Thanks for sharing. Somehow we have to figure out how to beat this false information tactic that they use. I think social media is making a difference in popping the bubble of deception.

          This is at the heart of everything I do professionally:

Real things are noisy because reality is noisy: objects have dirt, history, and quantum randomness. That is how we can tell that they are real.

          But, given my experiences I am not so sure I share this sentiment:

I'm heartened that the statistical community is taking such an interest in this issue.

          A real problem will be to "sell it" to the right people. If this just devolves into "my statistician disagrees with your statistician", then this will be just like the global climate change "debate".
          Forgive me, I am sometimes a cynic. Being described, by a lawyer at an official hearing, as being incompetent tends to harden ones soul.

        Logical syllogisms, and structures known as inductive logical form the foundation of your well written article. Be aware of the nature of the legal profession that provides no small part of the foundation of politics. Lawyers are trained to construct arguments and counter arguments grounded in what can be best discribed as classical logic without recourse to reality. The point is: Whatever may be true to reality be damned, if you can construct a solid acceptable argument you may still get a legal decision in your favor.
        The interface between the physical sciences and the legal sphere is not smooth and not particularly friendly. This is also true of our professional interactions with politicians.The rules of evidence in a courtroom are somewhat incompatible with those in the laboratory. Most politicians and lawyers do not understand how experimental and theoretical evidence taken together lead to conclusions. Worse they gleefully exploit the tentative nature of scientific conclusions to debase arguments they deem inconvenient truths. On the other side lawyers like to have expert witnesses use the vacuous phrase, "to within reasonable scientific certainty" to influence jurors and judges.
          In short, using scientific evidence and argument in the public sphere is a nuisanced affair fraught with danger.

Thanks for taking the time to research this issue. Touching on some comments about the use of statistics and "my statistician vs. your statistician" a long-time argument I've been making is that the problem we face when it comes to the spread of misinformation and propaganda is that on the side of the "corporate state" or oligarchy, "they" are extremely organized, focused, and committed to the spread of pro-establishment propaganda; and they have vast resources to spread it around, 24/7.

When it comes to propaganda, what the corporate state does has a name: Agnotology. "Agnotology is the study of wilful acts to spread confusion and deceit..." It is a term coined by Stanford University science historian Robert Proctor.

IMHO, the issue is no much the need to get truthful information into the hand of "the right people," although I acknowledge that that is important, the issue is that people of goodwill need to understand that what we are facing is a propaganda war and that the antidote to propaganda is counter-propaganda. That implies the use of propaganda techniques (in a mechanistic manner) in the name of social justice, peace, justice.

Having had this conversation with activists for many years now I fully understand that many find this idea of engaging in counter-propaganda distasteful. But I think it is something that deserves to be discussed, considered, and thought about.

Concerning one comment in the post, if Sanders voters did not like to be exit polled, they would be under represented in election polls and exit polls would give a lower Bernie vote than the official, allegedly counted, vote. The bias that would lead to the observed results (% of Bernie voters higher in the exit polls than in the official, allegedly counted, vote) would be if Clinton supporters avoided exit polls or Bernie voters actively sought them out.

I remember after the 2000 election some stats people looked electronic based voting machines and came to the conclusion that they were rigged and even reducing voter counts for Dems in heavily Democratic party areas. I remember no matter what they said and how loud they said it, or others who supported them, the issue was ignored, and strangely from what I can tell, ignored by Democrats. Maybe Dem leadership had some vested interest in not reforming, or maybe they were blinded by conveniently blaming Nader, and overlooked the cheating that was going on. I had the impression that in post 2008 election, suddenly the Dems woke up to all the shenanigans the republicans had put in place since 2000.

But Dems cheating Dems should come as no surprise. This is what created and maintained machine-dominated cities. In these areas, the primaries will determine the winner and all the money and graft that goes along with it--you betcha there was cheating. The stakes were high and certainly when you think about it, billions and billions and billions were riding on a Clinton victory. Imagine if Bernie appointed hard nosed regulators and prosecutors, the money that would be lost to the banksters and financial fraudsters. And that would just a start--you would have policy changes that profoundly effects money, big money. For example, no support for private charter schools. How much that alone would mean for money not going into private hands? Or not supporting private prisons.

For Sanders supporters what was at stake was better health, college, better wages, etc. For Clinton what was at stake was the billions feeding the elites and oligarchs from government corporate welfare. When Bernie's campaign took off, we could see in the press literally the Dem establishment thinking out loud how to stop Bernie if the first barriers didn't work--like giving the nomination to Biden somehow. Of course cheating happened. And of course, Bernie was going to lose no matter what--as much as we hoped otherwise. At least for right now.

In the end you are probably right--it doesn't serve the interests of either Dems or gopers to fix voting. Without the fixing, etc, Bernie would have beaten Hillary.

Convinced me.
Only counted actual registered Dems. No Indies or late registrants trying to vote when they shouldn't/couldn't.

And the machine vote versus the hand count results show $$Hillary gained with the machine counts while Bernie lost with the machine counts.
I suspect that it's not the machines that caused that, but DNC operatives purging Bernie supporters and forcing them to use other voting methods, if they were allowed/bothered to vote at all, after being told they 'weren't on the list'.

I've been of the same mind for a few years, but this primary robbery has been the final straw for me. The corporate media are nothing more than fascist propaganda organs. They have been colonizing the internet with alarming speed, and consistently work to tighten the grip of the corporations.

Unfortunately, anything discussed about how to fight them will be spied upon, and they will know about anything we plan in advance. I cringe every time I hear anyone to Left of center talking about spreading things over social media. All the popular, "free" social media are designed to harvest information from the get-go. So we must learn to conceal our planning as well as the corporations do. The enormous information disparity between these giant corporations and ourselves keeps us from effective counter-propaganda, all too often. We can never surprise any of the major actors.

The other thing that stops us is ineffective rhetoric. The MSM machines are way ahead of us on that. Generalizing here; we on the Left concern ourselves with logic and scientific reality, and they experience no such restraints. They are in the business of manufacturing reality to suit their sponsors. To some extent, this has always been true. Witness the "yellow press" that lead us into the Spanish-American War. Now that they have raised the warship "Maine", they have found that it exploded due to being an antique POS, with insufficient flash-tighting to prevent a coal-gas explosion, and NOT because of "Spanish saboteurs". The press of that time, however, took that sabotage story and ran with it, and presto! War.

I am not a scientist, but was raised with the goal of making me one. I went through public schools back when they actually taught science, and it was generally respected. I still respect it, as being the single greatest driver ever towards improving the human condition, and for ascertaining the true nature of reality. That being said, most people could give a shit. Most people form opinions first, and then cast about for facts OR lies which support their opinions. We tend to lead with facts, and assume that people will draw the obvious correlations. This is why the MSM keep kicking our asses up between our shoulder-blades. They begin by trying to form our opinions FOR us, and then parcel out carefully chosen facts to support those opinions.

That is not the way I prefer to work, but if we don't start learning, they win. So, yes I agree that we need a plan, but we also need to learn enough about computer security that whatever we plan is not an open book to TPTB. May I suggest starting up an "encrypted pen-pals" group? I have been thinking for a while that this is overdue. Encryption is not particularly user-friendly, but if others can figure it out, so should we be able to. Like any other activity, actually doing it should improve our abilities. -And speaking of counter-propaganda, it would effectively start fighting the common view that "They spy on everything we do, and we can't stop it." Empowering people to protect their right to privacy would be a useful first exercise to a greater goal of counter-propaganda.

OTOH, Having every single discussion and planning session happen in the public commons while "Blind Pew" sits in the corner and siphons it all up, is self-defeating, to say the least. I know a few things I could share about securing ourselves, and we could learn as we go, I expect. I know at least a few other regular posters that have expressed interest in this in the past; maybe they would be up for this, as well.

Any thoughts on this? R.S.V.P.