Back in January, One America “News” (OAN) interviewed “expert mathematician” Edward Solomon, who claimed he had mathematical proof that the election had been stolen from Trump.
You can use the binomial probability formula, and the chance of that event happening is one over ten to an exponent so large there’s not enough stars in the universe—there’s not enough atoms in the universe to explain the number. It can’t happen naturally.
I don’t claim to be an “expert mathematician,” so, for what it’s worth, it sounds to me like Solomon’s saying something that is technically true but is actually irrelevant to the topic at hand. It would be like me taking the last slice of pizza and then claim that the geometry of subatomic particles proves that I didn’t.
There is nothing in mathematics that forbids either candidate in an election getting more votes than the other candidate. It’s simple arithmetic. To talk about probabilities, the binomial theorem or any other mathematical concept is to confuse the issue.
To be abundantly clear, Donald Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 and 2020, and fortunately also the Electoral College in 2020. The Trump got more than 74 million votes, which is still horrifying, of course.
But then-President-elect Joe Biden got more than 81 million votes, corresponding to 306 votes in the Electoral College (36 more than the 270 out of 538 needed to win). And that’s why Joe Biden became President-elect Joe Biden in November and President Joe Biden in January.
And yeah, there’s been election fraud, but in every instance it was committed by a Republican, which means that Trump lost by an even greater margin than initially reported. You don’t need to look up any math jargon to understand that.
Edward Solomon sure looks the part of an expert mathematician. As Stephen Colbert noted last night, Solomon wears glasses, which naturally leads people to assume he’s a smart guy. Plus he wears his shirt buttoned all the way up but without a necktie, just like real professional mathematicians.
Okay, I’m being a little unfair to the guy. In the quote earlier, Solomon was referring to the probability that several precincts would show the same vote total shares at different times. That’s gotta be a huge coincidence that can’t be explained away as a random occurrence.
Oh my God, he’s on to us! Angelo Fischera and Saranac Hale Spencer for FactCheck.org:
“That several precincts would show exactly the same vote shares at different times is not at all surprising,” said Philip Stark, associate dean of the division of mathematical and physical sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. Stark also serves on the U.S. Election Assistance Commission Board of Advisors.
Noting that it was hard to fully assess Solomon’s claims because the origins of the data aren’t clear, Stark said in an email that precincts showing the same vote shares would be even more expected by incorporating multiple snapshots of time (as Solomon does). How polarized or close to evenly split an area is could also affect the chances of that occurring, he said.
The fact checkers were also unable to determine where Solomon obtained the data he showed on OAN, by the way.
For instance, Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, leans Democratic and in the OAN video Solomon cited a number of precincts that skew heavily Democratic. In our review of those precincts’ final election results, the 2020 vote shares were not markedly different from those in the 2016 presidential election. While the split was similar, Trump actually fared a little better in 2020 in many of those precincts.
In precinct 10J, for example, Hillary Clinton earned about 96% of the total vote in 2016 compared to Trump’s 3%. In 2020, President Joe Biden received 94% of the vote in that precinct while Trump received 5%.
Huh. Maybe that election was also rigged. Though I don’t recall Trump complaining about that result.
“It seems like [Solomon] may have sifted through the early Fulton County data … and picked out entries that have the proportion ‘pattern’ [he] dreamed up, using teensy numbers that are utterly inconsequential,” Charleen Adams, a research fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who has written about the misleading use of statistics in election fraud claims, told us by email.
There are other problems with the claim, too.
Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s voting systems manager, said in a phone interview that Solomon’s claim “shows a basic misunderstanding of how vote counts work.”
I’m starting to think Solomon might not be an actual “expert” mathematician...
Ryan Macias, former acting director of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s Voting System Testing and Certification Program, also pointed out in a phone interview that Georgia’s audit — which included a hand tally of the paper ballots — and recount further disprove the claim that an algorithm was used to steal the election for Biden. The counts ultimately confirmed the originally reported election outcome.
“That is the verification that the system is correct,” Macias said.
Stark and other credentialed experts do have concerns about election security.
However, those concerns are not unique to the 2020 election, he said, and they are not the same as baseless claims that algorithms were used to commit massive, wide-scale fraud.
So what are Solomon’s credentials? Well, he did take university math classes and was a declared math major at Stony Brook University. But he didn’t graduate. But some of our greatest mathematicians have no degrees.
Maybe Solomon really is a math genius but didn’t graduate because he was too busy working in a job that required advanced mathematical knowledge? Nope. Solomon was a drug dealer and now he’s a swing set installer. Neither job requires any deeper mathematics than basic arithmetic and basic geometry.
Anyone can be a mathematician. But not everyone can be a credentialed expert or a professional in the field. And not everyone can be a con man who strings along mathematical jargon to fool idiots. Edward Solomon is clearly not one of the former but one of the latter.
And also consider that Solomon is a white guy, with all the advantages and privileges that come with that. And even with those advantages and privileges, he failed to get any college degree and was convicted of drug possession with intent to distribute.
The good folks at Dominion Voting Systems are quite understandably annoyed by all this, and have sued Solomon among several other perpetrators of fraud. And I just heard that pillowmonger Mike Lindell fled his own “symposium” after getting some upsetting news about the Dominion lawsuit.
Looks like President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris can safely delete those resignation letters they’ve been working on.