As Deb Nolan and I wrote in our book, Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks, the most basic form of lying with statistics is simply to make up a number. We gave the example of Senator McCarthy’s proclaimed (but nonexistent) list of 205 Communists, but we have a more recent example:
One of the supposed pieces of evidence [of votes being recorded for dead people] was a list that circulated on Twitter Thursday evening allegedly containing names, birth dates, and zip codes for registered voters in Michigan. The origin of the list and the identity of the person who first made it public are not known.
CNN examined 50 of the more than 14,000 names on the list by taking the first 25 names on the list and then 25 more picked at random. We ran the names through Michigan’s Voter Information database to see if they requested or returned a ballot. We then checked the names against publicly available records to see if they were indeed dead.
Of the 50, 37 were indeed dead and had not voted, according to the voter information database. Five people out of the 50 had voted — and they are all still alive, according to public records accessed by CNN. The remaining eight are also alive but didn’t vote.
In an interview with Maria Bartiromo on Fox News on Nov. 8, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said the Trump campaign had “evidence of dead people voting in Pennsylvania . . . The Trump team has canvassed all early voters and absentee mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania. And they have found over 100 people they think were dead, but 15 people that we verified that have been dead who voted. But here is the one that gets me. Six people registered after they died and voted. . . . I do know that we have evidence of six people in Pennsylvania registering after they died and voting after they died. And we haven’t looked at the entire system.” . . .
We reached out to the Trump campaign and Graham’s Senate office for details about the Trump campaign research that concluded some number of ballots were cast by people who have died, but we did not get a response.
Graham was perhaps savvy enough not to give the list of 100, or 15, or 6. No list; nothing can be checked.
What’s interesting about this example is that no quantitative analysis is needed; you can just check the individual cases. But people don’t always check.
As the saying goes, when there’s smoke there’s smoke.
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