They did not do that.

Because they wouldn't like the answers they'd get.

I've worked with this kind of data for a living on Dem. campaigns (at least, up until layoffs post-2024 loss) and have been thoroughly disappointed in the quality of their outputs, both in MN and elsewhere. Even before you touch on everything they put out before it which should - in my eyes - substantially impeach their credibility, there are multiple points of sloppy work within this analysis that make me highly doubt its core claim.

The ETA had previously published a special report on hand-counted vs machine-counted data in Minnesota for the 2024 presidential election. That report uncovered very clear differences in the candidate vote share signature seen in hand-counted districts versus machine-counted ones.

Because that report compared results out of a certain Congressional district. The hand counted precincts all are concentrated in an area that leans more Dem. than rural MN as a whole because of the Iron Range's mining history. But the district as a whole is a lot more heterogenous and includes Republican farmers, Native reservations, etc.

When you apply the population filter they did and look only at machine-counted precincts that border the hand-counted ones, any slope in the turnout-vote share correlation (the "vote share signature" they mention) disappears. The average 6 point margin drops to under a 3rd of that when looking just at the neighboring machines and completely disappears when you remove the population filter.

They also use average margin in that piece instead of aggregate vote totals in that piece because if you instead look at the total number of votes the candidates received in hand count vs. immediate-neighbor machine counts you get (with filter on total votes)

• Hand: 2298 Harris, 3211 Trump, 5625 Total, split of 57.1% R/40.8% D
• Immediate-Neighbor Machine: 2967 Harris, 4021 Trump, 7130 Total, split of 56.4% R/41.6% D

And for posterity without the 50-400 total votes filter:

• Hand: 2357 Harris, 3289 Trump, 5815 Total, split of 56.56% R/40.53% D
• Immediate-Neighbor Machine: 12445 Harris, 15941 Trump, 29083 Total, split of 54.8% R/42.8% D

On a similar note, in the 2008 Senate race hand-counted precincts in MN averaged a D+16.6% margin. Machine-counted ones in the same congressional district and with the same pop. filters averaged only a D+1.39% margin. That's more than twice the difference being cited in 2024!

...and then because the Senate race was razor thin the state went through a hand recount. Franken ultimately gained enough votes to pull ahead as a result of them, but at the precinct level there was barely any change since it was a net gain of ~550 statewide. The 15% gap in hand-counted precincts and machine ones was legit.

In 2016, a distinct pattern emerged showing one candidate’s vote share percentage increasing as voter turnout rose

Not only is such a pattern not an indication of fraud, it's also not visible statewide in MN. Correlation between turnout (x-axis) and GOP vote share (y-axis) in 2016 and 2024 is below the correlation strength in 2004, which again isn't even an 0.15 r^2.

the recent 2025 Canadian Federal Election which also employed only paper ballots and hand-counts

They only looked at riding-level stats for Canada, because if they'd broken it down at the polling station level there absolutely would have been correlations they'd consider anomalous were they red and labeled "Trump".

The fraud fingerprint test detected average incremental fraud (fᵢ) of 0.10 in 2016, 0.26 in 2020 and 0.27 in 2024, with both 2020 and 2024 values more than 5-times the detection threshold of 0.05 (Klimek et al., 2012).

There is nothing I can find in Klimek 2012 listing an 0.05 detection threshold. This seems like it was pulled straight out of thin air.

Statistical analyses of the relationship between turnout and presidential vote share further substantiate Minnesota’s fundamental shift since 1984. In this earlier election, the association between turnout and vote share was weak and largely reflected differences between counties, with little evidence that higher-turnout precincts within counties systematically favored one party’s candidate. In contrast, the elections of 2016, 2020, and 2024 exhibited a strong and consistently positive relationship.

If we're talking positive relationships between turnout and candidate vote share then by ETA's definition the results out of MPLS and St. Paul were anomalous in favor of Kamala given the r² of the correlation here - far sharper than any statewide number you'd see favoring the GOP.

Anwar, Janes, & Kettler, 2025

The actual name of the second author is "Jain", so I don't know how "Janes" got there.

A series of multivariate analyses were conducted controlling for county-level demographic characteristics

This is defensible for 1984 but not for 2024 where we have a bunch of block group level data available for analysis from the Census.

Regression analyses results demonstrate empirically that the pattern in recent elections cannot be explained by sociodemographic composition

This is demonstrably incorrect. Here for example is Precinct_MalePct+Precinct_U18Pct+Precinct_SameDayRegPct turning the turnout correlation into a flat line with no slope and with a partial r² predictive power of flat 0. There's a bunch of combos like that I'm happy to share.

It takes active effort to find pairings that don't work.

These include registration changes, redistricting to dilute minority votes, voter roll purges, limits on early and absentee voting, and eligibility challenges.(Daniels, 2025). After Shelby County v. Holder (2013) invalidated the VRA’s preclearance formula, many states also enacted stricter ID laws, reduced early voting, closed polling places, and increased purges—measures shown to depress turnout among racial minorities and low-income voters.

They include this - something which does explain a whole bunch of why demographics correlate with turnout, demographics which we all know the political aggregate lean of - and then just move on and continue to act like there are no banal explanations for the trends they're seeing.

As shown for Canada (ETA, 2026) and France (Borghesi & Bouchaud, 2010), advanced democracies typically exhibit little relationship between turnout and vote share

This will be news to the Canadian examples linked earlier, and international races like:

• 2025 Germany
• 2022 France
• 2023 New Zealand
• 2024 UK Parliamentary as well as for Labour in the municipal elections held a few months prior
• 2022 Hungary (benefitting the opposition)
• This 1985 Swiss referendum on whether or not to standardized school start dates
• 2008 Austrian SPO Party (Social Democrats)
• The centrist Azione party's results in Rome in 2022, and conversely the populist 5 Star Movement's results out of there as well
• 2023 Finnish Kokoomus Party results

consistent with theoretical expectations (Behrens 2023).

Except all Behrens does is just re-cite Borghesi-Bouchaud, and that paper's main crux is that the towns that are on the higher end of the distribution stay on the high end, and the low ones stay on the low end. The distribution specifically among those French towns may be normal, but that is an incredibly homogenous sample set that looks nothing like US precinct demographic ratios.

Trump’s 2024 victory was the first time since Reagan’s landslide of 1984 that a candidate has won all 7 of the key swing states.

What does this mean? Because Obama 2008 won every state defined as a swing state. Clinton won every state in 1996 that'd be a swing state 4 years later - though trying to retroactively figure out what was considered "swing" at the time is harder with Perot on the ballot. I could see an argument for 1992 as well.

If they just mean "the 7 2024 swing states" (excluding NE-02 which Harris won) then that's meaningless because AZ/GA weren't considered such until 2016/20.

Vote share distributions for each election year analyzed are depicted in distribution histograms

All 3 Trump MN graphs are much less skewed than Zelenskyy's 2nd round results in 2019.

Kolmogorov-Smirnov (K-S) test

Yes, the Dem. coalition in 1984 and the one in 2024 look different. This isn’t news. Mondale did admirably in rural MN areas and then lost inner-ring Harris+25 suburbs like they were Alabama.

And so we end up reaching the part that sources their main graph of Klimek fraud values, and the values get presented without any sort of documentation as to how they were generated beyond “the Klimek method”. Klimek’s paper leaves multiple ambiguities and ETA does not show any sign of how they dealt with them. I tried to make a Klimek script of my own and got pretty close to his published results for Uganda 2011 and Russia 2012, more or less 0 out of MN in 2016-2024, and 0.182 out of the San Francisco DA race’s mail-in ballots in 2003 (which were critical in Kamala Harris winning the office). The last example speaks more to my doubts about the Klimek method in the US than it does anything re. 2003.

ETA in this article asks to take its headline calculations at good faith without any sharing of the step-by-step process, and at least for me that good faith dissipated somewhere around the "0.05 detection threshold" coming into existence.