Now, Montana’s local elections are over, and even if there’s nothing, there’s no doubt there will be some controversial results. So it seems like someone has to find fault with something, even if it’s imaginary. He has been thinking about this column for over a year now, since the Montana Election Integrity Project (MEIP) released a “canvas” of 4,347 Montana voters showing just how messed up our elections are. I’m here. (Visit mtelectionintegrity.org/canvas) The reason it took me so long to write this is because there are so many mistakes from a scientific perspective that I don’t know where to start. It was.
Based on the canvasses of 4,347 Montana voters, MEIP estimates that there were 120,261 so-called “invalid” votes in the 2020 Montana election, and that there were an additional 196,370 “invalid” voter registration files. Needless to say. They spoke to 4,347 voters about 13 months after the 2020 election and used what voters told them to understand the facts, or at least the facts that voters remember more than a year after voting. MEIP compares voters’ answers about when they sent in their ballots to a database in which the Secretary of State stores the ballots they receive, and if their answers differ from the SOS answers, it’s time to do the dirty work. This is clear evidence that it is in progress.
MEIP volunteers visited doors in selected areas across six counties. They do not say how they chose the regions, much less the counties. In fact, their lack of detail about such things is what got me interested in the first place. Because, please don’t hold this against me – I am trained as a scientist and am familiar with the so-called “scientific method”. Although it has a fancy name, it has a lot in common with cake recipes. The scientific method provides guidelines for conducting experiments and research. That’s because if you want to become a scientist, there is a rule that anything you claim to have discovered must be verified by other scientists using exactly the same procedure. In the experiment record, this is the section called “Methodology.” If you bake a cake, it’s called a recipe. If you follow the recipe exactly, you should end up with a cake that is exactly like, or very similar to, the recipe creator’s cake. The same goes for science. If you leave something out or include something, you will get different results.
MEIP used language that sounded like a methodology, but was very vague about the details, like my mother’s recipe, which required a little bit of this and a little bit of that. So, my question is, why and how did you choose your research destination? Was it because they needed to show that the canvas produced the desired results? In the method paragraph they say: “The canvass consisted of knocking on the doors of both voters who we believed had at least one questionable issue related to voter data recorded by the Secretary of State’s office and voters we did not record. Please report any suspicious issues. ” It’s not said what those “problems” are, but they do try to manipulate the results by pre-screening participants. They found that 1,138 of the 4,347 voters had what MEIP called “invalid” votes. Extending these results to all voters in Montana leads to the conclusion that there were the above number of “invalid” votes.
The problem is, there’s no way to know whether these 4,347 people are representative of the rest of the 2020 electorate. If they’re right, that’s great, but if they’re not, you can’t extend the conclusions from a small group to a larger group.
Why is this a concern? Voting is the most important right in our republic, and using inaccurate science to spread nonsense about “invalid” elections intentionally undermines voter confidence in elections. It will be.
People forget, people remember incorrectly, people lie. A failed candidate once said to me: “If everyone who said they voted for me had actually voted, I would have won.”
Jim Elliott served 16 years in the Montana Legislature as a state representative and state senator. He lives on a ranch in Trout Creek.