News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Investigating and preventing scientific misconduct with Benford’s law. Parent comment

Re:Investigating and preventing scientific misconduct with B... by anonymouskimmer on Sunday April 16, 2023 @06:04PM (#35594690)
It's too bad they don't disaggregate the data by state, instead assuming states which voted particular ways are equivalent. I guess that the Benford Law analysis wouldn't be as easy if they did due to the fewer number of counties to analyze per state?

So I wish they had instead grouped counties by how they voted (since certifying votes is done on the county level, typically), and run the analysis that way.

I'd also like to see an analysis based on county size (by population density, and by absolute population). As you get non-random effects based on density.

It's also interesting that in certain cases they use a 10%-level for confidence.

Edit to add a question: Does the registered voting population of these districts follow Benford's Law?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Investigating and preventing scientific misconduct with B... by gdavisson on Sunday April 16, 2023 @07:42PM (#35595207)
I don't know about that particular analysis, but there've been a number of such claims that don't stand up (mostly because, as you ask, the districts themselves don't follow Benford's law). See, for example, "Inappropriate Applications of Benford’s Law Regularities to Some Data from the 2020 Presidential Election in the United States" by Walter R. Mebane, Jr. [0], and "Why do Biden's votes not follow Benford's Law?" by Matt Parker [1]. This fits the general pattern that there's been a lot of suspicion raised about fraud in the 2020 election, but none of it actually seems to pan out.

[0] http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wmebane/inapB.pdf

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etx0k1nLn78

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Investigating and preventing scientific misconduct with B... by anonymouskimmer on Monday April 17, 2023 @02:56PM (#35604947)
It seems like the Benford's Law distribution should be adjustable by the specifics of its input data.
[ Parent | on HN ]