Charles Cicchetti

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]

A donor to Donald Trump's 2016 campaign,[5] Cicchetti filed a declaration supporting Texas in Texas v. Pennsylvania (2020), Texas's unsuccessful lawsuit seeking to prevent Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Michigan from certifying their electors for Joe Biden in the 2020 United States presidential election.[6] In the declaration he claimed that, given Trump's lead in the popular vote in those states on election night, the probability of Biden coming from behind and ultimately winning the state was "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 a declaration attached to the lawsuit, he claimed that the shift from an early Trump lead to a late Biden lead was statistically impossible because "the reported tabulations in the early and subsequent periods could not remotely plausibly be random samples from the same population."[6] Contradicting this statement, it has been widely reported that more Democrats requested mail-in ballots than Republicans, so that in mail-in voters came from a different population than in-person voters.[8][9] The so-called blue shift was in effect; for instance, several states' laws (particularly Pennsylvania) prohibit processing of mail-in ballots before Election Day. Thus, early returns showing more Republican voters (more likely to vote in-person) were in some cases gradually eroded by later tabulating of mail-in ballots, as Democratic voters make greater use of mail-in ballots.

His approach was described as "ludicrous," "comical," and "statistical incompetence" by several academics.[10] 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."[11] PolitiFact rated Cicchetti's claims "Pants on Fire."[7]

• Cicchetti, Charles J. (1972). Alaskan Oil: Alternative Routes and Markets. Routledge. OCLC 610289317.[12]
• Cicchetti, Charles J.; Dubin, Jeffrey A.; Long, Colin M. (2004). The California Electricity Crisis: What, Why, and What's Next. Kluwer Academic Publishers. ISBN 1-4020-8032-8. OCLC 57054145.

• Appearances on C-SPAN