A Different Thought Process
Craig R. Wright
Folks who "think about thinking" frequently come to identifying two differing paths of processing thought, and how pretty much everybody does a bit of both, but it is not uncommon to have a distinct lean one way or the other. They talk about a linear process and a gestalt/holistic process. They talk about an analytic process versus a synthetic process. They talk about a process more conducive to analysis and the other more suited to theory. In an interesting interview with the head of an analytic branch of an intelligence agency, he made an interesting distinction of how some were better at solving what he called "puzzles" and others were better at solving what he distinguished as "mysteries." I see these descriptive attempts as all trying to capture the same dichotomy.
Me, I’m in the group whose thought process leans more to the latter in those descriptive attempts — the gestalt/holistic process, the synthetic process, the one better suited to theory and solving mysteries. I lean so hard in that direction that I think with a lot of people it is sometimes difficult for us to step into each other’s shoes in an exchange of understanding. Our thought process — how we understand things, problem solve, think things out — is different enough that it is hard to understand each other about what we "see."
In feedback I’ve gotten to my article on "Fixing a Presidential Election," the parts on my assessment of the probability of the 2016 election being fixed has mystified many in a way that I recognize as mostly being related to this difficulty that arises between folks who significantly differ in the degrees to which they use those two paths of thought in working things out. On reflection I should have anticipated that more. Cracking this particular type of nut relies heavily on the synthetic process, and that is so natural to me, about the same level as breathing, that it is easy to keep tripping over a mistaken assumption that others "breathe" the same way. I wrote that article in a manner of, "Okay, here’s what you need to know. I assume you will process it in a similar way to me. There will be various levels of agreement/disagreement, but you’ll at least understand how I landed where I did."
That did not work for a good number of folks. Perhaps if I tried to capture how my thought process actually worked through it, then that might clear some of the fog of foreignness.
There is a Stone Wall
Some with a thought process similar to mine have used analogies related to exploration and the use of maps, and some have used the construction of a house, because they find it helpful to think of cornerstones and their importance. I like a stone wall, one that is free of mortar in the style of the old New England walls. I find it helpful to see these irregular stones managing to join together to form the strength — the sense — of the wall. Some stones are bigger and play a more significant role in the wall. Some are so small and unnecessary you could pull them out and the wall would still be reasonably sound. Some are significant but do not necessarily fit as well or as securely as would be ideal, but that does stop the wall from standing, from making a degree of sense. As you examine the wall — fiddle with the stones — you come to know it better, and develop a sense of its reliability as a whole.
There is this stone wall that represents my gestalt understanding of the 2016 Presidential election, the election of an underdog, and a presumption so basic that I did not feel a need to say it or think it — an assumption that it was an honest election.
There are stones in this wall that look normal enough and fit well in the wall of an election of an underdog. There is the stone of a "rising movement," voters gathering behind a particular theme favoring the underdog — such as: "What we have to have is change." Over here is a stone of "late-breaking perceived scandal," as in the FBI Director announcing an investigation that could result in criminal charges against the upperdog.
In this other spot I see a stone I recognize from the most famous underdog victory in a Presidential election, Harry Truman over Thomas Dewey in 1948. While this 2016 stone is smaller than its counterpart in 1948, the stone of "repair of leakage from the party" also fits well in the wall.
(In 1948 Truman’s party needed to do some healing from its splintering at the Democratic National Convention over the strong Civil Rights plank. The entire delegation of one state walked out, along with a majority of another, and there were a lot of pockets of grumbling among those who remained. This more than anything made Truman a decided underdog in the period six to nine weeks before the election. A partial "repair" of party unity as the election drew closer was a big factor in Truman coming out of his underdog position to win.
But in total, the wall decidedly does not look right. I said in response to one comment something like, "Even though one does not expect an underdog to win, it doesn’t mean we don’t have a reasonable sense of what it would look like if he did win. This doesn’t look like that."
That’s the wall I’m looking at, and it has a significant hole that I have to reconcile to feel at peace with this wall. That sizable hole is the startling disconnect between the popular vote and the Electoral vote of the winning candidate. That disconnect is so large that based on the design of the Electoral College — which reflects a blend of representation of population and state that favors population by more than four-to-one — one would expect the designers would be dismayed at the result of the 2016 election. The design is meant to be fine with a winner who trails in the popular vote if his margin of victory is covered by his edge among the Electoral votes not synched to population. But in the 2016 election that is way off by a factor of more than four.
The more I examined it, the more clear it became that the type of disconnect found in the 2016 Election between the winning margin of Electoral votes and the popular vote is the result of a precision of distribution that simply is not likely to occur in the dynamics of a Presidential election. It does not hit you that way at first glance — at least it didn’t hit me that way. It is easy to see how it is as least possible, and you start playing with a little, saying, "Well, you just move this a little over here, and this is a bump, and that a nudge, and there you are." Off the top of my head in an early stage, I guessed that it could happen about once every ten elections. But the more I thought through the interactions, the dynamics demonstrated in actual elections — how most of the shifts are more of a general than a precise nature, and how there are cross forces and canceling forces working to impede an extreme precision coming through, and how it keeps getting flattened out — well, it hit me: "This is not nearly what it appeared to be at first blush."
I had started off looking hard only at the elections since the 1964 election, the first with Electoral votes given to the District of Columbia. But the Electoral College and a national vote have coexisted since 1880, and if one is willing to tolerate the absence of a single state for resisting doing a popular vote, you can extend that run all the way back to the 1832 election. How amazing it was to keep going back, and going back, and not finding anything comparable to this oddity in the 2016 election.
I finally found a precedent in 1888, 128 years ago. Continuing on back to 1832, that 1888 election remained the only one. You don’t even need the unusual magnitude common to both 1888 and 2016. In those 47 elections they are the only ones where the loser of the popular vote won the Electoral vote by a margin exceeding his margin in Electoral votes not tied to population.
I worked with those 46 prior Presidential elections prior to study the dynamics between the margin of victory in the popular vote and the Electoral vote. I came up with a variety of reasonable models to estimate the likely number of Electoral votes for a candidate with the same edge in the popular vote as the loser in the 2016 Election. The one that made the most sense to me easily had her winning with a comfortable margin of 80 Electoral votes, which would be a remarkable turnaround from losing by 74 Electoral votes. The most conservative model — which meant taking out factors that logically should be part of the model, still give a comfortable margin of victory of 54 Electoral votes.
This was one heck of a hole to be confronted with. We can’t fill that hole with the common stones I already mentioned as fitting the election of an underdog. Stones like the "rising movement," "late-breaking perceived scandal," and "repair of leakage from the party" have a general affect, not a precise affect. They are not quite the proverbial tide raising all boats, but they are a tide raising too broad a swath of boats to have near the precision to be considered suitable to explaining this hole. The things that drove Harry Truman’s underdog victory were anything but precise. It actually rolled into a massive win in the popular vote, a margin of about 2.1 million or the equivalent of about 6.3 million in 2016 terms.
Well, how about the stone of targeted campaigning? That at least has the goal of being able to execute a precise edge. The problem with that stone is that campaigns have attempted this kind of targeting longer than anyone’s memory and it is pretty much a bust in producing that precise a result. The general outcome of targeted campaigning is a spotty hit-and-miss. That’s partly because that even if there were zero competition it is far from a guarantee that targeted campaigning can pull off its goal. But far more significant is that there is very active competition interfering with that goal. The other side is doing their own targeted campaigning, and the result is a "canceling out" dance between the two.
Running out of stones at hand, I moved to the wild card pile, which has the good old stone of chance distribution, the stone of luck, but it takes a heck of a long shot to fill this hole. The other stone in the wild card pile is the "possibility of the unanticipated" stone. You may know the story of the test of the chimpanzee that was intended to see which of the two possible ways he would work out to get a banana. The chimpanzee surprised them by finding a third way.
I turned that "possibility of the unanticipated" stone over and over in thought, trying to give it more substance by understanding it. Is there something going on in more modern elections that messes with the dynamic interactions of popular vote and Electoral vote observed in the whole of its history? If you looked at just the 13 prior elections that I started with (1964-2012), the data only suggests that the edge in the popular vote is even more meaningful than in the prior history. Is the edge in the popular vote less meaningful the closer the election is? One might be inclined to think so at first, because we tend to focus on the misses, and it has to be close to miss. But as far as predicting electoral votes, it continues to work very well even in the situation when it was leveraging larger chunks of votes. It was in testing that understanding against the historical evidence that I came to realize the 1888 Election was even more of a crazy outlier than I first thought.
That was the point in my thought process where I decided to do a little research into the 1888 election. I wanted to better understand the only precedent that approximates the oddball results in the 2016 Presidential election. Until I looked at the 1888 election, I would have had to make a weak guess just to name the candidates, and I had zero sense of what the election was like. I expected the result of my research to simply give me a better feel of the capacity of the luck factor to fill the hole.
It only took a few minutes of internet research to realize I was looking at a completely different animal. That extreme abnormality in the 1888 election did not happen in the context of a normal election — which would have bolstered the idea it was simply a very unusual event, an outlier covered by chance distribution. That freakish result happened in the context of what historians consider a highly corrupt election. It was fueled by what was — for those days — an unheard of level of donations of at least $3,000,000 from businessmen seeking protection from foreign competition through stringent tariffs promised by the Republican party. The RNC used this financial windfall to exploit vulnerabilities in the voting process and systematically bought votes and financed a small army of illegal voters — repeaters — in a couple of key states.
While 1888 and 2016 are far apart in time and different in many ways, they have the exact same dynamic for corruption to produce this precision of distribution unlikely to occur naturally. The Electoral College of 1888 is the same beast as the Electoral College of 2016, right down to the weights given to population and state being 81% and 19%.
So, I went back to that wall and took out the "possibility of the unanticipated" stone that was being used as part of the patch for the disturbing hole in the wall. I was flipping it in my hand, thinking: "I’ve been struggling filling this hole that feels so out of place, and now I know what this stone might be. I hadn’t been considering it because of the unspoken assumption attached to this wall, that it is an honest election. This stone in my hand, the ‘unanticipated stone’ might very well be a corruption of the vote."
What is known about the 1888 election, combined with its logical connection to its otherwise freak level of precision in distribution of vote, provides an unusually stringent stink test. I’ve been told that among those other 45 elections there are some with significant corruption in them, and I don’t doubt that. But it did not rise to the level of what was needed to produce the oddball results of 1888. Honest and dishonest, the other 45 states managed to pass the stink test of 1888. The first to fail that stink test was the 2016 Presidential election. For me, that’s where this election lost its assumption of innocence.
I put that stone back in the wall, leaving it as the "possibility of the unanticipated" stone that is part of what is weakly patching that hole, along with a long shot of luck.
Working with Another Wall
Now I bring up another wall that is representative of the 2016 Election from the standpoint of it being fixed to elect the underdog. I start examining carefully the bottom row that is necessary for the wall to have any chance to stand. This essential row of stones is all about feasibility — "Does the opportunity actually exist to fix an election?" One of the stones for that row is the format of the Electoral College making it possible to fix an election using precision to leverage a large result. Another stone in that row is the vast differences in vote security from state to state, from "very good" down to "clearly vulnerable."
Some who commented on my article struggled to grasp that point. One fellow was a retired state worker who had familiarity with his state’s election security and knew it was among the best — which it is. The fact he saw fit to mention it suggests he placed relevance on it. But the truth is it had as much relevance as what he had for breakfast. It reminded me a bit of the head of the Association of Secretary of States speaking to a reporter on the security of the national vote. I don’t remember her name offhand, but she was from a small New England state that had one the top ratings for its security of its vote. She told the reporter how hard a fix would be, but when she got into examples of why, she talked about security measures she was familiar with from her state. I don’t know if she truly believed they extrapolated across the nation, but the reporter came away with the impression she was saying these safeguards were being used everywhere, which wasn’t remotely true. She made it sound like no one was using voting machines without VVPAT, when the actual truth is that approximately 40% of the Electoral votes in 2016 came from states so dependent on machines without VVPAT that they cannot do an effective paper audit. It is irrelevant that many states have security measures that make it very hard to rig their vote. It is only relevant that there are enough that don’t — and given the format of the Electoral College, there are way more than enough.
Another stone in the row of feasibility is motive, and that stone is more solid today to than in our past history. The motives of 1888 still exist today, partisan and corporate influence. But with the heightened activity between nations, we have now added the motive of foreign nation influence, which may be the strongest motive we have faced.
One more stone for that row was my specific research into understanding the vulnerabilities that currently exist, and how a sufficient number of them mesh with the anticipated strategic imperative of an entity trying to fix the election — to maximize the odds of going undetected, and if detected, difficult to trace back to those directing it.
The final stone in the row of feasibility is the prevailing opinion among those with expertise relevant to the current security of the voting process. That opinion is generally supportive of feasibility, and when talking about the states with the weaker security, there were scathing assessments of the ilk: "If it ain’t happened yet, it is only because no one has tried." The experts who are more conservative about the degree of feasibility — not denying it, but saying that it would be hard — are pretty much those who have a stake in the image of security, and I am suspicious of that. There was a time it was argued that automated cars were too secure to be hacked, and that stance largely came from the automotive companies advancing that technology. It was the independent tech experts who said otherwise and were proven right. I’ve seen the exact same thing happen in similar debates. I was further unimpressed with the "invested" experts when they would explain their position with points that logically are not as secure as the assumption being made about them — such as saying the system is too decentralized to be effectively rigged, or arguing that air-gapping a system is a sufficient protection.
Satisfied that the wall had the basic potential to stand, I went back to examining the whole wall, looking for any critical weaknesses, holes that needed to be filled/explained, and also working to recognize stones in a context of seeing how well they fit or did not fit with the theory of the wall.
One significant stone from that perspective is that precision-driven highly abnormal disconnect between the Electoral vote and the popular vote. The simple truth is you don’t expect to see that in the wall of an honest election, but it is not out of place at all in the wall of a dishonest election. Corruption of the vote cuts like a knife through all the forces that normally work in an honest election to drag on the development of this abnormal level of precision. Rather than being an abnormality, this phenomenon is actually likely to occur to some degree in this wall.
Then there is the stone of knowing that the only other time that type of disconnect has appeared in our Presidential elections was a case where the election was considered essentially the equivalent of a fix.
A fairly snug relevant fit is a stone representing the sophisticated hack of the DNC, which clearly had the purpose of assisting the election of the "winner" — who will reasonably appear in quotes for the consideration of this wall. That criminal act went well beyond the dirty tricks tolerated in a campaign. We impeach Presidents for stuff like that. A hack of an online system and a largely air-gapped system are different beasts in their complexity, but a documented criminal act that was so clearly outside the accepted lanes is a clear indication of an entity with the willingness to criminally work outside those lanes.
A related stone that also fits well in this wall is that the hack was traced with "high confidence" by our intelligence agencies to an entity that has the motive and realistic potential for the resources to fix our election.
And then there are a bunch of small stones that have a mounting collective relevance in fitting what one would expect to see in the context of this wall.
The results of the four mistaken exit polls perfectly lean to toward the "winner." They could have gone 0-4 or 1-3 or 2-2 or 3-1, and it was a straight 4 for 4.
Those mistaken exit polls did not follow a random pattern of distribution among the swing states and the other states that ended up close. In the smaller ones in Electoral votes, the exit polls correctly captured the winner of the recorded vote, but as would be expected in a fix taking advantage of the format of the Electoral College, the mistaken exit polls were a near perfect focus on the top swing states in Electoral votes. The 4 mistaken exit polls were among the top five swing states in electoral votes.
In a fix, the conspirators would not likely risk the extra exposure of fooling around with the swing states with the fewest Electoral votes. The winner swept the five top swing states in Electoral votes, but went 0-3 in the smaller swing states in both the reported votes and the exit polls.
In a fix, the swing state that is most likely to be targeted due to security vulnerabilities was Pennsylvania. The "winner" did take that swing state. It also was a state where the exit poll disagreed with the reported vote.
In a fix, the next most likely swing state to be targeted due to security vulnerabilities was Florida. (While Florida joined Pennsylvania as the only two swing states with so many votes counted without VVPAT that it was impossible to do a basic paper audit, the percentage of votes without that protection was much higher in Pennsylvania.) The "winner" did take Florida, and as in Pennsylvania, the Florida exit poll did not agree with the reported vote.
In a fix the cloud of suspicion would likely be thickest around Pennsylvania, not just because of it logically being the primary target, but because of the lack of early voting in PA. That meant the fix would have to overcome the fact that nearly all PA voters would have gone to the polls with the opportunity to know about the result of the FBI’s investigation into [D]. An analysis of Pennsylvania polling data around the axis of FBI Director Comey’s announcement of an investigation that could result in criminal charges against [D] resulted in a sharp shift against [D]. Her lead dropped from 5.1% but still stayed ahead by 1.3%. Under the reasonable assumption that this sharp movement in the polls was mostly a reaction to Comey’s announcement, one would reasonably expect a bounce for [D] when folks got a chance to hear the investigation was completed and that it had been a dud.
Because of the lateness of Comey’s second announcement being made on November 6th, there were no pre-election polls in PA when any respondent had a chance to be aware of the reporting of the outcome of the investigation. The only chance to evaluate its impact would be in the exit polls and in the reported vote. The exit polls showed the kind of bounce that would be reasonably expected, with [D] bouncing back to a lead of 4.4%. But the reported vote actually had her losing ground and falling behind -1.1%. That’s a pretty odd result and it takes place in the state most likely to be targeted in a fix, and one of the two swing states incapable of doing a basic paper trail audit. Does that prove the reported vote in Pennsylvania is fraudulent? Of course not, nor does it intend to or claim to. Is it an unusually thick cloud of suspicion as would be reasonably anticipated if the 2016 Election was being fixed? Yes it is.
Quibbling with a Stone is not Quibbling with a Wall
There are those who will quibble with whether this or that stone is that secure. I naturally do that, too, coming back to look at this or that stone as I learn something new, or find an additional insight.
I take seriously stuff like a respondent who pointed out that there was a late poll that was not covered in the source site I used for evaluating the line of continuation for the polls in Pennsylvania, and it favored the "winner" by 1%. I put that in the wall.
And I ended up getting a lot of benefit out of his recommendation of a second site for tracking polls that is similar to the one I used, 270toWin.com, in that it covers a lot of polls. I looked at that site quite a bit and used it re-check some elements of connectivity in the wall. It actually played a significant role in my being more confident about expecting a bounce for [D] in PA as a result of the news about the conclusion of the investigation.
A small stone that may grow in size and more firmly fit relates to something completely new to me that was just brought to my attention a couple of days ago, but it is too fresh for me to write about it here.
Now there are those who will say — and some will shout it — "You can’t use that!" about some small stones. I say you can as long as you keep perspective of what it is. Even if it were next to nothing, you get enough "next to nothings" and they can add into something — not as real proof but as something that could be meaningful in estimating probability. As seriously as I take the quibbling of stones, they have to be handled in proportion. Quibbling with a stone is not the same as quibbling with a wall. A lot of folks say they understand that, but as I grasp their thought process, I wonder about their commitment to that. A lot of time gets spent addressing small stones, even chips of stone, with rarely a chirp of recognition that it is about the wall.
We have two walls to weigh against each other. Neither proves anything, nor can a comparison between the two prove anything. It would be a very poor thinker who would put 100% confidence in one over the other. But it would be a rare thing to judge two stone walls the same. One is more likely than the other. Which is it?
"More likely than not" is not a demanding line to draw, and I feel extremely comfortable saying that it is more likely not that the result of the 2016 Presidential Election was fraudulent.
I know from some things said in feedback to my article that part of what makes that possibility hard for others to accept is that it feels unusual just to consider it. I totally get that. I started off assuming otherwise and did not even realize I had made that assumption. I had to be hit over the head with a 2x4 to break loose of that — twice, actually, to really let go. The first was realizing how mighty unusual it is to have an honest election look like this without a better set of explanations than I’d been able to come up with. And then I still needed to be smacked by the connection between the 1888 and 2016 election before I really was ready to take it on. We need to be ready to accept a big idea that has merit even though it goes against the comfort zone of how we’ve seen things and how we have expected to continue seeing them.
When my mind gets timid, I try to remember this quote: "If at first, the idea is not absurd, there is no hope for it." The speaker pushed us a bit off-center using humor to make his serious point, but that was said by Albert Einstein. Our pre-conditioned thoughts, and our attraction to the comfort of thinking we have the world figured out, that often creates labels of absurdity that have nothing to do with the actual merit of a theory and its probability.
I got to a point where I was comfortable going further than "more likely than not" in this particular case. I would say it is far more likely than not that the 2016 Election was rigged, and I came to a point where I estimated the likelihood as about 3-to-1. Maybe if I could be more precise it might be 70% and not 75%, but the one thing I am not doing is exaggerating for effect. I don’t expect many to join me in that range, and I don’t find that unusual. I know what it takes to get there, and it takes an emphasis in some areas of connectivity that I had to learn to have trust in. I understand most would not.
To the extent that this kind of thought process — applied to this kind of problem — is foreign to you, then you are going to be drawn more to the center and are less likely to see levels of distinction between the two that would draw you further out. It is not unusual to find myself further out. This type of problem is right up my alley. I seek out stuff like this to think about. And I’m used to thinking this way. I’ve practiced it longer than most people have been alive, and it was essentially my profession for a long time. There a good analogy of how one view can hug a conservative line and another can stretch it way out while both feel they are making reasonable choices in their thought process. At one point late in the election CNN estimated that the "loser’s" lead in the popular vote would eventually end up between 500,000 and a million. I understood how they got there, a simple mathematical projection that did not factor in many things that needed to be understood to actually make a good estimate. They were not looking at it correctly, and they were making an estimate that not only was wrong but spectacularly wrong. Reasoning through it, it was near impossible for it not to go way over their max of a million and probably over 2 million. I reckoned about 2.2 million, and it still ended up a bit past that. I’m sure whoever did that crunch for CNN understood his own thought process and probably was quite comfortable about the choices he had made. Now how would he have felt if at that time his editor told him: "We’ve got a guy over here who thought about it a little differently, and the center of his estimate is nearly three times yours at 2.2 million." I’d put my money on his response being something like: "Come on, I may be off some but that can’t possibly be right."
(Understand that I do know that a lot of people — especially at BJOL — would have as easily seen the wisdom of working it differently than the CNN guy. It’s only an analogy. It is about how we get comfortable with different thought processes, and how a thought process better suited to a certain type of problem can end up in such a different place that it is hard for the other to take in.)
Please try to bear in mind what several have had trouble recognizing based on some of their comments. As far as the subject of a possible fix goes, what I have written is about is reasoning aimed at an estimate of probability of a fix. It is not proving a fix, nor is it trying to prove it. Just as a matter of probability, I still come up with a fairly high chunk of reasonable doubt. The odds I give to it being an honest election are higher than what most people gave that underdog to win the election.