Violating the Benford's Law

It certainly is a mystery why legally cast mail in votes (which are allowed to arrive after election day per state law in some jurisdictions) would sway to one party. It's almost like one candidate has been telling his supporters to, in no uncertain terms, not use mail in ballots.

Your other claim is literal misinformation.

Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt, a Republican: "Observers from the Democratic Party and Republican Party, from the Biden campaign and the Trump campaign, have been in our counting area observing, right up against where the process is taking place, from the very beginning" (he said this in response to a similar lie by Ted Cruz)

> That's because there is no direct causation between legitimate elections and a Benford's law style distribution.

This doesn't make any sense to me. Why do we see it in physical constants and so many other places, but not election results?

I did look through that paper by Deckert, Myagkov and Ordeshook from the Wikipedia citation, and I find it extremely difficult to follow. (A literature search reveals a number of other papers with varying conclusions.) I haven't done any stats since college, and that was over a decade ago, so I don't claim to be an expert. Still, if you actually understand something, you should be able to explain it from first principles!

I did some more digging, and I did find this very well-written piece on Benford’s law. It is something I can actually follow: https://towardsdatascience.com/benfords-law-a-simple-explana...

In general, I think it is best to avoid argument from intimidation. I also don't think that linking conspiracy theorizing with someone that just wants to understand something better is a kind thing to do.

I would tone down the contrast/volume on your responses if you want to sound persuasive. I’m guessing this is showing up on Hacker News because of the data analysis methodology nature of the postings.

Benford’s law is a very well-established approach in forensic accounting to determine patterns of fraud. Is it appropriate to use in these cases, and was it used properly?

Selective analysis/p-hacking/cherry picking is a strategy all-too-often used in even scientific publications to exaggerate the strength of claims. Mathematical statistics itself, however, is pretty well-established as an approach to analyze data and identify outliers to gain insights. Is the author biasing the analysis with selective focus in a way that any objective observer would believe was unreasonable? Exactly how, and what would a more balanced analysis show?

Responses that identify methodological concerns with challenges to reported voting numbers in a systematic and thorough way would be of value to the HN community. Angry words that veer off-topic and provide only anecdotal information make you sound overly defensive and do not serve your cause well in this forum. It’s like running away from a dog, it only motivates the dog to run faster.

Just chill and address the points systematically. There aren’t that many points to address. Maybe it will take more than one post or a pdf of your own.

But if you skip a point, assume that the audience will interpret it to means that the post is correct on that point. Acknowledge if it is and move on.

I do love voting data. It collapses the wave function of political rhetoric...

> I haven't done any stats since college, and that was over a decade ago, so I don't claim to be an expert.

That's the whole point. This isn't my field of expertise and it certainly isn't yours. No offense, but the 45 minutes you spent between my post and this one is not a "literature review." I am a professional scientist and for my most recent publication it took me three weeks to cover the literature on my one narrow finding. That was already after spending the last five years in a PhD becoming an expert in my field! The three weeks was spent deeply reading almost every significant paper on the topic I was publishing on. That is what literature review means and you don't really understand the nuances of applying Benford's law to election fraud by spending 45 minutes browsing wikipedia and skimming abstracts.

If the political science experts who have spent decades studying the facts surrounding Benford's law disagree that it is a reliable indicator of fraud then what are we doing running sketchy analyses and then making huge leaps to claim it as "mathematical proof that the democrats stole the election." And yes, that is a conspiracy theory with all of the hallmarks of one. It is to the point that state election officials are having to waste their time to go on television and debunk literal lies and disinformation that are being broadcast by certain political figures. Judges are already tossing Trump's lawsuits because even his lawyers have to tell the judges that they have no evidence of fraud. The continued assertion that Democrats are "stealing the election" is the conspiracy theory here and it is literally dangerous. A bomb threat was called into a Philadelphia counting center. Vote counters are being escorted to and from counting locations by the police for their protection from armed mobs that are aggregating in some areas. You'll have to excuse me if I'm already tired of seeing these baseless claims show up over and over again when not even Trump himself can pull out evidence to support them when it comes time to do so in court.

If you want to learn about Benford's law then good on you. I think that it is a really interesting topic and there is some good entertainment to be had in learning about it. However, it's delusional for people like the author of this article to spend an evening learning about it and then act like it is the magic bullet from the Kennedy assassination.