2024 US election

Some thoughts on the US election.

Wrong theory: 2024 was lost because Harris voters stayed home

I first believed that Harris lost just because people were staying home compared to 2020. But that, by itself, is an insufficient explanation.

At first glance, this seems to hold water: currently, we have 71 million votes reported for Harris, and 75 million votes reported for Trump, whereas last time Biden got 81 million votes and Trump 74 million votes. 10 million votes less is enough to lose an election, right?

There are two things that make this analysis insufficient: first, California is really slow at counting, and it is likely that both candidates will have a few million votes more when all is counted. Harris already has more votes than any candidate ever had, besides Biden and Trump.

Trump already has more votes than he got in the previous two elections. In 2020, more people voted for Trump than in 2016. In 2024, more people voted for Trump than in 2020.

Second, let’s look at the states that switched from Biden to Trump:

• Wisconsin and Georgia: both Trump and Harris got more votes than Trump or Biden respectively in 2020
• Pennsylvania, Nevada and Michigan: Trump already has more voters in 2024 than Biden had in 2020. Even if Harris had the same number of voters as Biden had in 2020, she would have lost these states.
• Arizona still hasn’t counted a sixth of their votes,, and it is unclear where the numbers will end up. If we just extrapolate linearly, Arizona will comfortably be in one of the two buckets above.

Result: There is no state where Biden’s 2020 turnout would have made a difference for Harris. (With the possible but unlikely exception of Arizona, where the counting is still lagging behind)

Yes, 10 million votes fewer for Harris than for Biden looks terrible and like sufficient explanation, but 1) this is not the final result and it will become much tighter, and 2) it wouldn’t have made a difference.

California is slow at counting

I was really confused: why had California only reported two thirds of its votes so far. I found the article below, explaining some of it, but it really seems a home-made mess for California, and one that the state should clean up.

https://www.berkeleyside.org/2024/11/08/alameda-county-election-results-slow-registrar

Voting results in PDF instead of JSON

Voting results in Alameda County will be released as PDF instead of JSON. The Registrar for Votes “recently told the Board of Supervisors that he’s following guidance from the California Secretary of State, which is recommending the PDF format to better safeguard the privacy of voters.”

This statement is wrong. JSON does not safeguard the privacy of voters any better than PDF does. This statement is not just wrong, it doesn’t even make sense.

In 2022, thanks to the availability of the JSON files, a third-party audit found an error in one Alameda election, resulting in the wrong person being certified. “Election advocates say the PDF format is almost impossible to analyze, which means outside organizations won’t be able to double-check [...] [I]f the registrar had released the cast vote record in PDF format in 2022, the wrong person would still be sitting in an OUSD board seat.”

The county registrar is just following the California Secretary of State. According to a letter by the registrar: “If a Registrar intends to produce the CVR [Cast Vote Record], it must be in a secure and locked PDF format. The Secretary of State views this as a directive that must be followed according to state law. I noted that this format does not allow for easy data analysis. The Secretary of State’s Office explained that they were aware of the limitations when they issued this directive. [...] San Francisco has historically produced its CVR in JSON format, contrary to the Secretary of State's directive. The Secretary of State’s office has informed me that they are in discussions with San Francisco to bring them into compliance”.

Sources:

• https://www.berkeleyside.org/2024/11/08/alameda-county-election-results-slow-registrar
• https://oaklandside.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/FW_-Update-on-Cast-Vote-Record-CVR-Production-1.pdf
• https://oaklandside.org/2022/12/28/alameda-county-registrar-miscounted-ballots-oakland-election-2022/

It was not a decisive win

There are many analyses about why Harris lost the election, and many are going far overboard, and often for political reasons, with the aim to influence the platform of the Democratic party for the next election. This wasn’t a decisive win.

I wanted to make the argument that 30k voters in Wisconsin, 80k voters in Michigan, and 140k voters in Pennsylvania would have made the difference. And that’s true. I wanted to compare that with other US elections, and show that this is tighter than usual.

But it’s not. US elections are just often very tight. There are exceptions, the first Obama election was such an exception. But in general, American elections are tight (I’ll define a tight election as “if I can find that by flipping less than 0.5% of the voters, a different president would have been elected”).

I don’t know how advisable it is to make big decisions on a basically random outcome.