UPDATED: Bill Binney's Bombshell Examined

Bill Binney has thrown a bit of a bombshell into the debate about the Election Hoax. Working off a WaPo article, Binney calculates that Biden may have actually received something like 66 million votes--for short of his supposed mega landslide of 80 million and also far short of Trump's 74 million. 

However, a closer examination of the premises behind the WaPo article suggests that Binney misunderstood premises on which the WaPo reporters' statistics were based.

Before we get into the numbers, here's the Wikipedia short bio of Binney, to show that he really does have a "head for numbers" and to explain why I took his thesis at face value:

Binney grew up in rural Pennsylvania and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from the Pennsylvania State University in 1970. He said that he volunteered for the Army during the Vietnam era in order to select work that would interest him rather than be drafted and have no input. He was found to have strong aptitudes for mathematics, analysis, and code breaking,^[6] and served from 1965 to 1969 in the Army Security Agency before going to the NSA in 1970.

Binney was a Russia specialist and worked in the operations side of intelligence, starting as an analyst and ending as a Technical Director prior to becoming a geopolitical world Technical Director. In the 1990s, he co-founded a unit on automating signals intelligence with NSA research chief Dr. John Taggart.^[7] Binney's NSA career culminated as Technical Leader for intelligence in 2001. He has expertise in intelligence analysis, traffic analysis, systems analysis, knowledge management, and mathematics (including set theory, number theory, and probability).

Here's what I included in a post this morning, quoting Binney:

REVEALED: ‘Simple Math’ Shows Biden Claims 13 MILLION More Votes Than There Were Eligible Voters Who Voted in 2020 Election

Correspondent Margaret contacted me this evening, having run the numbers and seen that they didn't add up. Here is her analysis, which led me to go back to examine the WaPo's premises:

According to the Washington Post 2020 voter turnout in raw numbers was the highest in over a century.  That is believable due to the large number of absentee ballots that were enabled this special Covid year. Based on the total votes, 19.6 million more people voted than had ever voted before in an election. (159,633,396, first ever to go over 140 million).

When you do the math using actual tallies of registered voters in each state as of the most recent point before the election cutoff in each state you find something interesting.

turnout = # votes /# registered to vote = 66.2 % (WaPo)

There were 159,633,396 total votes for President (81.3  million for Biden and 74.2 for Trump 4.1 others)

Total registered to vote = 213.8 million

So total 159.6 votes divided by 213.8 = 74.6 percent voter turnout

Why the discrepancy? If WaPo's voter turnout percentage is correct and only 66.2 percent of registered voters turned out and the vote total should be only 141.6 million. Where did the other votes come from? 

If we take the voter turnout percentage and multiply times the registered voter total:

66.2 percent x 214 million registered voters gives us 141,668,000.

Yet 159.6 million votes were counted.

So, with that under our belts, here is what the WaPo article states about their numbers:

Turnout figures are based on historic and current estimates from the U.S. Elections Project of citizens age 18 and over who are eligible to register and vote, and of ballots cast.

I read this to mean that, for purposes of the WaPo article, turnout = ballots cast / all citizens "eligible to register and vote." Thus, the WaPo's turnout percentage appears to be based on a percentage of those who were theoretically eligible, not on a percentage of those who actually registered. 

The number of those who are ELIGIBLE to register and then to vote is, of course, smaller than the number who actually DO register. The number who register and then actually do vote is, once again, smaller than the number who simply register. The result is that if we look at the larger total number of persons who were theoretically eligible to register and then to vote and compare that to the actual number of votes, we come up with ~66%. But if we compare the smaller number of persons who actually did register to vote to the same actual number of votes, we get, as expected, a higher percentage: ~73%.

If my reasoning is correct, then Binney's numbers were based on a faulty reading of the article. I hope commenter EZ will take comfort in this. He gets to chide me for not examining the WaPo's premises more closely and relying blindly on Binney's authority.

Thanks go to Margaret for setting this out so clearly.

UPDATE: It should go without saying, but I will say it: 73% of registered voters actually voting is still a crazy high number. That comes back to the crazy and historically high number of votes supposedly cast and all the anomalies and irregularities that have been documented. So, none of the above is a validation of the election numbers. It's simply a questioning of Binney's interpretation.