Comment by spzx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spzx | Hacker News Reader

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>CulturalHusbandry @APhilosophae

>The following information is provided via an anonymous data scientist and another anonymous individual who wrote a script to scrape the national ballot counting time series data of off the @nytimes website.

>This is based on their proprietary "Edison" data source which would ordinarily be impossible to access for people outside the press.

https://twitter.com/APhilosophae/status/1325592112428163072

Why should we trust these anonymous people (including twitter thread OP)? They could just tamper with the data and we would have no way to know that.

Take into account the pinned thread by @APhilosophae too, they are not impartial at all:

https://twitter.com/APhilosophae/status/1325135291791839232

Well that's why I ported and ran the python script, and put it on GitHub, so you could re-scrape the NYT data too, it will just overwrite what's in the repo. I'm not vouching for any of the corresponding analysis, but the data seems real: https://github.com/guscost/nyt-election-2020-analysis

Ah I misunderstood, I thought one can't repeat the scraping part. But what did they mean by "proprietary "Edison" data source which would ordinarily be impossible to access for people outside the press" then?

Obviously, the bigger problem with trusting this Twitter rando is that they don't know how mail-in ballots are county, came up with weird broken premises, and then accused Wisconsin, Georgia, and Pennsylvania of perpetrating a gigantic fraud.

From my understanding most of the press data sources are just companies that wrote code to scrape the multiple state sources of data and/or interface with archaic fax systems that sent counts from counting centers to central locations. I believe in some cases they had observers who took totals off the counting machines themselves.

I believe the primary reason for them is that they got the data faster than the official websites.

Thanks, now I understood that "this is based on ..." means "this script is based on ..." and I initially parsed that as "this information is based on ...".

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