If crowds of Massachusetts residents came into New Hampshire on Election Day as part of widespread voter fraud – a claim made by President Donald Trump’s administration and others – they managed to do so without creating any spikes in voter turnout and without creating any unusual changes in town-by-town support for Kelly Ayotte. That’s the conclusion of a study from a trio of Dartmouth researchers, whose work follows their previous studies that failed to find evidence of any voter fraud during the 2016 presidential election in six states. “Because of these results and a total lack of photographic evidence of buses infiltrating New Hampshire on Election Day 2016, we believe that Trump’s claims about a tainted election in New Hampshire are at best unsupported and at worst an intentional mistruth,” says the report from two professors and a postdoctoral fellow.
President Trump has said more than once that “thousands” of Massachusetts voters were bused into New Hampshire on Nov. 8 to vote illegally, costing him the state and also contributing to former governor Maggie Hassan’s very tight win over incumbent Kelly Ayotte for a U.S. Senate seat. Trump most recently made the claim to a group of senators Feb. 9.
David Cottrell, a postdoctoral fellow in the Program in Quantitative Social Science at Dartmouth and one of three authors of the just-released study, noted that analyzing such a claim is difficult because of its lack of specificity.
“The fraud hypotheses are often very vague and ambiguous. Determining exactly what people mean is difficult, and there are always different theories that come out later. It could go endlessly – that’s kind of the nature of these theories,” he said.
To analyze the claim, the group chose some effects that it thought would be visible if large numbers of voters were crossing over from Massachusetts, and looked at electoral data.
Full Article: Dartmouth researchers find no evidence of bused-in voters.