And here is the underlying reality after correcting for the magnitude of deviation from reality that matches the high estimate of deviation found in the real-world instance of a Russian election:
This shows that fraudulent pollsters (or fraudulent election officials) only need for it to be the case that just 8% of people support something — and they can make it appear as if a majority (51%) of people support it.
More importantly, it shows that you shouldn’t give up hope on America, just because you saw a public poll supposedly proving that most Americans are socialist, or whatever. Chances are that those in power are exercising some of their capabilities to alter perceptions — sometimes even all of the way up to the limits of deceit.
But we can interpret the data in a more generous light, by assuming that only one kind of cheating occurred. Under a more generous assumption that the fraudulent votes were all merely add-ins without any vote-switching — so that merely removing them reveals the “true vote” — you get the lowest estimate of deviation from reality:
19% absolute percentage points of deviation from reality
When the extent of deceit in public polls and/or elections is put into the best possible light — showing it from the most generous perspective — then from that original “bare-majority” graph above, you would get this situation as the underlying reality:
That’s almost a ratio of “60:40” against socialism, yet the original hypothetical poll above showed majority support for socialism — by incorporating achievable deceit.
Historic Deceit
But this post isn’t intended to be a post against Russia, the only intent is to show what is possible with deceit. That other countries agreed it happened in Russia means that they agreed it happened — they agree that a level of deceit was achieved. A historic example given below shows that there is achievable deceit across space and time.
After conducting election forensics on the 1868 state constitution ratification vote in Mississippi, there was an 11.8 absolute percentage point deviation from reality that was estimated, as shown in my own notes below (cell B16):
This deviation from underlying reality isn’t as large as was found in the recent Russian election, but it is more than half as large as the estimate that used generous assumptions (the low estimate on the magnitude of deceit).
Reference
[report estimating the magnitude of deceit in recent Russian election] — https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20240320-shpilkin-method-statistical-analysis-gauges-voter-fraud-in-putin-landslide
[report estimating the magnitude of deceit in the 1868 state constitution ratification in Mississippi] — https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev.polisci.6.121901.085655