This is an article about evidence of possible cheating by the Republicans in the special election in Tennessee. I hope it gets investigated to see if it's true, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it.
--Kim
So - here's an interesting update on election interference that you might have missed this week.
You probably heard that Republican Matt Van Epps won Tuesday's special election in Tennessee's 7th congressional district. What you might not have seen is a preliminary statistical analysis that's raising questions about how those votes added up in Montgomery County.
The Election Truth Alliance, a nonprofit organization of statisticians and data scientists that's been analyzing election data since the 2024 presidential race, released a report examining precinct-level results from Montgomery County - the most populous county in the district and typically its bellwether. Their findings describe patterns they say are consistent with known indicators of vote manipulation.
The core of their analysis is simple to describe. When you plot each precinct's turnout against the Republican candidate's vote share, you get a tight correlation. As turnout goes up, Van Epps's percentage of the vote goes up with it. The correlation coefficient is 0.8855 with a p-value approaching zero. For Democrat Aftyn Behn, the pattern flips - her vote share drops as turnout rises.
The numbers are striking. For every 10-percentage-point increase in turnout, Van Epps gained roughly 16 points in vote share while Behn lost about the same. The ETA calls this a "cross-pattern" and notes it matches what election forensics researchers have documented as a signature of ballot-stuffing or digital vote allocation.
The methodology comes from established election forensics literature. Sergey Shpilkin, a Russian physicist who has analyzed elections for over a decade, developed techniques for examining turnout-to-vote-share relationships. Peter Klimek and colleagues published peer-reviewed research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on statistical detection of election irregularities. The ETA applies these frameworks to American election data.
In what these researchers describe as a clean election, vote share stays relatively stable across different turnout levels. The scatter plot shows a roughly horizontal cloud. What the ETA found in Montgomery County looks different - an upward diagonal for the Republican that they characterize as a hallmark of the "ballot addition" effect Shpilkin has documented in elections with confirmed manipulation.
The ETA analyzed 38 precincts after filtering for valid data. They also produced a heatmap using Klimek's methodology, which displays vote-share-to-turnout relationships by density. Normal voting behavior, according to this model, appears as a circular distribution. Abnormal behavior creates a smear or distortion upward and to the right for the benefiting candidate - which is what they say the Montgomery County data shows.
Their report is careful to note that statistical results alone do not prove manipulation. But they argue the consistency and magnitude of these effects warrant further scrutiny: hand counts of paper ballots in the highest-turnout precincts, chain-of-custody documentation review, and examination of tabulator logs and precinct-level reconciliation.
Van Epps won Montgomery County by 8 points, 53% to 45%. He carried the district overall by about 9 points. The ETA's analysis suggests that if similar anomalies exist across the district's other 13 counties, the cumulative effect could be significant relative to the margin of victory.
The organization has previously released reports on Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Nevada from the 2024 election, using similar statistical methods to flag what they describe as irregularities warranting investigation. Their work has drawn both interest from election integrity advocates and criticism from those who argue these statistical patterns have benign explanations.
What happens next is unclear. Tennessee has no automatic recount triggered by this margin. The ETA is calling for voluntary audits and independent verification. Whether election officials in Montgomery County or elsewhere in the district take up that call remains to be seen.
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