Table of Contents
In a "guest essay" on April 16, 2024 discussing the election, this illustration appeared
What I said below is wrong and NYT is right. The 2020 census was not used for the 2020 election. (Who knew? Not me, but I should have.)
It shorts Pennsylvania one electoral vote—it has 20, not 19 and swaps Michigan and North Carolina. So, instead of 93 votes up for grabs, there are 94. There's no way to tell if this is only an illustration error or if it also underlies the accompanying analysis. Because lack of transparency. And because NYT.com doesn't operate with the same journalistic rigor that The New York Times newspaper was once known for. We would have expected the correction for the record the following morning.
There were 311,257 votes more cast for President Biden in six of swing states he won in the 2020 election than 74,483 more votes won by former President Trump in North Carolina. In Michigan, Biden's margin was 154,188 votes, twice Trump's margin in North Carolina. Assuming that the candidates begin with the same states except for the seven swing states, the combination of which states they win determines the outcome. This shows up most starkly in the 269-269 Electoral College tie scenario. With the correct number of electoral votes there are five scenarios:
- NV, MI, NC and PA
- NV, NC, PA and GA
- MI, WI, NC and GA
- MI, WI, AZ and PA
- WI, AZ, PA and GA
With the three errors, the only cases that survive are
- NV, NC, PA and GA
- MI, WI, NC and GA
where the errors are offsetting.
Although 56 states and electoral districts and the 128 different ways in which the swing state votes can be combined is a handful, it is just arithmetic. The Gray Lady in print in days past would never have let this go to press without checking the numbers. I doubt that anyone is still working at the Times remembers when a bored copy editor inserted a fictive reference to a "Lady Brett Ashley Cup" into the sports statistics page, set in agate type. He was immediately fired. If the online edition no longer aspires to that degree of rigor any longer, we are all the poorer.
