GCP view of the 2020 Presidential Election
Roger Nelson, November 6 2020, additions Nov 9.
Because the US has an outsize influence in the world, its political processes are of interest around theglobe. People pay attention to US Presidential elections in general, but perhaps more so in 2020 than isusual because the President has been so unusual. In any case, this occasion is one we have assessed
every four years since 2000, and will again this year. The following is a brief report on what the GCP
data look like day by day, even while the vote counting continues. The outcome as I write has not yet
been officially determined, but it appears that Joe Biden is likely to be declared the winner, based on
his lead in 4 of 5 states where mail-in and provisional ballots have not yet all been tabulated.
The Coronavirus pandemic continues, and it has caused major alterations in voting patterns. Early
voting was available in most states, and was heavily utilized. In many or most states a strong push wasmade for people to use mail-in ballots, and as a result, vote counting has been delayed for a large
proportion of ballots. Democrats heeded the suggestion while Republicans tended to follow President
Trump's exhortations to vote in person. That has resulted in big changes in the vote totals over time,with the in-person votes (favoring Trump) being counted first, and the mail-in ballots (favoring Biden)
taking multiple days.
The analysis and graphs I will show here cover a much longer period than usual, Typical specifications
are a few hours for events with a sharply defined starting time like an explosion or an attack, up to afull day for events that don't have specific times, like holiday celebrations, peace demonstrations, etc.
The election is obviously in the latter category.
The first data I examined was for the 2nd of November, the day before the election, but well into the“election” mood. It shows a modest but persistent incline, indicating a consistent but non-significant
positive deviation of the RNG output. Note that the hours indicated for the horizontal axis are in UTC.

Next, we look at November 3, the actual Election Day. The horizontal axis shows UTC (GMT) time,
which is 5 hours ahead of US Eastern Time. 7:00 pm EST corresponds to 12:00 midnight UTC. The
data show a positive trend and the terminal value is significant with chance odds of about 1 in 50.

The concatenation of these two days with Nov 4 and 5 puts the election day trend in context. It looks
like the positive trends on Nov 2 and 3 are replaced with a more-or-less level although varied output for
the next two days when the election news was a litany of small but non-decisive increments in thecounts of several states with narrow margins between the two candidate vote totals. By the end of thisperiod the indications of a Biden victory were strong but not yet conclusive. The closing of polls at
7pm in most states on the east coast is marked.

Finally, on November 7th, the media reported that Joe Biden had won more than 270 electoral votes,and thus the Presidency. The vote counting continues in other closely contested states, and Trump has

not conceded but continues to proclaim fraud and cheating (without evidence), but the declaration for
Biden/Harris aroused mass celebrations around the country, and in other parts of the world. The next
figure shows the data for the 24 hour UTC day of November 7. It shows a strong downward trend thatis broken shortly before noon by a sharp (and visually powerful) inflection followed by a strong
upward trend for the next few hours.

Below, we look at a detailed picture of the four-hour period starting at the time NPR declared Biden thewinner: 11:26 Eastern time. This is an exploratory analysis of course. We had no good model formaking an a priori prediction, but my colleague Bryan Williams independently set almost exactly thesame parameters for his analysis of data from all US RNGs, lending support for the parameter choices.
The graph is persuasive in showing a clear and steady response of the network. The trend is consistentand the terminal value is marginally significant with odds of about 15 to 1 against chance.