A Misuse of Statistical Reasoning: The Statistical Arguments Offered by Texas to the Supreme Court in an Attempt to Overturn the Results of the 2020 Election

Abstract

In December 2020, Texas filed a motion to the U.S. Supreme Court claiming that the four battleground states: Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin did not conduct their 2020 presidential elections in compliance with the Constitution. Texas supported its motion with a statistical analysis purportedly demonstrating that it was highly improbable that Biden had more votes than Trump in the four battleground states. This article points out that Texas’s claim is logically flawed and the analysis submitted violated several fundamental principles of statistics.