You may notice that the chart eliminates the last three precincts in Madison County. Madison County’s data trend line is basically flat or horizontal. The one county of the four largest by population in Alabama that does not use provably hackable voting machines shows a vote share per candidate by precinct size that matches what statisticians would expect in areas that are similar in terms of race, economics, wealth, and the like. The following is a teaser the rest will be released in a larger report in about two weeks: Nicholas Bauer pointed this phenomenon out to me based on his precinct level analysis in New York City. I am now working on a much larger project analyzing voting share down to the precinct level in large counties in every state that held primaries. Clinton did far better in those counties than in demographically similar counties in Alabama and elsewhere in the South where exit polls did not fail (notably in North Carolina). Likewise, the exit poll for Alabama included so few young voters by percentage that there is no mathematical way to make that explanation work.īut what about my explanation? Three of the top four Alabama counties by population have very old voting machines that were badly hacked by a “red team” of university security experts more than eight years ago. Alabama did not have early voting (beyond the very basics required by federal law for military and infirm voters). Cohn had made his arguments about early voting and race in brief on Twitter previously, and I addressed them specifically accordingly. I used the case of Alabama for precisely these reasons. The exit poll released by the networks when the voting booths closed in Alabama was off by fourteen percentage points, far more than for any of the previous elections Cohn mentions. The problem, as I noted previously, is that these theoretical arguments do not work when applied to specific places where exit polling failed. Cohn is more specific than previous commenters, however, going into some detail on why early voting and age demographics could have skewed exit polls toward Sanders. Tax evasion laws were not intended to catch gangsters, but Al Capone landed in jail anyway. This seemed a strange use of his time as, in the run-up to the election, Cohn’s polling blog was an exceptional resource for making sense of the deluge of survey data released each day, and was nuanced and hedged enough in its explanations that it is difficult to criticize even in the wake of results that have again left people questioning the reliability of polling.Cohn’s basic argument, like so many others, is that exit polls in the United States are not designed to catch fraud. Throughout the night, Cohn continued to interpret results in terms not of the election outcome, but of the needle: “Trump’s lead in Georgia down to 2.5 points needle unmoved on the news.” A little after 9pm, Cohn explained on Twitter, in a fairly complicated walk through the models used, that he thought they were being too pessimistic. When Florida began releasing votes soon after polls closed, all three swung toward Trump. Cohn wrote that they were restoring the needles because they allowed for a simple presentation of complex electoral analysis, in real time. Why those three states? Because they were releasing the kind of data that the needle’s algorithms require.

On Monday, the Times’ polling guru Nate Cohn announced that the needles were returning for 2020, but only sort of: instead of a running gauge predicting the ultimate winner of the presidential election, the Times limited it to just three states: Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina. (Others disagree, of course, because it’s the internet. In 2016, I found that the whipsawing gauges, which were programmed to be extra bouncy, accomplished nothing but to induce high anxiety.

I’ll say right up front that I have been a strong partisan in this particular fight. But, for me, one long-running debate was settled for good: it’s time to retire the New York Times’ needle-the graphic display that shows the likely winner of an election.

The results of election night 2020 were not as conclusive as many anxious Americans had hoped.

Nate cohn twitter