This is a bit of a wall of text, so bear with me.
The data we all have about the election comes from Edison: https://static01.nyt.com/elections-assets/2020/data/api/2020-11-03/race-page/pennsylvania/president.json but that data is very difficult to parse.
For one, votes are presented in a weird format. We are only given the total votes, and then Trump and Biden are given a three significant digits representation of their share (I assume this was done in order to drive news graphics?). But, moreover, the data is frustratingly vague. Candidates will lose votes by the hundreds of thousands.
So my big question is: What is the explanation for this opaque presentation of the data? Have we ever gotten one? Can someone point me to it?
I mention it because if I were going to cheat, this Edison data is exactly how I'd do it: Give Trump 100k imaginary votes by hiding them in the numbers, Give Biden 300k extra votes, take away 100k from Trump, take 200k away from Biden. If anyone complains, well, what's the big deal, Biden "lost" more votes than Trump.
I also mention it because throwing out a state is a very high bar to clear, even with a friendly Supreme Court. You'd need some very serious proof of wrongdoing, and even so. On the other hand, if you can prove that the big ballot dump (and just that big ballot dump) was fraudulent, you can slice that out (you don't even need to go find the ballots or anything), you just subtract it from the totals.
Check out: https://results.philadelphiavotes.com/ResultsSW.aspx?type=FED&map=CTY there's no precinct anywhere in PA that is 99:1 Biden to Trump. Anywhere you get a vote dump that's 99% Biden, if it is legitimate, it must be some combination of parts of votes from different precincts. (I say "if it is legitimate" because it is possible that this is some garden variety governmental incompetence where they separated the votes out and then added them back in. This, I'd assume is also illegal).
So, this rests on how the Edison data is to be read. Do dumps represent finished precincts/vote-types? For example, Division 09-07 in-person votes get tallied and sent up to central command along with some other divisions? Or, do they represent all of a precinct? Or, do they just represent some arbitrary subsection of a precinct? In the case of the massive Biden dump, somehow, an amalgamation of subsections of many precincts which do not at all resemble like the actual precincts they came from.
Well the documents show that these voting machines support rank choice aka "weighted" voting and thats why these fractional format. The question really should be "why did you certify a voting system that can change the weightages for each candidate?"
But I would go further and suggest that even with the official explanation of weighted voting feature, you still do not need this format. You can simply store integral votes for each candidate for each batch, and store a global parameter with their weightage (or a local parameter for each batch with its weightage). This way it would be transparent whether the weightage is being used or not.\
The ONLY explanation of this format is obsfuscation of vote manipulation and especially vote reduction since it wont show up as negative numbers.
BTW one of the points in Kraken Lawsuit has to do with why in each batch the votes for each candidate is fractional.
I can see the reason why Edison serves data this way is because that's the kind of data you want in order to display an interactive election map, like CNN and NYT do. It's not clear that the we see there is all of the data, and that there isn't a better source out there where each candidate's vote total is an ordinal number.
I disagree.
Do the Edison timeseries reported by NYT make sense? Here is a link that includes all states.
https://static01.nyt.com/elections-assets/2020/data/api/2020-11-03/national-map-page/national/president.json
It appears every single state was reporting zero votes between midnight and 4 a.m. central standard time November 4th (?) - in many instances, at the very same moment in time.
I believe these timestamps are GMT/UTC, which is 6 hours ahead of central standard time.
Louisiana 2020-11-04T05:58:59Z Virginia 2020-11-04T06:01:19Z Delaware 2020-11-04T06:22:59Z Florida 2020-11-04T06:43:00Z Rhode Island 2020-11-04T07:01:20Z Oklahoma 2020-11-04T07:02:20Z Vermont 2020-11-04T07:41:41Z Wyoming 2020-11-04T08:04:01Z North Carolina 2020-11-04T08:04:21Z North Dakota 2020-11-04T08:04:21Z Ohio 2020-11-04T08:04:21Z Iowa 2020-11-04T08:04:41Z Nevada 2020-11-04T08:04:41Z Kentucky 2020-11-04T08:06:01Z Arkansas 2020-11-04T08:38:22Z South Carolina 2020-11-04T08:39:42Z Maryland 2020-11-04T09:00:43Z Mississippi 2020-11-04T09:00:43Z Missouri 2020-11-04T09:00:43Z New Mexico 2020-11-04T09:01:03Z New Jersey 2020-11-04T09:01:23Z New Hampshire 2020-11-04T09:15:43Z Georgia 2020-11-04T09:23:03Z Pennsylvania 2020-11-04T09:25:23Z Illinois 2020-11-04T09:51:24Z Minnesota 2020-11-04T09:55:44Z New York 2020-11-04T09:57:24Z Idaho 2020-11-04T09:59:24Z Utah 2020-11-04T09:59:44Z Massachusetts 2020-11-04T10:00:04Z Michigan 2020-11-04T10:00:04Z Tennessee 2020-11-04T10:00:04Z Texas 2020-11-04T10:00:04Z Indiana 2020-11-04T10:01:04Z Oregon 2020-11-04T10:01:24Z Alaska 2020-11-04T10:01:44Z California 2020-11-04T10:01:44Z Colorado 2020-11-04T10:01:44Z District of Columbia 2020-11-04T10:01:44Z Hawaii 2020-11-04T10:01:44Z Kansas 2020-11-04T10:01:44Z West Virginia 2020-11-04T10:01:44Z Arizona 2020-11-04T10:02:04Z Montana 2020-11-04T10:02:04Z South Dakota 2020-11-04T10:02:04Z Wisconson 2020-11-04T10:02:04Z Connecticut 2020-11-04T10:02:24Z Maine 2020-11-04T10:02:24Z Nebraska 2020-11-04T10:02:24Z Washington 2020-11-04T10:02:24Z Alabama 2020-11-04T10:02:44Z
I agree, there's lots of questions about it and no one to explain it. Do we have a better source? The results.philadelphiavotes.com that I randomly found seems better, but it's not a timeseries, and there's no good way to scrape it.