Don’t fall for this! (Critical thinking lesson)

It’s time to talk about critical thinking again. There are a lot of deceivers out there – some intentional and some accidentally.

So, did you hear about the election fraud of 2024 where there were suspicious “missing” voters? I’ve seen references to this “fraud” and have looked into this and thought about what may be happening. And at present time I have to say there is NO fraud.

Apply this critical thinking to charts

I grabbed this chart off of a vlogsbrother’s YouTube video, where Hank Green was discussing how to view maps and charts. If you want to see the video where there are other instances presented, you can go to the following YouTube link:

So, the contention from those arguing that there was fraud perpetuated against the Democrats was the number of voters mysteriously declined from that of 2020 election. Where did all of those voters go? Now, in the chart above, Hank was addressing the claim that the number of voters were cut in half from 2020 to 2024, based upon the chart appearance.

However, if you apply your critical thinking cap and check on the y-axis, you will note that it starts at 50 rather than zero. That action alone distorts the story the image conveys.

Here’s another chart but with the starting point at zero:

In this one, I pulled the data through 2020 from Britannica via Power Query and then had to add in the latest set of data for 2024 to create the chart. Note now that the 2020 vote counts for the Democrats are NOT doubled 2024 vote counts.

Possible reasons for missing voters

Here are some possible reasons for the drop:

1. Somebody went in and deleted the votes. People were suspicious about Elon Musk declaring the vote for Trump a few hours before the final say. Yeah, the guy owns Starlink which might have drilled into the election database and changed things.
2. Ballots were mysteriously stolen.
3. Voters just didn’t show up.

My vote is on number 3. In order to declare #1 or #2, the detectives have to provide proof of nefarious activity and so far, no one has. Until that happens, the reason is that voters just did not show up. There are no missing voters.

Another reminder for scrutinizing the numbers or statements

A couple of months ago, I did a post on deception on topic of climate effect on heat waves. A site declared that heat waves were not increasing; this is in contradiction to what NOAA’s data was saying.

I was able to do some research and found that the site was sponsored by a climate denier, so there was a strong possibility of bias towards climate denial.

Curiously enough, the data in support of their contention came from the NOAA site which was saying something opposite: heat waves were increasing due to climate change.

After digging around, I realized the time span were around 20 years (roughly 2020 to 2023). Instead of the y-axis issue, we have a wrong time period issue. Climate change will be much more visible over a longer time span.

In that post, I displayed a chart with a longer time span, showing the gradual increase in temperature which should impact heat waves.

To see the thought process, go to this page:

Evaluating information – in this case, climate information

What have we learned?

1. Check the axes.
2. Consider the source and where the data is coming from.
3. Check the time span. Play around with it to determine if time span was cut too short, especially when dealing with long range geological events such as climate.
4. Dig, dig, dig into the data. I realize that there may be a lack of time for this one but if you can, please dig into the data to satisfy that you can come up with the same image.