> In a working paper published on 10 November, Mebane looks deeper at the US election data using a 2BL test, based on the second digits and Benford’s law digit probabilities, along with other statistical tools.
> The bottom line: there are no signs of irregularity in the officially declared precinct vote counts data from Fulton County, GA, Allegheny County, PA, Milwaukee, WI, and Chicago, IL, as some have claimed.
> The vote counts from the four jurisdictions are not final, so one should treat them cautiously. Nonetheless preliminary analysis shows little that suggests there are problems.
Presumably a more up to date source exists now that the votes are finalized. The paper also has a link to the data they used on GitHub if you'd like to see for yourself (and both this & the paper below say they downloaded it from the Secretary of State websites of each state, so presumably you could do that too if you didn't trust this random GitHub).
This paper from MITRE is interesting but doesn't use 2BL. (They don't find any evidence of fraud. They do discuss 2BL in an appendix.)
I remember from an election fraud class in college that the best digits to check on vote counts (particularly in places like Russia) are actually the trailing digits, which should be uniformly distributed. Apparently eastern European fraudsters at this point are sophisticated enough (and have enough leeway to fudge the vote counts) that they can get past checks based on Benford's law, but they are usually too lazy to whiten the trailing digits of their fake numbers.
I was curious about 2020 after the pop science emerged and checked all of these precincts' trailing digits (as well as a few other statistics), and they looked totally fine.
maxbond|2 years ago
Wikipedia cites this article:
https://physicsworld.com/a/benfords-law-and-the-2020-us-pres...
> In a working paper published on 10 November, Mebane looks deeper at the US election data using a 2BL test, based on the second digits and Benford’s law digit probabilities, along with other statistical tools.
> The bottom line: there are no signs of irregularity in the officially declared precinct vote counts data from Fulton County, GA, Allegheny County, PA, Milwaukee, WI, and Chicago, IL, as some have claimed.
That article cites this paper:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wmebane/inapB.pdf
> The vote counts from the four jurisdictions are not final, so one should treat them cautiously. Nonetheless preliminary analysis shows little that suggests there are problems.
Presumably a more up to date source exists now that the votes are finalized. The paper also has a link to the data they used on GitHub if you'd like to see for yourself (and both this & the paper below say they downloaded it from the Secretary of State websites of each state, so presumably you could do that too if you didn't trust this random GitHub).
This paper from MITRE is interesting but doesn't use 2BL. (They don't find any evidence of fraud. They do discuss 2BL in an appendix.)
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/trecms/pdf/AD1148123.pdf
pclmulqdq|2 years ago
I was curious about 2020 after the pop science emerged and checked all of these precincts' trailing digits (as well as a few other statistics), and they looked totally fine.