Losers Who Won't Lose: What Are The Odds Of A Successful Hillary Recount?

Zero Hedge ^ | 11/27/2016 | Submitted by Salil Mehta via Statistical Ideas blog

[SeekAndFind]

Submitted by Salil Mehta via Statistical Ideas blog,

President-elect Trump won 306 electoral votes versus Hillary Clinton's 232 (24% less electoral votes).  Similar to 2000, the surrendering party then reversed course and put the nation through a recount, just for the sake of it.  What are the odds that such an exercise here would yield successful for Ms. Clinton?  Based on statistical randomness of re-assessing voter intent, the chance of Hillary emerging as the victor is far less than 10%. 

Anything can happen, but these lean odds do not rise to the level of putting our peaceful democracy into the hands of a temptuous recount scheme every time a stung party loses (let alone misleadingly blame it on something else from Russia's Putin, to sexism, to "in hindsight the popular vote would be reasonable", to FBI Director Comey).  All Americans should instead focus on how the 6 states that flipped this election, were all economically ignored and all flipped to Donald Trump. 

The only viable path for a Hillary Clinton victory at this stage is to astoundingly uncover a wide-spread (across three states) fraud.  And that's equally unlikely, since the basis for the voting aberrations occurred in less populated counties and anyway the three states employ three different voting mechanisms, so the fraud would have had to somehow occur through different transmission vehicles (paper voting, and electronic voting) and we would require a speedy judicial resolution for states such as Pennsylvania that sidestepped back-up recordings from their direct voting equipment.

We should note the following statistical facts about the electoral vote in the three recount states:

• 10 votes, Wisconsin (Trump leads by 0.9 percentage points)
• 20 votes, Pennsylvania (Trump leads by 1.1 percentage points)
• 16 votes, Michigan (Trump leads by 0.2 percentage points)

Given that Mr. Trump won by 74 electoral votes, Ms. Clinton would need to flip all three states noted above, in order to liquidate this deficit (i.e., >74/2 = >37 votes).  The leads described above however, among 4.4 million voters from these three states, is highly statistically significant on a state-level (and certainly when all three states are combined).  It would be remarkably unlikely (>5? event) that we would arbitrarily second-guess every one of these millions of voters' intents and, convert any (certainly let alone all) of these three states.

Hillary must be cognizant of this improbability, and so is piggy-backing off of the second most reasonable recount rationale: not that errors in intent occurred, but rather straight-fraud on such a scale that would flip most of these states.  While tempting for true Democrat supporters, this fraud scenario is of course dubious.  Because for it to work, we would need to suppose that such fraud occurred in three different ways at once:

• Michigan is a paper-ballot state (no electronic voter equipment hacking) so fraud is virtually unlikely to show at all
• Wisconsin does have paper back-ups recorded though the counties that are most heterogeneous, are lesser-populated and not so wildly-off probabilistically
• Pennsylvania has similar issues to Wisconsin, except they haven't recorded all of their votes in an auditable back-up so judicial hurdles must be overcome

The bottom line is everything must go right here, in all three state recounts (between proving fraud and getting mathematical help from wide-spread voter intent errors), in order to better align towards a Donald Trump downfall.  And even if this all occurred, accounting for all of these statistical adjustments, the probability of a Hillary Clinton triumph is still quite low. 

Lower than the odds that comic Nate Silver and all of the other "pollsters" gave to Mr. Trump throughout this election season.  It is these same pollsters and juvenile campaign "scientists" who completely mis-forecasted Ms. Clinton's path, who are now gasping for a recount phenomenon.  This was nicely articulated in a recent Bloomberg article here:

[The Great RJ]

I think all but the most deluded liberals recognize that Hillary has no chance of overturning the election results. However, that is not the intent the recounts. The Clinton’s are all about revenge and personal destruction. This is no different than Hitler ordering the destruction of Germany by his own troops when he knew the war was lost. Hillary wants to smear Trump, delegitimize his election and strut her fat butt saying that only she won the popular vote. These are the actions of a very mentally ill person.

[freedumb2003]

>>If the recount doesn’t uncover Hillary votes by illegals, unregistered, and dead voters, then the recount is rigged.<<

A recount is not an audit. It looks only at the votes cast not who cast them and whether the voter was valid. The only point the voter is involved is to ensure a separate human being initiated each vote.

[Iron Munro]

But even though the Clinton camp already knows all of the facts presented in this article (and more) she still has made a move that amounts to a challenge of Trump’s victory.

So that tells me that it is a sure thing they have already set some sort of devious, underhanded plan into motion behind the scenes.

A plan to do something not considered in this article and not immediately obvious to those outside the Clinton camp.

Heck - the minute I heard Hillary’s concession speech I knew it was just too compassionate, smarmy and out of Character for her to be authentic.

She’s not going to let a little thing like respect for the election process stop her from trying a scam to steal the election any more than she let respect for the law stop her from breaking the laws as Secretary of State or using the Clinton Foundation as a scam to get rich off her government position.

[Repeal The 17th]

“... What do you believe this is about? ...”
-
It is all about putting a stain of illegitimacy on the Trump victory
... just like with the Bush v. Gore election ...

[madison10]

Hope she is prepared to strut that fat butt across the prison yard.

[Ray76]

Yes. They must be obliterated. Their organizations destroyed.

[fortheDeclaration]

The odds that the recount changes the election results are zero.

[immadashell]

Sadly, statistics can be worthless in the hands of a single Justice.

[COUNTrecount]

Bookmark

[freedumb2003]

>>They can’t swing PA<<

I have read over and over that PA is done and can’t be recounted unless they convince a judge there was a significant possibility of vote tampering.

Any judge who decides that way takes the chance of getting slapped down hard.

[mplsconservative]

I don’t think Trump worked that hard for a year and a half to let Shrillary steal it out from under him. Keep your powder dry for goodness sakes.

[madison10]

Thing is, it is nothing like FL. There were no too close to calls in spite of the AP’s lies. 10,000 votes in MI does not even trigger an automatic recount.

I am about to be disenfranchised and I am NOT a happy voter. Hillary, Jill and Huma need to book a padded cell together.

[Inyo-Mono]

Thanks for posting those figures not taken into account by anyone.

[Degaston]

During the presidential race its a fact that there was strong correlation between the state-specific polls that any responsible pollster would consider as they did their analysis. If Trump started doing better in Florida then one could assume he was also doing better in North Carolina and Ohio as some national events were impacting the race. The same would apply the opposite direction for North Carolina and Ohio if Hillary was doing better in Florida to some degree.

However in the case of recounts there should be NO correlation whatsoever in the process having any change in the results. The Election is long over with all the ballots counted. Thus any errors should be completely random in predicting what direction, if any, that the results would move. If there is any correlation then it would be do to some not-yet-detected bias/rigging which would be very illegal and unbecoming of our elections process.

So with this in mind - if the oddsmakers say that Hillary has a 1% chance of winning PA, 2% chance of winning WI, and 3% chance of winning MI then her total odds of winning the whole Presidential race is approx 0.0006% or about 1 in 160,000. In reality I think her odds are about 1/20th as likely in each of these 3 states so this 1 in 160,000 is more like 1 in 1.28 billion. However due to the risk of “rigging” I think her odds are better - about 1 in a million.

[jospehm20]

I hope this causes Trump to reconsider the whole dealing nicely with the Clintons thing.

[pt17]

The real question is how much money is Stein going to get for her coffers and will she jump to the top of the dem playbill as a result of her little show.

[pfflier]

Very true words. One injunction, a decision through the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and a hung SCOTUS can change the whole election.

[Maine Mariner]

At this point what difference does it make? Why would Hillary try to delegitimize his election? The only reason
that makes sense is that she is thinking of running in 2020.

[Alberta's Child]

How do you create a fraudulent vote three weeks after Election Day?

[madison10]

Hillary most likely will be worm food by 2020... or did she get better suddenly?