Did Philadelphia Really Report ‘23,277 votes … all for Biden’ in One Update?

Yes, but it’s not unusual.

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Following a tweet from polling website FiveThirtyEight reporting “23,277 votes in Philadelphia, all for Biden” on Wednesday, many social media users were confused about how every ballot reported could be for Biden, with some taking this as evidence of voting chicanery.

Aaron Bycoffe, a computational journalist for FiveThirtyEight, told The Dispatch Fact Check that it’s not unusual to see an update that includes votes for only one candidate. “Election officials and vote tabulators occasionally enter results one candidate at a time, and it looks like that’s what happened here,” said Bycoffe. “That would explain why Trump had zero votes in this one update. His votes would have been added in a subsequent update.”

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  1. Avatar photo
    Kevin M. James

    Swing and a miss here, I'm afraid, for two reasons:

    1) "Maybe they just included the Trump votes in the next update? Yeah, that's probably what happened." This is less an adequate explanation than a hopeful guess. absent a single counter-example of a batch that was not just a bit Trumpier than average but all-Trump.

    2) Might have provided some useful context to dig up this:

    https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/politics/20121112_In_59_Philadelphia_voting_wards__Mitt_Romney_got_zero_votes.html

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    1. Avatar photo
      Kevin M. James

      (addendum to previous reply)

      And also, again...what I thought I read seemed to be reying entirely on mere assumptions that were "suggested" by a subsequent piece of variant data. That's...not solid enough to qualify as a "fact check". More like a "can we think of a way this might be explained? we can? okay then! job done!"

      (And just how variant was that subsequent batch, exactly? Did it have 15,000 more Trump votes than the average batch...or 15?)

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    2. Avatar photo
      Kevin M. James

      Maybe I'm just misunderstanding the debunking here. Seems likely enough, considering how very nearly all fraud claims so far have fallen apart laughably easily. But what I think I'm hearing here is a scenario more or less like this:

      1) Data entry person receives totals of 23,277 Biden, and say 11,912 Trump.

      2) Said person starts by entering in the Biden number by itself. Okay; reasonable enough.

      3) Said person then, instead of putting in the Trump number by itself, reaches or waits for a later batch. Say it's 27,838 Biden and 14,421 Trump. Well, the simplest and fastest thing to do then is add the previous 11,192 for Trump to this batch, and it goes out as 27,838 - 25,613.

      Wait...what?

      I'm not saying that scenario looks crooked in any discernible way. I'm saying it simply makes no sense.

      (So again...maybe I'm just completely misreading the attempted explanation here.)

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  2. Raincheck

    Why is the Trump campaign not suspicious of his own strong comeback in AZ?

    Why is Trump going to lose a close battle in a GOP run state (Georgia) and win a close battle in a Democratic run state (North Carolina)?

    Is it suspicious that Biden had an big early lead in Ohio and Trump erased it?

    Are all Republicans virtuous lovers of fair elections and all Democrats cheaters?

    Do we need to look into Trump’s close win in 2016, or is it only a problem when he loses?

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    1. Daniel

      Trump lost - it is not close. This is over unless you lost your mind.

      That said, Philly has a history of fraud:

      Check out Michael “Ozzie” Myers

      https://philly.metro.us/fraud-charges-filed-over-contested-north-philly-election/

      https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-philadelphia-judge-elections-convicted-conspiring-violate-civil-rights-and-bribery

      Couple this with a mail in system that is hard to police, and you can see why the conspiracy theorists take hold.

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  3. Laurie

    Thanks Alec! Would you also cover the accusations about Republican poll workers being denied access in Pennsylvania?

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    1. Beth

      Would you point me to those allegations? I've seen an allegation about one poll worker being denied access, because there was confusion about what his credentials gave him access to.

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      1. Laurie

        Rick Santorum claimed it on CNN, but like many of these allegations, it was overblown or an outright lie. I wanted to see the Dispatch's version of it, but the story has died.

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  4. Avatar photo
    Tom Jedrzejewicz

    So where is the update with Trump only votes?

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    1. Joe1776

      There is no such update that is why this fact check is worthless beyond confirming that yes there were 23,277 votes reported that were 100% for Biden. Everything beyond that is guess work by a guy who had worked for huffington post.

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    2. Bradley Potts

      This is probably wasted, but you should read the last paragraph. If that still doesn't sway you, just wait for the facts presented in the lawsuit that would surely follow malfeasance. Don't hold your breath.

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      1. Avatar photo
        Tom Jedrzejewicz

        This answer misses the real question ... why are the counters segregating votes by candidate. That there is only one batch that is single candidate, with no explained reason WHY that batch is single candidate, and no other batches.

        Well, some other batch is heavily Trump, so it balances out, is not an answer. It is not much more than "trust us."

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        1. Beth

          A variation of Hanlon's razor - don't attribute to malice that which can be explained by mere human behavior or accident. Hit "enter" accidently? Was distracted for a moment and thought the task was completed?

          In all seriousness, not everything is a conspiracy.

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        2. Avatar photo
          Probably Wrong

          If you are an election worker handed a piece of paper that says “300 votes for Purple, 180 votes for Green”, it is much easier to just copy that into the system one line at a time than it is to needlessly add up the results from the batch of votes you were given and dump them in all at once. In fact, combining the results like that presents a risk of calculation error.

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  5. Kevin Couhig

    As and individual who has run campaigns and been involved in politics at the national, state and local level for over forty years I can tell you that this is absolute BS. Tabulations are taken in groups and uploaded based on Precinct results (or county level results) not on a particular candidate.

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    1. Chandler Johnson

      Ah, the ole anecdotal “I’ve never seen it done this way so it’s impossible they do it this way anywhere else!” Argument. Nice.

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      1. Joe1776

        “Election officials and vote tabulators occasionally enter results one candidate at a time, and it looks like that's what happened here,” said Bycoffe.

        Well it looks like either that happened *or* someone dumped 23,000+ votes for Biden. Both situations would look exactly the same.

        Until we know they just for some reason only entered one candidates vote at a time we have no reason to think that is what happened.

        Their evidence that this is what happened here, is that on another dump there were some trump votes. But that is evidence of the opposite. If they were exclusively Trump votes then it would be evidence they are entering votes for one candidate at a time. But that all the dumps are mixed with both Trump and Biden except one big dump exclusively for Biden looks fishy.

        "Bycoffe said that the following update was “considerably more Trump-leaning than others from around that time,” suggesting that it contained the Trump ballots that had not been included in the previous update. "

        Considerably more than zero trump votes? If the votes are separated by candidates it would be exclusively Trump votes not just a few more than X.

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    2. Avatar photo
      Tom Jedrzejewicz

      That's the underlying question .. why are they processing ballots differently for one candidate than the other?

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      1. Avatar photo
        William Cotton

        Why don’t you ask one of the many Republican observers who are watching the counting process?

        Or just continue your death spiral into epistemic oblivion. What do I care.

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        1. Joe1776

          Well what is the point of a fact check if you are just going to tell others to "go ask the people involved yourself." The fact check says "it's not unusual" to dump tens of thousands of votes exclusively for one candidate, but fail to point out when it ever happened any other time in PA's vote dumps. Did it ever happen any other time? If not, it seems like it is unusual. Why did it happen here? Who knows?

          At least they confirmed it in fact happened.

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          1. Avatar photo
            William Cotton

            My point is that we've been conducting elections in the country for over two centuries and that we have evolved many systems to deal with fraud. It is already a bipartisan process. There are numerous checks in place.

            You know what is unusual? Holding an election during a global pandemic.

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