Yeah, I'll Hang My Hat On Anything

I'm still in shock over Election Day.  So while I've been preparing myself to become much more of a Facebook activist (because as pissed as I am, I sure as shit ain't no protester), when something like this comes up, I'll jump on this like the desperate whore that I am.

You may know that Hillary Clinton has won the popular vote, the raw number of votes in this country.  At last check the gap between her and Donald Trump is two million votes.  Then, in at least what I can tell, there has been chatter on Twitter (I, for one, found it here) that a few counties in Wisconsin overcounted Trump votes.  In fact, those counties announced vote totals greater than the actual number of votes made.  (How this was found, I don't know.)

Then, it was reported that some data scientists brought their findings of discrepancies in the state of Wisconsin to the Clinton campaign.  If anyone would want a recount, it would come from them, obviously.  They apparently decided against it.  However, a professor and the nation's foremost cybervoting expert at the University of Michigan named J. Alex Halderman said that there should be an audit, if not a recount, for not just Wisconsin but also Michigan and Pennsylvania, states expected and polled for Clinton which Trump has either won or, in Michigan's case, is winning as of press time.  I don't know if Halderman was one of the experts to talk to the Clinton campaign.  He doesn't have evidence that there has been a hack or any other voter hacking.  In fact, I don't think that he believes that Clinton actually won those states.  But considering that many people believed before the election that Clinton would win, that the margins in the three states he's calling for recounts are so close, that he knows that voting machines can totally be hacked (by, say, Russia) and, most important of all, that he says that for democracy's sake we should be double-checking the votes manually anyway, we should have an audit and recount.  (Halderman stated his own case just fine, but for writing's sake, this article on techdirt is a more compelling argument/summary of Halderman's points.)

(Should add that Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight and Nate Cohn of the New York Times use statistical regression to prove that there wasn't a hack and that certain racial and education groups expected to vote for Clinton simply didn't.  But they both were wrong in thinking that Clinton would win, so why should we believe them now?  So fuck them.)

Recounts, however, are expensive -- or at least states make them expensive.  In Pennsylvania, it costs you half a million; in Michigan it's $600,000; and in newly-corrupt Wisconsin, it's $1.1 million.  Moreover, deadlines to file for recounts are coming up really soon.  In Michigan it's the 30th; in Pennsylvania's it's the 28th; and in Wisconsin it's the 25th, aka tomorrow.

I felt the need to just toss in a couple shekels for the effort, however quixotic it seemed.  But I didn't know where to donate, especially since Hillary Clinton seemingly refuses to ask for one ... to unite the country.  And I didn't want to just toss my money to a grassroots campaign because I doubted it would get anyway.  Well, someone who launched her own quixotic campaign for President, Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party, launched a fundraising campaign yesterday.  As of yesterday afternoon she raised about a quarter million of the $2.5 million needed to ask for the three recounts.

But then, while at the Golden Gopher volleyball match last night (which, by the way, they won over #1-ranked Nebraska after losing the first two sets, the second of which ended on an 8-1 Cornhusker run), I checked my Twitter feed.  Stein raised it.  All of it.  And checking now, her donation page has just surpassed $3.2 million.  They now have a stretch goal of $4.5 million.  Furthermore, even though they cannot guarantee that they'll get the recounts the money asks for, if there is litigation in these three states, the total should reach $7 million.

So what the hell -- why don't I contribute something?  Shit, if you believe Clinton was robbed, why don't you?  I still have fantasies that Halderman and an army of computer scientists and data scientists and grad students comb through everything and find such significant hacking and election fraud that Clinton is determined to have actually won those three states -- which would be enough to give Clinton the 270 electoral votes needed to claim the presidency.  A guy can dream, can't he?

Look, there is some next-level science and analysis going on here.  I also know that this election season has been unlike anything we've ever seen before.  We need to know what the hell actually happened.  What I think we should stop doing is rely on probabilities.  This campaign has reduced such probabilities to assumptions without evidence.  This campaign has also exposed blind spots that we all have.  So instead of sticking to what worked in the past, or even to overcompensating and potentially relying on new biases, let's just fucking count the votes and make sure no one hacked into these voting machines, OK?  Is that too goddamn much to ask?