weeks later. An intrinsic weakness of this assumption, and of the tradition of premature announcements based on it, is that the public is likely to misapprehend that these particular "projected winning" candidates have certainly won before any official vote count has been completed, whereas in fact all that is truly known is that those candidates have some degree of likelihood of having won; the magnitude of the likelihood (all the way from very reliable to not reliable at all) varies by state because the details of election procedures vary by state. This problem affects all non–in-person votes, even those cast weeks before election day—not just late-arriving ones. In 2014, scientists from Princeton University did a study on the influence of the so-called "elite", and their derived power from special interest lobbying, versus the "ordinary" US citizen within the US political system. They found that the US was looking more like an oligarchy than a real representative democracy; thus eroding a government of the people, by the people, for the people as stated by Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address. In fact, the study found that average citizens had an almost nonexistent influence on public policies and that the ordinary citizen had little or no independent influence on policy at all. Attempts by foreign countries to influence the outcome have occurred in some elections. The Electoral College has been criticized by some people for being un-democratic (it can choose a candidate who did not win the popular vote) and for encouraging campaigns to only focus on swing states. Allegations of voter impersonation, of which there are only 31 documented cases in the United States from the 2000–2014 period, have led to calls for Voter ID laws in the United States. Notable instances of allegations of stolen elections and election fraud include the 1948 United States Senate election in Texas, in which 202 "patently fraudulent" ballots gave future President Lyndon Johnson a seat in the US Senate and the 2018 North Carolina 9th congressional district election in which ballot tampering was admitted in witness testimony, including filling in blank votes to favor Republican candidates. Sanford Levinson argues that next to the fact that campaign financing and gerrymandering are seen as serious problems for democracy, also one of the root causes of the American democratic deficit lies in the United States Constitution itself, for example there is a lack of proportional representation in