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Google Surfaces Fake News About Election Results (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Last week, Facebook faced criticism that the platform's habit for surfacing fake news contributed to the election of Donald Trump -- a claim Mark Zuckerberg denied. This week, Google faces a similar problem, as its search algorithm surfaces fake election results. As Mediaite's Dan Abrams first reported, when you search "final election numbers" or "final vote count 2016," the first result in Google's "in the news" box is from a scrappy-looking Wordpress blog called 70 News that appears to be run by one person. The article, posted on November 12th, features the headline "FINAL ELECTION 2016 NUMBERS: TRUMP WON BOTH POPULAR ( 62.9 M -62.2 M ) AND ELECTORAL COLLEGE VOTES ( 306-232)HEY CHANGE.ORG, SCRAP YOUR LOONY PETITION NOW!" First, the numbers in this post are inaccurate. Though millions of votes have yet to be counted, but Clinton has already been shown to be leading the popular vote by a sizable margin. Current counts have her ahead by around 668,000 total votes, with some polling experts projecting Clinton will ultimately rack up a 2 million-vote lead. Second, the writer of the 70 News post claims that the source material for the article is "Twitter posts," specifically, this tweet from a user named Michael. Michael, on the other hand, is sourcing an article from the ultra-conservative tabloid USA Supreme, which argues that Clinton might win the number of votes "counted" but will not win the number of votes "cast" because of ignored Republican absentee ballots. (Michael also believes that Trump has been singled out by God to be president of the United States, a conspiracy theory popular with 4chan users who believe that Pepe the Frog is a reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian deity.) And yet Michael -- by way of 70 News, by way of Google -- has become the sole source for a story squatting at the top of Google's search results. 70 News has since updated its post with a single line admitting that CNN is showing different numbers -- the headline and the body of the post remains the same.
...with some polling experts projecting...
Honestly, after this election, I'm surprised anyone takes that phrase seriously.
And what of the people living in Rural NY State? Won't they be lumped together with the people in NYC? This is a bogus argument.
Shouldn't news websites require digitally signed press credentials of some sort?
Then the news search engines could simply *ignore* any noncredentialled publishers--or at least classify them correctly as opinion sites.
You mean the NYT that wrote anti-Hillary stories and praised Trump without fact checking?
The absentee ballots may not be counted right away if they can't possibly affect the election results. However, the final certified totals do include all absentee ballots. See http://help.vote.org/article/8...
Why does it matter - that's just a pissing contest. The actual election is held in the Electoral College, which has built-in checks and balances.
States get 1 Elector for each Representative. That number is directly related to the state's population and the number of associated Electors will very closely match the popular vote. Each state also gets 1 Elector per Senator. That number is equal for all states.
Consequently, the result of the Electoral College vote is a balance between the popular vote, and the number of states which a candidate's Electors won.
Those claiming it's somehow unfair for the winner of the popular vote to not be the winner in the Electoral College are either ignorant, or ignoring that the system is working exactly as intended. It's not a fluke, or a rounding error, or a problem with how votes are counted. It's by design. By the same design which created a House of Representatives with directly reflects the population, and a Senate which represents States. It's checks and balances, to prevent populous states from overwhelming the less populous ones. It's a Federal government because the US is a federation of states, not a direct democracy.
You want to change to a direct vote for President? To be consistent, you'd better be pushing to get rid of the Senate, too, where the imbalance between population and power is even more pronounced.
Your candidate got 1% more of the popular vote? Well, the other candidate won in 50% more of the states.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Or, they are correctly noting that the Electoral College system is unfair. Just because something is "working exactly as intended" doesn't make it fair.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
But it doesn't really work that way, and if you applied even an iota of critical thinking, you'd realize why it can't.
Did you vote on Tuesday? Did your ballot really only have a single multiple choice item for President of the United States? Because mine didn't. My had president, senator, representative, state senator, state representative, city council member, state supreme court justice (multiple), municipal court justice (multiple), family court justice (one or two), and multiple local millages.
My wife's absentee ballot, being that she lives with me and all, was identical. Which means that whether Trump defeated HRC by several hundred thousand votes or a few hundred, there were many other races where her vote was relevant to the outcome, and the presidential election was not the end-all-be-all of whether all those little bubbles would be scanned by the county's equipment.
Your inability to find governmental information concerning this myth is as ridiculous as this Michael nonsense.
"The media often will report the projected outcome of the election before all of the ballots are counted. In a close election, the media may report that the outcome cannot be announced until after the absentee ballots are counted. However, all ballots, including absentee ballots, are counted in the final totals for every election - and every vote (absentee or in-person) counts the same."
The ability to project a winner in a top-of-ballot race does not eliminate the need to count absentee ballots in all other races.
Tell you what, why don't you actually telephone your county board of elections as ask them yourself rather than settling for discrediting the messenger only when it suits you.
It's a bit more complex than you think, and partially untrue.
Take Oregon for example when it comes to federal Presidential/Senate elections: Every rural county in the state could have its population vote 100% for Kodos, but if Portland, Salem, and Bend vote 100% for Kang, then Kang wins, period. (Now the reality is that something like 60% of the rural counties go for Kodos, and 60% of the urban ones vote Kang... and Kang still wins because of aggregate population. The population differential really is that lopsided.) This also goes for state-wide offices such as Governor, Secretary of State, Attorney General, etc.
Now Congressional House elections and state legislature/senate elections are a different story, where your assertion would hold a bit more truth to it.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
The fake news site? The New York Times...
If you followed the live chat for NYT, they were very conservative about calling out states and waited for confirmation from multiple sources. Politico updated at a quicker pace. I was switching back and forth between the two.
From the summary:
which argues that Clinton might win the number of votes "counted" but will not win the number of votes "cast" because of ignored Republican absentee ballots.
Did you actually look at the website where this came from? It doesn't exactly project an aura of credibility.
If it really works that way (and I could not find information to prove or disprove that theory), they might have a point.
Yes indeed, he (Michael) might. But until some more credible source reports on this story, I'm quite comfortable with ignoring it.
And suspicion is reinforced by their (The Verge) obvious attempt to discredit the messenger by noting (Michael also believes that Trump has been singled out by God to be president of the United States). And that attempt to ridicule is totally unnecessary.
That's not The Verge. That's Michael's own tweet, per TFS. Michael is discrediting himself. The Verge is just reporting what he has done.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Just because something is "working exactly as intended" doesn't make it fair.
Furthermore, there's no evidence that the system is "working exactly as intended." I've pointed this out numerous times in the last week, but the Electoral College basically NEVER worked as intended by the Founders. They created this system to deal with a collection of 13 individual states and no major political parties. The Electoral College was created because the assumption was that most voters would vote for a candidate from their home state, leading to a slate of a bunch of random candidates, no one with more than 10-20% of the vote. Aside from any qualms some of the Founders may have had about direct democratic votes in general, getting only 10-20% of the vote would not have resulted in an adequate "mandate" to govern.
Hence the Electoral College, where electors were required to vote for two people, one of whom had to be NOT from their home state. The idea being that the "native son" from the home state would get one vote, and the other would be for someone with regional consensus. The top 5 such candidates would float to the top, and Congress would make the final selection.
Within 12 years, that system failed due to the emergence of political parties, since that system didn't differentiate vote for President or VP (the most votes just became President, and the runner-up became VP). Hence the 12th amendment, which separated the votes for VP.
And yet still the Electoral College did not function as originally imaged by the Founders, since they imagined a group of educated folks with essentially free choice to elect the best person in their own view. Instead, more and more states started moving toward a "general ticket" structure where you'd just have a slate of partisan Electors who were designated to vote for their party candidate. By the 1830s, that was pretty much the norm everywhere.
So no, the system is NOT working as intended, and never really has. It was an idealistic and abstract system constructed before anyone had a clue what the electoral landscape of the new nation would look like -- and it basically became irrelevant (and redundant) the moment political parties emerged.
'...with some polling experts projecting Clinton will ultimately rack up a 2 million-vote lead.' Are these the same polling experts that predicted that Clinton would comfortably win the election? No matter what the final tally will be, the popular vote winner will probably win by less than 1%. Not exactly a 'sizable lead' in my book. The EC vote tally however, gave a sizable lead to the election victor.
Your link is run by Alex Jones, an alt-right radio host and conspiracy theorist. Per the wikipedia article:
Jones has been the center of many controversies, including his statements about gun control in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. He has accused the U.S. government of being involved in the Oklahoma City bombing, the September 11 attacks and the filming of fake Moon landings to hide NASA's secret technology. He says that government and big business have colluded to create a New World Order through "manufactured economic crises, sophisticated surveillance tech and--above all--inside-job terror attacks that fuel exploitable hysteria".
Forgive me if I don't take him too seriously.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Can we please move on already?
Why do we need to keep rehashing this? Trump won. I voted for Hillary and she didn't win. BFD, it happens. Move on....
Let's give the guy a chance instead of getting all worked up over it. Maybe he will be the best POTUS ever (doubt it, but you just never know).
At the very least, we have no more excuses for not getting stuff done. It is all under republican control now so there should be no more gridlock, we can actually see a government in action for once. Bring it republicans, show us what you got. Fix all the problems! No more excuses!
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Back in the day, the US was more of a federation of states rather than a single nation. Quite like the EU is now. Each state was a quasi-nation of its own, and the federal government was intended to just sort of administrate that federation. So, the president was voted on by the states, not by the people, because he had basically nothing to do with the wants and needs of the people. He was just a designated treaty signer and funeral-goer. Just as with the congress and senate, the quantity of electors was designed as a compromise between the large powerful states and the smaller states. It was kind of a brilliant compromise, for the time.
Now, however, as a cohesive nation with nationwide media and national parties, the EC does nothing but cloud the election. Frankly, we are kind of past the idea of even having borders. We would much rather our opinions are represented in government rather than our geographic area.
Why is the run-off in a different format? Presumably, they didn't think it would happen very often, and if it did, allocating votes to Congress the same way they did to the EC would result in the same result. One vote per state would hopefully assure a clear winner.
Believe it or not, fake news can be filtered out... if the majority of reports are correct or if the report is from a trustworthy source. You have to make associations with initial results and compare all the overlapping associations overlap. The more times a site is correct, the more weight you give to it's reporting and vice-versa. Basically, you have to make IBM's Watson.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
If the Electoral College went away, I'd have to actually vote for a major party candidate when I dislike both. Here in Illinois the Democrats always take the Presidential vote. So, my protest vote would be a throwaway if direct election of the President occurred.
All votes are counted, absentee or not. Previous posters provided these useful links:
http://help.vote.org/article/8...
https://www.fvap.gov/vao/vag/a...
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
You do realize that "surfaces" here is a verb (granted, an awkwardly used verb)?.
Claiming something is unfair with no argument as to why, while ignoring how and why the system was designed to be fair is ignorant.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Of course they get counted. What state has laws that allow discarding some votes? They have to be counted before certifying the results. They are not necessarily counted before the news sites predict a winner, but that's a different matter.
This is why a lot of too-close-to-call elections take a few weeks or longer before the result is knows, in some cases the declared winner is not the certified winner.
This is an important point where so many "my vote doesn't count" people forget: the presidential election is just one small part of the larger election cycle. There many more things to vote on, things that have a more direct effect on the voter than the election of a president. Senators, congress, state congress, school boards, judges, propositions, county measures, dog catchers, etc. And yet people still don't bother to vote - we had maybe only half of the eligible voters actually bothering to vote, meaning that Trump really only got 1/4 of the electorate, and Hillary really only got 1/4 of the electorate(and much much less if you only count voters who voted for someone as opposed to voting against someone).
Then of course, *after* the election we have the inevitable protests (don't laugh trump supporters, if trump had lost I guarantee there would have been protests against Hillary). I heard one high school protester saying that she needed to feel like she was doing something about the elections. But the election is over, duh, maybe she should have done someting before it was too late? No point in getting all worked up today about it, all that energy will be gone by the time the next election rolls around in two years (which these idiots will ignore because it's not a presidential election), and in four years they'll bit sitting back and apathetic again.
While saying Trump won the popular vote appears to be fale, you can hardly call a 668,000 vote lead "sizable" when the total turn out was somewhere around 130 million. She barely edged him out.
Pointing out something is unfair is "ignorant"?
Is the World Series unfair? The pennant goes to the team that wins the most games, not to the team the scores the most total runs.
The Electoral College was designed to encourage candidates to appeal to the entire nation, rather than just running up the score in their geographic base.
I visited a lot of election results sites during the night of the election. The New York Times site was by far the best one.
They didn't project results based on exit polls. They projected it based on tallied votes. As each precinct reported its vote tally, it was added to that county's vote count. That was extrapolated to the number of precincts in the county to estimate how the entire county would vote. And the same was done for every county in the state to project how the state would vote. Statistical uncertainties were also calculated, and they had a nifty little confidence graph projecting which candidate was projected to win, how likely they were given the number of uncounted ballots, and what their estimated margin of victory was going to be.
This was a brilliant way to use computers to quickly crunch the overwhelming amount of election results data into a simple human-readable format. It takes all the guesswork out of it - CNN had pundits eyeballing which counties still waiting for precinct returns, and trying to predict the state's outcome based on just those few counties. They thought Pennsylvania might flip to Clinton because the urban areas around Philadelphia still had a large number of precincts not yet reported. But the NYT site showed that there were lots of rural counties which were breaking heavily for Trump yet to be counted. Each county on its own wasn't big enough in population to catch CNN's attention. But the NYT site showed that in total they would easily swamp out the uncounted urban vote, and Pennsylvania would remain Trump's.
With this system, any mis-predictions are simply sampling flukes - precincts with higher-than-average votes for Clinton or Trump just happened to report first. If the NYT continues this format, I will definitely be visiting their site in future elections.
Incidentally, even when 100% of precincts have reported their votes, the state cannot be called if the tally is close enough. There are still absentee ballots outstanding. Those have to be opened up and counted, and could conceivably flip a close election. That's why Michigan is still listed (at the time I'm writing this) as 92% likely to be won by Trump even though 100% of precincts have reported. Trump leads by 13,000 votes, and there are enough absentee ballots still waiting to be counted that statistically there's an 8% chance that they could flip the state to Clinton. Most live news stations don't bother accounting for absentee ballots because it just complicates things and rarely flips a state.
Coronated is a perfectly cromulent word.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
But did Netcraft confirm it?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Google Surfaces Fake News About Election Results
Google does what?
Maybe they were using Google as a verb.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> if trump had lost I guarantee there would have been protests against Hillary
You mean like all of the protests and rioting that occurred when Obama was elected? Oh wait.... that never happened. Why would you assume that trump supporters are as whiny and childish as Hillary supporters when that never happened for Obama? Oh sure, there were a handful of morons trying to claim he wasn't edible to be president because of the nationality of his father but that was nothing compared to what's going on right now. To make it even more idiotic is that they're destroying the cities that actually voted for Hillary. That'll show all those trump supporters!
You, labelling voters "stupid", immediately revealed your political leaning in this election.
Have you ever stopped to listen to how people talked about politics? I've known a lot of stupid people who can recite Fox News talking points by heart. If I try to correct them, they get very angry. As the bible says: "The person who loves correction loves knowledge, but anyone who hates a rebuke is stupid." (Proverbs 12:1)