Use Facts When You Make Your “Rigged” Claims
Yes, 80,000+ people chose to vote but abstain from voting in the presidential election in Michigan. This is not an anomaly or that big of an outlier. And people telling you otherwise — I’m looking at you “Palmer Report” blogger Bill Palmer — is wrong. It’s basically selling people magic beans and hoping the beanstalk grows. It won’t.
What happens instead is that this “information” is spread without any reference to the fact that it’s a red herring. Consider the following facts:
Note that the total presidential votes does not match the Palmer Report or the MLive calculation. But that doesn’t change the facts. You can look this up for yourself here.
Do you know how long that took me to compile? Five minutes. And that includes formatting the spreadsheet. I took ten additional minutes to fact check myself. That means that you have to be doing some really lazy reporting/blogging to ignore the historical trends or you are purposefully misleading people. To be fair, this isn’t just the Palmer Report. This includes people on Twitter and Facebook who share these things without any context.
As I tell my students all the time, context is key. You cannot decipher whether something is an outlier without considering what it lies without. Yes, 75,335 is greater than 49,740 (the second highest number) but in context, it is not. Donald Trump was the least popular presidential candidate on record. Do you know who number 2 was? Hillary Clinton. I may not agree with people’s views, but given those opinions, I can easily see how this year’s undervote number would be higher. In fact, I’m surprised it isn’t in the six-digit figure area.
So, please, Palmer Report and rogue “statisticians” on Twitter…stop it. Provide context or don’t even bother. You’re doing the world a disservice and I cannot tell whether or not you are doing it on purpose or out of ignorance.
At this point, it doesn’t even matter.
