HIJING can describe the anisotropy-scaled charge-dependent correlations at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider
The experimentally measured charge-dependent correlations in heavy-ion collisions have been suggested as a signature of the chiral magnetic effect (CME). Early model studies could not reproduce the measurement. For example, the HIJING model yielded far smaller magnitude for the charge-dependent correlation than observed in data. This led to the conclusion that the CME had to be invoked to explain the observed correlations in heavy-ion collisions. In this paper we show that this conclusion of the CME interpretation is premature. We show that the reason that HIJING predicts a far smaller correlation than data is because the elliptic anisotropy $(v_ 2)$ parameter in HIJING is too small. When properly scaled, the HIJING model can reproduce in entirety the measured correlations. Further, we also employ the AMPT model, which has a large enough $v_2$, to demonstrate that the measured data can be easily accommodated by models without invoking the CME.