Republic Doubles Down on Fake Election News

"Why up to 270,000 voters had trouble exercising their fundamental, constitutional right to cast a ballot in one of Arizona’s hottest primary elections in decades."  

-- Laurie Roberts, AZ Republic, citing AZ Republic'a flubbed election flub analysis

Bill Goodykoontz,  Media Maven [Arizona Republic]:

Today (11/3/18) your fine newspaper again featured the fake 270,000 voters affected number in an advertisement for its upcoming election coverage.   Sensational circulation generating claims trump integrity.

Much as I'm a fan of schadenfreude and karma,  your fine newspaper wasn't fair to Adrian Fontes ... and you have yet to confess and ask forgiveness.  Help me understand how this one got past the editors and recycled by Laurie Roberts, who's supposed to be an election maven.   Since it's hard to imagine that the paper is going after Fontes for partisan reasons,  it may just boil down to sensational claims sell newspapers.  

Gilligan

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From: Slante9 J <slante9@msn.com>
Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2018 1:05 PM
To: Ruelas, Richard
Subject: Thanks for asking...

In the precincts affected by the outage

11420 ballots were cast on election day

65693 ballots were cast prior to election day by mail or in person 

We know ahead of time that only about 30% of the registered voters in Maricopa county will vote in a primary.

We know ahead of time that most voters will vote before election day.   In the recent election, the number for the affected precincts 85% of the total vote.

Using the election day turnout rate for the unaffected precincts,  we get a proforma election day vote for the affected precincts of 12140.

The hard ceiling for the number possibly affected by the outage is 13,000.   But we know 11,420 were able to vote and that the affected precincts were closed for only part of the morning.

Using an estimated hourly arrival/voting rate at the affected precincts and the timeline recently provided by the Recorder,  the number of voters affected works out to about 2,500 with the number that might have been entirely deterred at about 600-700,  using the difference between the proforma vote and the actual vote.

Sure it's an educated guess ... an educated guess informed by 50 years of experience -- from here to Aramco and Vietnam -- and four college degrees including econometrics and mathematical economics.

You don't need a degree in econometrics to figure this out, though, but it does help to have a Falcon Northwest heavy duty workstation that loads a big spreadsheet really fast -- the [entire] publicly available precinct detail.   

Thanks again.   This was fun

Gilligan

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From: Ruelas, Richard <richard.ruelas@arizonarepublic.com>
Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2018 12:06 PM
To: Slante9 J
Subject: RE: How can we trust fact checking when ...

Thanks for taking the time to write [Mr. Ruelas].

My job was to simply fact check the governor’s debate.

The things you mention are out of my wheelhouse.

Still…

Your clean energy comments are interesting. But they don’t negate Abe’s opinion, which is his job to express.

I am not aware of the Clean Energy folks saying the initiative would stop global warming. If that does become part of the argument, your information could come in handy.

I’ll pass it along to our actual Fact Check team that looks at claims and ads.

As to the 270,000 number, it appears that number was calculated by counting all registered voters in the precinct.

You are correct that those who had already decided not to vote on that day would not have been affected.

I don’t know of a way of knowing that the figure is.

We also don’t know how many people attempted to vote, were met with delays and decided not to cast a ballot.

To me, reporting the overall potential number of voters affected is a valid number.

I don’t know what your calculations are, but given the unknown quantity of voters who might have voted but not for the problems, that would be an educated estimate. Agreed?

Thanks for reading.

Please continue to keep us on our toes.

Richard Ruelas

Arizona Republic

From: Slante9 J <Slante9@msn.com>
Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2018 10:55 AM
To: Ruelas, Richard <richard.ruelas@arizonarepublic.com>

Subject: How can we trust fact checking when ...

Mr. Ruelas:

How can we trust the Republic's fact checking when you refuse to correct your own mistakes.

The Republic claimed 270,000 voters were affected by Recorder Fontes's election day problems.   Preposterous.   Only 101,000 people voted on election day and even then most of these don't live in the precincts affected by the outages that lasted only a few hours.

My analysis of the problem indicates that only about 2,500 voters would have been affected and that probably only about 600 people might have been deterred from voting at all by the outages.

Gilligan