Full disclosure: I'm not a Trump fan in the slightest. I don't spend an extraordinary amount of time talking about that fact on Reddit; but some of my comments do indeed express this view, either by way of serious commentary or lighthearted joking.
At the same time, I take impartial analysis and fact checking
extremely seriously. I always push back against weak and/or unfounded accusations that are made against Trump, as I do for all other political figures — something I've done both on this account and on
FactCheckHuman, my dedicated fact checking account.
Usually, my fact checks don't run much more than a couple of paragraphs. In some instances, though, I've done ultra–deep dives into an issue. This current post can certainly be considered one of these. As with any other fact check, the ultimate aim of these write-ups is simply to determine what is or isn't true; or what is or isn't
likely to be true.
At the same time, this post also genuinely intends to persuade people of the speciousness and toxicity of the Trump campaign's current claims about voter fraud. To tell the truth, I kind of approached it as a synthesis of conversations I've been having with my conservative friends and family members, who are really on board with the Trump position on election integrity.
In any case, not everything is as simple as finding the facts and evidence, and letting these speak for themselves. Ideally that's how we want things to be; but often times there are a number of ambiguities that prevent this from being done so easily, in terms of varying interpretations that the evidence permits. In these instances, we basically have to make a reasonable judgment call about what's likely to be the case: educated guesses that try to fill in some of the gaps in the evidence.
Even here, though, I try to be similarly rigorous, and take a lead from what I call critical parsimony. In short, this tries to find the most "normal" and least sensational/conspiratorial explanation for something, while also bearing in mind some of the complexities and anomalies that might complicate the issue. Often times, these two different or seemingly contradictory aspects come together when we encounter some event or phenomenon that superficially seems exceptional and counterintuitive, but which turns out to be much less unusual than it appears to be. In short, this allows extraordinary events to be, well, rare.
In line with that last point, one of the most insightful things we can look at is events and situations, usually from the recent past, which can help contextualize and elucidate various things that have taken place in the current election — and things which have taken place in terms of people's reaction to this. So things like looking back to the 2016 or 2012 election can be crucial here, or other historical events that can give precedent for what's happening in 2020, and shed light on it.
I suppose the most obvious point of departure for this post is what we might describe as a main "narrative" that Donald Trump and the Trump campaign and its supporters have advanced in response to the election itself: that the election has been unusually fraught with irregularities and duplicitous/fraudulent intentions. Responsibility for these irregularities have almost always been placed at the feet of Democrats, and is clearly taken to represent an effort on Democrats' part to steal the election.
Obviously, I think a lot of Trump supporters and conservatives have accepted this narrative more or less at face value. Even before getting into some of the actual specifics of the claims of voter fraud, though, one thing that I've called attention to from the outset is how we might first consider the initial motivations behind the narrative itself a bit more critically, and how it comes together in the first place.
Not to get too philosophical or anything, but it's worth pointing out that whenever we have a political "narrative" like this, it's somewhat of an artificial construct. A bunch of different phenomena or allegations are brought together and crammed into one explanatory framework. Nuance or ambiguity becomes something secondary to promoting the narrative. Far too often, the cast is full of stereotyped protagonists and antagonists, divided along party lines.
Further, it's important not to lose sight of everything that's paved the way for such a bitter partisan narrative to emerge in the first place. The electoral process itself probably never been neutral affair, and is still intensely partisan in numerous aspects — from the emergence of the Electoral College itself, to the crafting and enforcing of state voting laws and guidelines. At lower levels, issues of gerrymandering have been a serious problem; and at all levels, different political parties have fought in the courts to try to influence voter eligibility and voter turnout in their own favor.
In tandem with this, beyond the judiciary itself, political parties also wage many of these same battles in the court of public opinion.
In this current instance, the overarching narrative in question — of Democrat attempts to unlawfully steal the election — indeed seems to target public opinion above all else. And it far predates the 2020 election itself, too. Even before running in 2015, Trump had previously suggested that President Obama's original election was assisted by fraudulent votes being cast by dead voters. During the 2016 Iowa caucus, Trump accused Ted Cruz and his campaign of having committed fraud, and called for a "new election" or that the results be nullified; and he leveled a similar accusation against Marco Rubio in the Florida primary, too.
In August of 2016, regarding the general election, Trump claimed that "[t]he only way we can lose . . . Pennsylvania . . . is if cheating goes on." He continued to frequent challenge the integrity of the election leading up to November; and even after his victory, he stated that he "won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally" — implying there had been upwards of 3 million "illegal" votes. Very closely echoing what we'd see in 2020, after the 2018 Florida Senatorial election, Trump stated that "[t]he Florida Election should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis in that large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged. An honest vote count is no longer possible-ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!"
In May and June 2020, Trump began ramping up claims that fraudulent mail-in ballots would be printed in vast droves, both by domestic entities and "maybe by the millions by foreign powers." Again, this would be insisted on time and time again; and finally, echoing his sentiments in late November 2016, on November 7 Trump declared that "I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!", and later reiterating that he received 71,000,000 "legal" votes. (An exhaustive catalogue of Trump's allegations re: voter fraud can be found here.)
It's hard to deny that Trump's public-facing view has always proposed voter fraud and irregularities as ubiquitous things affecting a large number of elections. But it's precisely the one-sidedness of his seeing monsters in every shadow here that points toward another explanation. Trump's accusatory or even paranoid worldview can be seen as something like a microcosm reflecting a much wider trend in historical political rhetoric around elections.
Even when Trump is taken out of the picture altogether, the propagandistic function of allegations of election fraud has still been frequently noted by a number of scholars and historians who specialize in election studies. In a 2007 paper for the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law, for example, American constitutional law scholar Justin Levitt calls attention to the emotional resonance that claims of voter fraud can elicit — and also notes its prevalence because of this:
Allegations of election-related fraud make for enticing press. Voter fraud, in particular, has the feel of a bank heist caper: roundly condemned but technically fascinating, and sufficiently lurid to grab and hold headlines. Perhaps because these stories are dramatic, voter fraud makes a popular scapegoat. In the aftermath of a close election, losing candidates are often quick to blame voter fraud for the results, and legislators cite voter fraud as justification for various new restrictions on the exercise of the franchise. ("The Truth About Voter Fraud," abstract)
Similarly, Raymond Gastil, writing in an article in the journal Studies In Comparative International Development in 1990, noted that
in many new or transitional countries, it is standard practice for the opposition to point out before the election how the government will "steal" the election. If the opposition loses, it will then make strenuous claims that the election was stolen. Thus the ARENA party in El Salvador has claimed fraud in each of the several elections in the 1980s; most recently it won the election and yet claimed that it was robbed of the greater win to which it was entitled. Claims and counterclaims of this nature are seldom subject to verification, even for those on the ground.
Although the U.S. obviously isn't a new or transitional country, it's impossible not to see close parallels to the accusations of Trump here — especially the similarity between the claim of having been "robbed of the greater win to which it was entitled" and Trump sweetening his electoral win by insisting that he won the popular vote, too, so long as "illegal" votes are deducted from the tally.
But when these claims are put to the test, in actuality, scholarly studies have long demonstrated that the prevalence of true voter fraud in general in U.S. elections is minuscule. A Brennan Center for Justice special report on voter fraud compiles and links to many if not most major studies on voter fraud in the U.S., concluding that together these studies paint a clear picture that voter fraud "very rarely happens." (See also my Endnote for more on this.)
So, statistics paints a much different picture than political rhetoric would have us believe.
If the bogeyman here is more of a phantasm than anything, however, it's still a powerful tool for influencing electorates: "voter fraud and voter suppression allegations are strongly used as a mobilization tool by parties during significant elections (Hasen, 2012; Levitt, 2007)." (This quote is taken from Fogarty, Kimball and Kosnik's article "The Media, Voter Fraud, and the U.S. 2012 Elections," published in the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties. This article is especially worth reading to get a bit more background about some of the things that set the stage for the 2016 and 2020 elections and their rhetoric.)
One last thing: Population growth and other factors have led to a vastly increased number of voters over the past couple of decades. In 2000, just a little over 100 million people voted, while in the current election this number went up to 130 million. Further, the transition to electronic voting and the use of tabulating machines has increased significantly during this time, too.
Because of these things — all further complicated by COVID this year — both statistics and common wisdom alone should lead us to expect a large number of voting irregularities. But it's also important not to conflate irregularities with voter fraud. Irregularities are simply errors, that don't necessarily require bad human intentions at all. However, with realpolitik at its ugly peak in the election cycle, this offers an opportunity for political pundits to read deliberate ill intentions into these incidents, whether by innuendo or explicit accusation. But it should also be kept in mind that if irregularities are unintentional, and if political affiliation in the U.S. is split roughly equally, then these irregularities should also affect the two political parties roughly equally; probably in similar proportions.
Finally, the increasing partisan divide between media outlets, along with their selective coverage, probably makes it easy to overlook (or perhaps forget) the great number of lawsuits routinely filed by both Democratic and Republican attorneys, both in the lead-up to the election and in the wake of its inevitable irregularities: efforts to block or secure votes from voting populations likely to favor one or the other of the two parties. It should be clear here, then, that an overemphasis on irregularities and claims and fraud are often treated as rhetorical and legal tools in service of political self-interests.
With all these things considered — and again, even if we set the political situation in 2020 aside, along with some of the specific claims of voter fraud that are currently being made — this should still give us ample reason to rethink how accusations of voter fraud function more broadly: what's in it for those making these accusations, politically speaking; how these claimants often see little use for factual accuracy or measured analysis here; and how this perpetuates toxic discourse and bad-faith assumptions.
Claims of Election Irregularities and Fraud in 2020: A Catalogue and Commentary
So this second part of the post is going to be a sort of compendium of a lot of the major allegations of voting irregularities and voter fraud that have been circulating, followed by a critical analysis of these. While some of these irregularities are clearly broad and would affect both political parties, I'm pretty sure that almost every one of these claims has circulated widely in conservative and/or pro-Trump sources; and most have been interpreted as a partisan attack on election integrity. I'm sure that there have been other incidents or alleged incidents that have circulated on the left; but this post is already extremely long and took quite a while to write, and I don't want to make more work for myself.
I'll probably be updating this in the days to come, as more info on various things comes out.
Finally, as a sort of transition point between my probably-far-too-long prologue and the catalogue, I think it can be very instructive to take a look at a compendium of voting irregularities in 2016 — to help get some additional context and perspective for how similar issues can and did surface in the 2020 election.
Claim: It's suspicious how additional Biden votes have kept magically appearing, long after election day, pushing his total over Trump's prior total.
Response: I've put this in the initial position because it seems to be one of the most common observations of accusations: it was one of the first that Trump made, and which he continued to repeat. But among all the different accusations here, this has one of the most mundane explanations.
Prior to the election itself, and noting various state laws pertaining to the tabulation of mail-in votes, various commentators called attention to a likely phenomenon of delayed results for mail-in ballots — which have skewed heavily Democrat. Dave Wassermann noted, for example, that
in northern battlegrounds such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin . . . officials are not permitted to begin processing mail ballots until the day of the election (or, in Michigan's case, the day before). In those states, a "red mirage" of Trump-heavy Election Day votes could linger until larger metro counties report huge tranches of early ballots later in the evening.
(As for mail-in votes skewing highly Democrat, this also has mundane explanations. For reasons that are less than clear, on numerous occasions Trump strongly discouraged his supporters from voting by mail. Unfortunately I don't have the room to fully get into this, though there's certainly some interesting/surprising data about just how overwhelmingly blue mail-in voting skewed even in a number of red strongholds.)
Further, sometimes this claim has appeared in the bit more specific iteration, suggesting that it wasn't just suspicious how Biden votes kept coming in to counteract Trump's tally, but also how precisely Biden's total crept past Trump — as if it was known exactly how many votes Biden needed to just barely scrape past him. But this also has a deceptively simple explanation: the extremely slim margin of victory for Biden in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania basically mirrored the same ultra-slim margin of victory for Trump in these same states in 2016, but now just the other way around. Honing in on PA, for example, we can also see how Biden just marginally outperformed Clinton in terms of cutting into Trump's lead in many red areas.
Even the 2016 election in Georgia saw a significant blue shift, especially in the Atlanta metropolitan area — which presaged Biden's performance in 2020, also bolstered by the efforts of those like Stacey Abrams to register an enormous number of new GA voters.
Claim: Some counties saw a suspicious or even impossible ratio of votes for Biden.
Response: The most widespread claim of this pertained to Michigan returns as posted by Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ) in the early morning of November 4. A screenshot of the returns at two different times here appeared to show the DDHQ vote tally for Biden go up by 128,000 votes from the previous update, but with no change at all to Trump's total.
Later that morning, it was clear what had happened: shortly after the original entry error (in Shiawassee County), DDHQ had subtracted the erroneous inflated vote update for Biden — something that obviously required no alteration of the tally for Trump. However, the screenshot that circulated gave the misleading impression that it was an addition of Biden votes, instead of a subtraction. (My original detailed explanation of this can be seen on FactCheckHuman/.)
A similar claim has been made around the same time in the Wisconsin totals. Here a chart is linked, and it's suggested that there was a huge vertical surge of votes for Biden in the hour or so before 6:00 am, but with no change at all in Trump votes. But the explanation here is almost goofy in its simplicity: as seen at other points in the chart, the blue Biden line actually covers the red Trump line at various points. The big vertical Biden vote jump in question is almost certainly simply covering up a smaller vertical jump for Trump, and then continues to obscure it until it ends (otherwise we'd be able to see the horizontal trajectory of the red line). I've lost the original source of this, but I had actually saved another chart which shows the same phenomenon of big vertical leaps, only this time with the red Trump line obscuring the blue Biden line.
Claim: The significantly lower number of total votes for Democratic Senators compared to Biden votes in individual states is indicative of something sketchy — when compared to the much smaller mismatch between Trump/Senator votes.
Response: Several articles — e.g. "Swing States Show Biden Votes Suspiciously Far Exceeding Democrat Down-Ticket Votes" — note that there was a significant difference in the ratio of Trump votes to GOP Senator votes in Michigan and Georgia (nearly an equal number of votes in both), compared with the ratio of Biden votes relative to votes for the Democrat Senator in these states (significantly lower).
But this seems to be part of a wider trend of Democrats failing to pay a similar interest in down-ballot candidates. In the 2016 Georgia election, the ratio difference was significantly more drastic: 2,089,104 votes for Trump and 2,135,806 for Isakson, versus 1,877,963 for Clinton but only 1,599,726 for Barksdale — some 275,000 fewer votes for Barksdale than for Clinton. In Wisconsin, there were nearly 75,000 more votes for Ron Johnson than Trump, but 20,000 fewer for Russ Feingold. In PA in 2016, there were 20,000 fewer votes for the GOP Senator as for Trump, compared to 60,000 fewer for the Democratic Senate candidate than for Clinton. (Surprisingly, I haven't been able to find any commentary on this phenomenon. If anyone knows any, please direct me to it.)
Presumably having tabulated similar data from the other states, Trump attorney Sidney Powell has recently noted that there were 450,000 ballots "in the key states that miraculously only have a mark for Joe Biden on them and no other candidate." But based on what I've noted above, I'd be willing to bet that this isn't truly miraculous. Also, as a fascinating fact, in the 2016 election, 1.75 million (!) voters refrained from voting for a Presidential candidate entirely, only voting down-ballot. And frankly, I find it easier to imagine someone only voting for a Presidential candidate, than only voting down-ballot.
Claim: There have been over 3,000 instances of voter fraud in Nevada, with non-NV residents voting in the NV election.
Response: According to the official Nevada Secretary of State site, "Nevada residents who are students in another state or are otherwise temporarily residing in another state may vote in the 2020 Nevada general election." Similarly, apparently a look at the complete list of 3,000+ voters here turns up a number of overseas military personnel; though when I took a look at that, I didn't really see many. Even further, a fact check of this same claim by PolitiFact also notes that "[p]eople who move within 30 days before an election can cast a vote in their new state, or in their prior state of residence, in-person or via absentee ballot." (In this regard, one of the statements by former Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt may also be of interest, which was a bit more specific in noting that "[w]e are also certain there are thousands of people whose votes have been counted who have moved out of Clark County during the pandemic" — emphasis mine.)
Finally, perhaps also worth noting is that there are actually allegations of irregularities in the attainment of information in the first place — at least in the version of the criminal referral to AG William Barr that Trump campaign spokesperson Tim Murtaugh submitted.
Claim: The votes of those in Arizona who filled out a ballot by hand using a Sharpie were/would be invalidated.
Response: Various Arizona county officials have disputed that this would automatically invalidate a vote. That being said, there are indeed reports of tabulating machines rejecting votes after voters used Sharpies and noted a bleed-through of the ink. This finds some additional support from the official Pima County Twitter, where it was written that "[f]elt pens are discouraged because the ink can bleed through." However, another source states that
According to a video Maricopa County published on Oct. 24, Sharpies — at home and at the ballot box — are compatible with their scanners, and were actually the best choice for filling out ballots, due to their fast-drying ink.
Claim Some of the votes of those in Maricopa County, Arizona were rejected due to stray marks or (possibly) ink bleed-through; yet some poll workers seemed unable to help voters remedy this and cast a valid vote, due to their own confusion about how the tabulating machines worked.
Response: This is the subject of a lawsuit by the Trump campaign and RNC, etc.; and from a cursory read of the complaint, it seems to be well-founded. I have no clue what the remedy for this would be, though.
Claim: Poll workers have seen brazenly filling out ballots themselves.
Response: Several PolitiFact fact checks (1, 2) have already covered this. In short, it's standard operating procedure for the voting choices of damaged ballots to be transferred/transcribed onto a new, non-damaged ballot. This can even happen on a massive scale, as this report on the 2012 Florida election notes:
During the election, the county’s ballot printer sent out around 60,000 absentee ballots with a typo that could not be read by the county’s tabulation machines. Because of this mistake, county workers had to copy about 35,000 of the votes by hand onto new ballots.
This also intersects with Arizona's SharpieGate slightly: one fact check re: SharpieGate noted that
According to the state's elections procedures manual, if a felt-tip pen mark does bleed through, the ballot will likely get sent for duplication. An election worker will fill out a new ballot using the voter's choices that will be read properly by tabulation machines.
I'm not sure what measures are in place to ensure that the poll workers don't switch the votes in these instances (besides any poll observers who could see this); but in any case, the "risk" of one's vote being switched seems to be equal for Democrat and Republican voters — something that was also noted by the Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich (Republican).
In any case, as for more on spoiled ballots: a Project Veritas article (which I can't link due to a Reddit-wide ban) claims that its journalists had found 8 to 10 spoiled ballots in Quakertown, PA. I'm mentioning this here because I had been sort of curious what's supposed to be done with spoiled ballots; and apparently, as the article notes, "Pennsylvania law requires spoiled ballots to be held for 22 months after an election." I know a 22 months retention for some election materials is indeed found in federal law, though I haven't seen anything else that specifies what's to be done with spoiled ballots.
Claim(s): Donald Trump and others shared reports that there had been some sort of unspecified reporting error in a batch of votes in Fulton County, GA. Later it was stated in ambiguous language on ABC7's Twitter account that this reporting error "has taken @JoeBiden's lead in Georgia from 4,000 votes to 7,000 votes." This was interpreted by many to mean that the (correction of this) error was actually in Biden's favor.
Response: What actually appears to have happened is that the reporting error pertained to votes within the batch that originally had given Biden a 3,000 vote lead — but it wasn't that there were actually 3,000 votes that were mistabulated. The true number of affected votes within the batch appears to have been 342; and there's actually no information as to what the Biden/Trump split here was.
Claim: Glitches in voting machine software should cause things like crashes, and not the sort of vote switching that's been reported.
Response: Due to the complicated nature of some of the tabulation errors, etc., news reports have sometimes mistakenly ascribed these to software glitches — when later, more accurate info comes out which gives other causes. For example, a Detroit Free Press article originally suggested that the results of a local race in Oakland County, MI had been overturned when it was discovered that a "computer error" or "technical glitch" had accidentally given votes to the Democratic candidate, and not the Republican one.
But an article in the NYTimes from yesterday actually reiterates how this and several other reported errors actually have human error as the primary or sole cause here. Re: that local election in Oakland County, it notes that
County election workers had mistakenly counted votes from the city of Rochester Hills, Mich., twice, according to the Michigan Department of State. The workers later spotted the error.
That being said, it's also not exactly true that things like vote-flipping can only be caused by human error. In the section "The Challenge of Aging Machines" in a 2014 Brennan Center report on voting machine risks, for example, this discusses instances of vote-flipping that come from calibration errors caused by touch screens that shift and degrade over time. An NPR article from 2016 makes similar observations, while also reporting on how this led to widespread accusations of these votes instead being deliberately "rigged."
[Edit:] I figured it was worth it to actually expand this section by looking back at incidents prior to 2020 wherein one candidate's votes were mistakenly given to another (and other related phenomena) in initial tallies — whether this was due to human error, machine error, or sometimes both in conjunction.
It's actually somewhat hard to paint a comprehensive picture of previous Election Night reporting errors like this. Those having never made the news in the first place were probably quickly forgotten. Perhaps there's a trove of early reports of these left to be (re)discovered on Twitter; but this can only take us back so far, considering its fairly recent rise in popularity. However, we can still find records of these in various publications. This internal report by CBS News on its Election Night 2000 coverage, discussing the reporting of votes from various FL counties, for examples, notes that
Vote reports from Volusia County severely understated Gore’s actual total when a faulty computer memory card reported votes that were off by thousands. That precinct, Number 216, subtracted more than 16,000 votes from Gore’s total and added votes to Bush’s total. In addition, an apparent reporting error in Brevard County reduced Gore’s total by an additional 4,000 votes.
It also briefly notes other errors, too, such as
In Massachusetts, 30,000 votes were left uncounted in 51 precincts because of human error.
In New Mexico, election officials thought that a handwritten notation about absentee votes from one precinct indicated 120 votes for Gore, when the actual number was 620.
An article in the Denver Post re: the 2016 Colorado primary notes "a reporting error on caucus night":
The problem . . . occurred when a volunteer at Byers Middle School in Denver punched the wrong vote tallies from 10 precincts into the party’s interactive voice response system for the presidential preference poll.
The state party’s website reported March 1 that Sanders won 14,624 votes, or 54 percent, in Denver County and Clinton took 12,097 votes, or 45 percent.
But the corrected numbers for Denver County give Sanders 15,194 votes, or 56.5 percent, and Clinton with 11,527, or 43 percent, according to official party results.
A Brennan Center report on voting machine failures includes a very long list of human and machine errors in various U.S. elections. Among some of the most significant of those listed include the 2002 Alabama gubernatorial election, where
The Birmingham News and the New York Times reported that an error in the way officials downloaded vote data from a computer cartridge led to an incorrect initial tally of votes in the gubernatorial election. The initial tally of the votes showed that the Democratic incumbent had received 19,070 votes in Baldwin County. A reexamination of the vote tallies showed that the incumbent received only 12,736 votes, which gave the victory to his Republican challenger.
Further, in the 2004 Presidential and congressional elections,
local officials discovered an error in eight Diebold scanners that had been used on 208,446 absentee ballots. According to the North County Times, votes were miscounted in both the Democratic presidential primary race and the primary race for the Republican U.S. Senate seat. A recount was conducted, revealing that “2,821 absentee ballots cast for Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry were actually counted for Dick Gephardt.” Similarly, in the Senate race, 68 votes for one candidate and six votes for another were credited to a third candidate. The Union Tribune reported that multiple scanners caused the error, feeding data into the tabulation system at once.
An article on irregularities in the 2018 midterms in GA begins
To find a clue about what might have gone wrong with Georgia’s election last fall, look no further than voting machine No. 3 at the Winterville Train Depot outside Athens.
On machine No. 3, Republicans won every race. On each of the other six machines in that precinct, Democrats won every race.
Claim: A very serious instance of (electronic) vote-flipping has taken place in Antrim County, MI, where 6,000 Trump votes were accidentally flipped to Biden. This has been one of the most widely reported instances recently, usually accompanied by a note that 47 other counties in Michigan used the same faulty software as that responsible for the vote-flipping in Antrim County.
Response: More accurately, the actual votes themselves weren't switched at all here; and for that matter, the error seems to have been more human than electronic. What appears to have happened is that a county clerk hadn't manually updated the software which was responsible for compiling the votes for reporting; and consequently, "even though the tabulators counted all the ballots correctly, those accurate results were not combined properly when the clerk reported unofficial results."
[Edit:] A while after writing this, by chance I came across some more info which either sheds more light on all this, or makes the whole thing a bit more complicated (or both). According to this AP article, the President of the company who made the voting software explained that "a minor correction was made to a ballot that caused additional compounding changes to how the software totals and presented the data"; and an article in the NYTimes similarly states that election security experts and state officials concluded "that an election worker had configured ballot scanners and reporting systems with slightly different versions of the ballot."
Claim: There was suspicious activity around items and containers brought into a Detroit absentee ballot counting center in the early hours of November 4, after the deadline for these to arrive.
Response: This claim — including video footage and pictures — was shared by Eric Trump; and in it it's been intimated that these were fraudulent absentee ballots. However, the man in the video footage has been identified as an employee of Detroit's ABC affiliate WXYZ; and the items in question were his camera equipment.
I'm right at the character limit here — continuing in a comment below.
submitted by Introduction:
Sup bois, my name's Bailey and today I'm going to PROVE to you that bots exist in Clash Royale's ladder system! Just before we get into the content today, I just wanna plug the
YouTube video I made on this topic. It's a nicely edited version of this post for those of you who enjoy watching rather than reading, and I'd appreciate the support! Otherwise, be sure to enjoy the read! Now, bots have been theorised in Clash Royale for about a year. Boss did a video on his YouTube showing that he faced two very similar players, and guessed that they were illegitimate. But outside of Boss' video, nobody has really discussed this topic, and there definitely hasn't been PROOF that bots exist. So, I went and started a brand new Clash Royale account on stream and played a total of 91 games, facing 32 bots in the process... That gave me a total of 35% of games being a bot player, which is sort of insane. IN THIS POST I will give 100% proof that bot players exist. Twitch streamer 'MathologistBrad' showed me a profile API that can PROVE any account to be a bot, but let's talk a bit more about Boss' video first...
The Boss Video:
I mentioned
Boss' video just now, so I wanted to give ample credit to what he found almost a year ago now. He faced two players by the names of Rian and Gato. In his video, he pointed out that these two players have a one-word name, no clan, a random but similar amount of donations, and a complete noob arena 1 deck. Now, let's think about this. Each player has a one-word name, which already isn't likely in Clash Royale. When you sign up to Clash, you're probably not just gonna put your real name in that username box. I, for example, picked an edgy name that incorporated my surname. Boss, also, doesn't use his real name. Heck, Clash with ASH isn't even called Ash. I bet a couple of you reading this do use your real name, but it's fairly unlikely that a real person just enters their first name and uses that. Both of these bots were running identical decks, as well, using only cards that are unlocked in arena 1. This is super suspicious as most players will switch up their deck as soon as they unlock cool new cards, especially as you would have a legendary at the point in the game where Boss found them. Both players ALSO had donations with no current clan. You may think they've just left their clan, but I will prove otherwise later in this post...
Bot Profiles:
Before we take a look at the behaviour of bots in battle, let's talk about how we can recognise a bot right after we face them - on their profile. As I mentioned earlier, I faced a total of 32 bots in just 91 games of Clash Royale. It is important to note that there are NO bots above the 4000 trophy mark, this is where the game is 100% legitimate players. From these 32 bots, 100% of them had a single named profile. 100% of them had a player tag that started with either a Q or an L. 100% of them were NOT in a clan. 100% of them have some random amount of donations that is above 0. These are all things Boss looked at in his video, but I found a little bit more on the profiles than just that. 63% of bots are within two games of a new arena, and almost 80% of bots are within THREE games of a new arena. We'll theorise more on that later, but I think this is to do with Supercell wanting new players to reach new arenas more easily so they can feel achievement whenever they play the game. 100% of bots over level 7 have no cards in their deck two levels higher than their king tower - meaning a level 7 bot will never have a level 9 card, and so forth. So those are all quite obvious things, but let's take a look at RoyaleAPI. 100% of the bots I faced had either dropped trophies to be at the nearest trophy border, or had stayed right around where I faced them over the following days. Considering 80% of these bots were within a few games of the new arenas anyway, it consolidates the theory that the bots are only in the game to give players easy wins when they may be at crucial points in the game. Howeverrr, there's one thing outside of the game ENTIRELY that gives us the definitive proof that bots exist... I mentioned Brad earlier. Brad is a speedrunner on Twitch and came into one of my bot hunting streams, asking me for the player tags of any bots I had found... what he returned pretty much changed the entire outcome of this project... Using the Supercell API, he was able to pull the ACHIEVEMENT DATA from each of the bots. For those of you too new to Clash to remember achievements, these are what came before quests. They were super basic things like "get 3 wins in a challenge", or "hit 2000 trophies" and would give you a small amount of experience upon completion. Why would this old system be useful in 2020? And especially to prove bots? I hear exactly none of you ask. Well,
Supercell never actually deleted the code for these achievements. Whilst they may not be visible in the game anymore, your account is still continuously being tracked for completing achievements, but just isn't being rewarded when you do so. And
THAT is important, because one of the easiest achievements on this list was to join a clan... Using Brad's API, we can see that every one of these bots has donated cards and that the achievement is still being tracked on their profile. But what we can also see is that
NONE of the bots have
EVER completed the join a clan achievement (
see image #1 here). This tells us that these accounts, that aren't in a clan but have a random amount of donations, have NEVER actually been in a clan. This PROVES that these accounts are bots, because how would a human ever manage to donate a card without joining a clan?? It's impossible, and proves EXACTLY what I needed for this research. Now, knowing that these accounts are most definitely bot accounts, I reviewed the replay files of each bot account I encountered to analyse how the bots play inside of Clash Royale so I could figure out why they even exist inside of Clash Royale...
Bot Gameplay:
The bottom line of this section goes something like this - the bots tend to be SUPER passive in how they play. Only 29% of bots put troops in the back to start a push, and only 21% of bots played units aggressively at the river. This sorta never really gave the bots a way to actually build a push, seeing as they'd just sorta play units in the middle of the arena. I named this middle section of the arena the "bot spot", and it turns out that 96% of bots put the majority of their units in this passive zone. This really never lets them threaten you, and makes their gameplay super passive, which I guess is intended by Supercell. This "throwing of games" is backed up by the fact that 95% of bots leak elixir during the game when you're close to taking a tower. Instead of spending that elixir on defending your pushes, they legit just sit there and let you win. The only real aggression I found was with bots below 600 trophies. These ones seemed to spam everything at the river as soon as they could, but once you reach the 600 trophy mark the bots seem to stop doing this - I would guess that Supercell have different AIs at different trophy ranges. Although we already discussed that the majority of bots do just leak elixir to let you win, 92% of them will place a card right before they die. It seems as though they're trying to trick the player into thinking they haven't forfeit. Overall, these bots seem intentionally well coded by Supercell to make newer players believe that they are beating other real players, when in actuality they're getting free and easy wins to keep them playing the game for longer. I noticed that 70% of bots like to sacrifice their win condition on defence, maybe this is also to give the player easier wins? 0% of the bots I faced used any emotes, which again could relate to keeping newer players happier as they climb the ranks. That, of course, is not certain, just a theory. The final behaviour I noticed was to do with spells. 87% of the bots played spells in a sort of "programmed" way. This is sort of hard to explain, but hear me out. That percentage of bots wanted to play their spells on things that were spell-resistant. For example, they would always like to Fireball Musketeers and Arrow Skeleton Armies. However, this wasn't always executed well. There were a number of times were they would Fireball Musketeers at 4hp, or Arrow Skeleton Armies that only had 2 Skeletons left. So it felt as though they were programmed to use x spell on y troop, but didn't have any logical thought behind it - which made total sense for how a bot would actually run. Now a lot of you are probably asking... why? Why do bots exist? Well I've theorised a little bit about letting players have wins around crucial parts of the game, but I think there might be a somewhat deeper meaning here...
Why Bots Exist:
Let’s put bots into the context of Youtube. Almost all of you skip ads before videos on YouTube. Ads are usually only 15-30 seconds long, but you probably skip them anyway. While YouTube make less money from you skipping ads, people might leave the site if they had to wait 30-seconds before every video. And this is the same for Clash Royale. There simply cannot be 15-second queues for games, and bots are the fail-safe. Getting someone to download an app is already difficult enough, so Supercell cannot have a ton of players uninstall the game because of waiting times. PUBG and Call of Duty mobile both already have bots in their games to start matches sooner, so this isn't unheard of. There’s even a developer called VOODOO Games who ONLY release games with bots in them. They’re advertised as being multiplayer games, but the game isn’t even coded to be able to connect with other devices (you can even turn on airplane mode midgame and continue playing as normal.) Anyway, VOODOO has a game called Hole.io that a lot of my friends enjoyed playing for a while. And the reason they loved playing it is because... They were winning... a lot. You see, bots are terrible at playing video games. So if Hole.io was truly multiplayer, they might win 1 in every 20 matches? It wouldn’t be as fun and they’d probably uninstall. In Clash Royale, someone has to win, and someone has to lose. So every time a game is played, one player ends up happy, and the other player ends up sad. A bot is designed to lose on purpose, and does not care at all about losing because it has no feelings. So matches against bots allow Supercell to increase the overall enjoyment of the game by letting players gain happiness from beating bots. If the average player loses too many matches in a row, they’ll probably just uninstall and find a new game to play. So, it is in Supercell’s best interests to have these “pity matches” where an opponent is SO bad it is impossible to lose - and bots fill that role perfectly. By making sure players are never waiting too long for games, as well as making sure players never get too frustrated from losing a lot, bots allow supercell to give a better experience to newer players.
My Opinion and Conclusion:
This might be the most irrelevant part of this post, but I thought I'd give my views on the bot scenario in Clash Royale. I totally agree that shorter wait times and higher game enjoyment are POSITIVES, but what about everyone above 4k? It's fairly obvious that a lot of us more loyal players are slowly getting bored of what Clash Royale has to offer... and why newer players might be having a better experience, what do we get? Instead of spending time developing updates that give the loyal players a better experience, they've developed this secret, complex, bot AI that they've sorta his from all of us. Again, I agree that bots are a POSITIVE addition to the game, but my only problem is that they should have never been the main priority for Supercell. Whilst the bots are just a small factor, it indicates to me that Supercell aren't afraid of adding things that help them without even letting the community know why the updates have REALLY been taking this long. The ONLY statement I could find from Supercell on this topic was a support post where they talk super ominously, but do admit to bots existing (
see image #2 here). They call the bots an "extension of the tutorial", and say they're encountered "infrequently" with the purpose of "increasing the skill level of players who are climbing the ranks", but really this doesn't line up too greatly. I don't think the first 4000 trophies, equivalent of nearly 7 hours of game-time if you win EVERY battle, count as an "extension of the tutorial". Nor would I agree that they're "infrequent" encounters, with 35% of my games being against bots. And I DEFINITELY wouldn't say that they help to increase player skill level, as they are literally just free wins. As a closing statement here, I don't really mind that bots exist in Clash Royale. That's fine. What I do mind is that Supercell have tried to be as secretive and covert as possible about this. Just ADMIT there are bots. Just ADMIT they give people wins. Just ADMIT it's because the game is on a slow decline and you want to keep new players engaged. That would keep the community MUCH happier, rather than having us find it out anyway in the middle of the biggest update drought we've ever seen. I doubt Supercell will ever see this, but just be transparent with us... it would make everyone's lives so much easier, and it'd stop people trying to look for things to quote-unquote "expose" you on. But yeah boys, hopefully you did enjoy this little project that I came up with. PLEASE do consider giving a share to this post, or checking out my
YouTube video on this topic. I don't usually ask for stuff like that, but I think this information could be quite important to any Clash Royale friends you may have. Big shoutouts to
lolnopound and
Brad for helping me out with this video - their links are in this post if you wanna check them out! But yeah boys, thank you all for reading this far, I hope you enjoyed the post :)
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