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On 8 June 2016, the Facebook page The Bern Report shared a document authored by researchers Axel Geijsel of Tilburg University in The Netherlands and Rodolfo Cortes Barragan of Stanford University suggesting that the outcomes of the 2016 Democratic Party nomination contest [are not] completely legitimate: In an appendix, Geijsel and Barragan stated that their research was still in progress and had not yet been subject to peer review, but since the information was highly topical they believed it better to pre-release their findings due to the ongoing primary ballot count in California (among other factors): The post-introduction portion of the paper began with a comparison of outcomes in primary states with paper trails and without paper trails, holding that potentially inaccurate results led the researchers to restrict [our] analysis to a proxy: the percentage of delegates won by Secretary Clinton and Senator Sanders. After identifying via the Ballotpedia web site 18 states that use a form of paper verification for votes compared to 13 states without such a paper trail, they concluded that states without paper trails demonstrated a higher rate of support for Hillary Clinton: The information included in the Appendix didn't explicate exactly what those alternative explanations might be: In the paper's second portion, the researchers examined discrepancies between exit polls and final results by state, a subject of debate (hashtagged #ExitPollGate on social media) that antedated the publication of their paper and was addressed in a Nation article disputing the claim that exit polls revealed fraud. The Nation's analysis held that fraud detection exit polling varied significantly from the type of exit polling typically carried out in the United States: As well, standard exit polling conducted in the U.S. can be very inaccurate and systematically biased for a number of reasons, including: As the New York Times put it, [N]o one who studies the exit polls believes that they can be used as an indicator of fraud in the way the conspiracy theorists do. Nonetheless, Geijsel and Barragan contended in their paper that: The expert whose numbers were utilized for the paper wasn't expressly cited by name, but his moniker appeared on the linked spreadsheet: Richard Charnin. Charnin indeed lists some impressive statistical credentials on his personal blog, but he also appears to expend much of his focus on conspiracy theories related to the JFK assassination (which raises the question of whether his math skills outstrip his ability to apply skeptical reasoning to data). Geijsel addressed questions about exit poll numbers in a subsequent e-mail to a blogger who was highly skeptical of his research: That blogger passed the anlysis on to his father (a retired Professor Emeritus in Mathematics and Applied Statistics at the University of Northern Colorado), Donald T. Searls, Ph.D., for comment: Although Geijsel cited a number of sources to substantiate the claim that fraud was well-documented in the 2016 primary season, most of those citations involved persons with an interest in the overall dispute (such as groups party to lawsuits). That factor doesn't necessarily cast doubt on the researchers' findings, but it highlights that not much independent and neutral verification of their conclusions has occurred yet.
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