Donald Trump campaign’s data firm Cambridge Analytica admits to knowing some voting results in advance
Over the past five days, the Donald Trump campaign’s voter data analysis firm Cambridge Analytica has been exposed as a serial election cheater. It stole user data from fifty million Facebook users on Trump’s behalf. Its executives have been caught on tape discussing using everything from bribery to blackmail to cheat in elections. Now one of its executives has been caught on tape admitting to having known absentee ballot voting results in advance of election day, which would be impossible without breaking the law.
Back in May of 2017, Cambridge Analytica vice president Molly Schweickert was asked when she “knew” Donald Trump would win the election. Here was her answer: “In the final weeks leading up to the election, once we started getting some absentee ballot returns coming in, the models were re-weighted, predictions were re-weighted, and again the path to victory was starting to show an extremely high probability that Trump actually would be victorious.”
Absentee ballot returns for specific candidates are never, ever made public prior to the close of polls on election day; the most data that’s ever released in advance is the party affiliation of the absentee voters, which does not provide any information about whether they voted for their own party’s presidential candidate, or even if they cast a presidential vote at all. There is no possible way that Cambridge Analytica could have known how Trump was doing in absentee voting in the “weeks leading up to the election” unless the company illegally hacked into the voting results, or someone on the inside of the vote counting process was illegally giving this information to the company. Polling companies do attempt to conduct early voting polls, but as FiveThirtyEight has explained, these polls don’t tell us much (link). In addition, Schweickert specifically said “absentee ballot returns” and not “polling.”
This Cambridge Analytica executive admitted to knowing in advance how Donald Trump was doing in absentee voting, weeks before election day, when there is no legal way the company could have known this. Did she wildly misspeak? Was she lying? Or did she just confess to a crime? Her remarks about knowing absentee voting results were filmed and posted to YouTube, which you can watch here. This video was first brought to our attention by Mike Farb of Unhack The Vote.
