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peepeepoopoo3 | 2 years ago

Remember, according to Wikipedia, Benford's law applies to election data in every country except the United States, where the laws of statistics are totally different.

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dang|2 years ago

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

peepeepoopoo3|2 years ago

No, I don't think I'm Going to Go out and change Everything about my Replies.

ano-ther|2 years ago

For elections, the test should be with the second digit, not the first.

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford's_law > Benford's law has also been misapplied to claim election fraud. When applying the law to Joe Biden's election returns for Chicago, Milwaukee, and other localities in the 2020 United States presidential election, the distribution of the first digit did not follow Benford's law. The misapplication was a result of looking at data that was tightly bound in range, which violates the assumption inherent in Benford's law that the range of the data be large. The first digit test was applied to precinct-level data, but because precincts rarely receive more than a few thousand votes or fewer than several dozen, Benford's law cannot be expected to apply. According to Mebane, "It is widely understood that the first digits of precinct vote counts are not useful for trying to diagnose election frauds."

The other examples on this page used the second digit for their election analysis.

MrJohz|2 years ago

Matt Parker did a good video with lots of visuals to explain why Benford's Law works in general, but why it cannot always be simply applied to election results.

https://youtu.be/etx0k1nLn78

peepeepoopoo3|2 years ago

Except the other digits failed too.