Charles Joseph Cicchetti, born on July 31, 1943, in Jersey City, is an American economist.
Cicchetti studied at the United States Air Force Academy from 1961 to 1964 and received a bachelor's degree in economics from Colorado College in 1965. He received a PhD in economics from Rutgers University in 1969. [1]
Cicchetti was a founding member of Pacific Economics Group and a senior advisor to Pacific Economics Group Research. Previously, Cicchetti was the Jeffrey J. Miller Professor of Government, Business, and the Economy at the University of Southern California; a managing director of Arthur Andersen Economic Consulting; a co-chairman of Putnam, Hayes & Bartlett, and a deputy director of the Energy and Environmental Policy Center at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.[1][2] From January 2017 to December 2020, he was a managing director at Berkeley Research Group.[3][4]
Following the victory of Joe Biden over Donald Trump in the 2020 United States presidential election, Texas filed a lawsuit (Texas v. Pennsylvania, 2020) to prevent Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Michigan (all states won by Biden) from certifying their electors for Biden.[5] Cicchetti, who was a donor to Donald Trump's 2016 campaign,[6] filed a declaration supporting Texas in the lawsuit. In the declaration, Cicchetti claimed that, given Trump's lead in the popular vote count in those states on election night, the probability of Biden winning the state would be "one in a quadrillion". He based his analysis on the erroneous assumption that votes are evenly and randomly distributed among geographic regions, demographics, and voting methods, so that any two large groups of voters should generate similar results.[7] In fact (as was widely known), more Democrats had requested mail-in ballots than Republicans and mail-in votes would take longer to count, so the later-counted votes came from a different population than the earlier-counted votes.[8][9] The "blue shift" toward Biden as mail-in votes continued to be counted had been expected, in part because several states (including Pennsylvania) prohibit processing of mail-in ballots before Election Day. The Supreme Court dismissed the suit.[10]
Cicchetti's analysis was described as "ludicrous," "comical," and "statistical incompetence" by several academics.[11] Kenneth Mayer, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, said the analysis "is going to be used in undergraduate statistics classes as a canonical example of how not to do statistics."[7] David Post, a law professor at the Beasley School of Law, wrote that "Cicchetti's analysis—for which, I assume, he was paid handsomely—is merely silly, irrelevant, and a total waste of time."[12] PolitiFact rated Cicchetti's claims "Pants on Fire."[7] A 2021 PNAS study by political scientists at Stanford University and the University of Chicago rebutted Cicchetti's analysis as being not even remotely convincing.[13]
