Live data from Hacker News

Violating the Benford's Law

theredelephants.com

21–30 of 30 posts

Re: Violating the Benford's Law

#21
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about Benford’s law isn’t a conspiracy theory. It isn’t evidence necessarily proving fraud, either, but it is an important finding that warrants further investigation. I don’t know what will come of this, but I do know that it will be written about at length in the coming court battle. I didn’t vote for Trump, btw...

No. This baseless insistance that the most closely watched election in living history has had fraud at a scale never seen in the US that occurred in front of hundreds of bipartisan observers is literally a conspiracy theory. All of the newly minted statistics experts on the internet wildly missaplying methods to support their foregone conclusions are exactly the same as Johny C. Theorist getting an internet education…

You're arguing with a side that is using statistical analysis to detect fraud. Meanwhile your arguments are:

- "fixation on wildly cherry picked data and missaplied (sic) statistics is the conspiracy theory"

- "There are already court cases with the best experts in the land looking at the counts"

- "They are starting to be laughed out of court because they have no evidence to support their claims"

I don't find your arguments compelling because you are arguing to authority. You also use a case that was dismissed that has nothing to do with Benford's Law. Please address specifically what data is being cherry picked and why Benford's Law shouldn't apply in this election.

Re: Violating the Benford's Law

#22
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 nar…

There is a rebuttal to the paper you cited

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/political-analysis/a...

Re: Violating the Benford's Law

#23
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's almost like one candidate has been telling his supporters to, in no uncertain terms, not use mail in ballots. MI, WI, PA stopped counting votes on November 3. These states had the same candidate winning by 130K+, 300K+ and 700K+ votes respectively. It's remarkable that at about 4AM in Nov 4, WI and MI reported just enough votes to change the outcome of the election. And there is evidence of people that was pre…

Given the emotional argument, here is another way to think about it - do you believe in the process and the court system? The person(s) most affected by it, the 2 candidates are making those calls. If you believe everything is corrupted and you cannot trust the system, then it starts sounding like a conspiracy theorist would.

If you want to discuss application of Benford law to election process, maybe a different tone would help.

Re: Violating the Benford's Law

#24
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's almost like one candidate has been telling his supporters to, in no uncertain terms, not use mail in ballots. MI, WI, PA stopped counting votes on November 3. These states had the same candidate winning by 130K+, 300K+ and 700K+ votes respectively. It's remarkable that at about 4AM in Nov 4, WI and MI reported just enough votes to change the outcome of the election. And there is evidence of people that was pre…

Given the emotional argument, here is another way to think about it - do you believe in the process and the court system? The person(s) most affected by it, the 2 candidates are making those calls. If you believe everything is corrupted and you cannot trust the system, then it starts sounding like a conspiracy theorist would. If you want to discuss application of Benford law to election process, maybe a different ton…

The supreme court of PA changed the law months before the elections to allow non-postmarked ballots without signature verification to be received after election day.

Re: Violating the Benford's Law

#25

This has to be one of the funniest + stupidest attempts I have seen at this. The first part of analysis says that Wisconsin turnout percentage is up "5.5 standard deviations" - as if turnout percentage follows any type of random distribution. The number of voters in Idaho increased 30% as well - is their fraud there? Clearly this is a result of a "virtual statistical impossibility" and not the fact that this was the…

The people that made this obviously are just assembling a bunch of claims the found elsewhere on the internet, and a great deal of it is trash. I think it's a mistake to dismiss all of it completely out of hand, without at least examining some of the more interesting and serious stuff as well: https://twitter.com/statsguyphd/status/1324352213595181059

Take a look at this: https://mobile.twitter.com/gelbach/status/132476099369259008...

Re: Violating the Benford's Law

#26

Here's the research and code. It's all open source. I find it very convincing but that's just me. Do your own analysis https://github.com/cjph8914/2020_benfords

What's convincing about it? The author doesn't even first verify that population sizes in each precinct/ward follow Benford's law before trying to apply it to the vote counts.

If you read the issues, someone already pointed out that the distribution is not wide enough to expect Benford's law to hold even in principle https://github.com/cjph8914/2020_benfords/issues/9

The underlying issue is that vote counts are tallied over regions whose size and population are chosen to fall into reasonable bounds, so they don't follow a power law like e.g. the size of cities.

Re: Violating the Benford's Law

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people that made this obviously are just assembling a bunch of claims the found elsewhere on the internet, and a great deal of it is trash. I think it's a mistake to dismiss all of it completely out of hand, without at least examining some of the more interesting and serious stuff as well: https://twitter.com/statsguyphd/status/1324352213595181059

Take a look at this: https://mobile.twitter.com/gelbach/status/132476099369259008...

Hey, thanks for that link. That actually does make sense to me. I wish it was written a bit more kindly so that the Republicans would actually read it, but I will do my best to share the ideas in there.

Re: Violating the Benford's Law

#28
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 nar…

As an alleged scientist, I'd think you'd be much less likely to engage in "proof by credentials". Particularly here, on a site frequently traveled by folks who as a matter of habit tend to walk a path in life far more adjacent to the Arts (scientific, technological, and yes, sociological) than most.

To engage im brow beating of the person when you have data in front of you that shows admmittedly interesting skews evidences to an impartial observer an entrenched interest in avoiding the topic. You're doing the same type of thing I came down on people for during the 737 MAX fiasco, and as we've all found out, many of our "armchair experts" from that time ended up being right.

I have no love for either candidate, or the implication made by this data has for the country at large. In fact, that this is the most closely watched election in decades is exactly why these statistical anomalies are so important to look at. Not for Trummp's sake mind, but because usually there's no point in sweating it because most of the time there isn't really that much choice in candidate, so everyone just moves on and doesn't look that hard in the interests of keeping things moving along. Further, you have had drastic operational changes that have effected the efficacy of traditional poll watching. These statistical anomalies are the outcome. Claims that no one has evidence of any fraud in this is a bit llike claiming gerrymandering doesn't happen. It absolutely does, it just doesn't have a well formulated legal test making a determination that it has tenable in the Courts. There's a few drips of precedent around it here and there, but nothing to the scale of being in the national toolkit.

In a slight sense I agree with you; because I'm not sure that anyone wants to approach the can of worms created by dealing with the issue of "Okay, lets say this was a fraud. What then? Do over?" However, if life has taught me anything though, it's that nothing worth keeping and depending on is worth being spared the rigor of really testing and working out the warts of it from time to time. There is something odd afoot if we're heavily departing from historicals in so many places at once and if there is any merit to statistics at all as an auditing tool, and we rely upon these techniques elsewhere to perform as a sniff test, then you're either arguing the technique is flawed (which I don't fully buy; there being academic controversy on something doesn't disclude it from still being useful) and calling into doubt everything based on it; or you're asserting that for some reason Benford's magically doesn't work in the United States, and we've just capriciously used it as a specious reason to classify other country's elections as fraudulent for diplomatic purposes. Either of those is enough to justify some scrutiny. I don't, however, think the Courts are necessarily the right avenue for this disagreement to take place in.

In short, sit back, relax, and chew on the data. Forget how close to home it hits. Definitely don't dogpile those who are out of curiosity. Interesting times indeed.

If I had to offer up an interim solution for how the country should be run until any controversy gets resolved, I'd say that Executive authority should in a limited fashion be distributed to the cabinet as overseen by a re-affirmed Speaker of the House and Senate, working as co-equal partners. Not President and Vice President, but both together carrying equal weight. If one disagrees, the answer is no, if unanmity is reached on a direction, the answer is yes. The House and Senate must reaffirm any extension of that arrangement with a two thirds vote and Unanimous agreement between both houses. If the Congress can't manage to even do that, everyone gets dismissed and barred from reelection, and it goes back to the People to re-prime the pump. An alternative is to simply re-run the Presidential election. The Congressional statistics don't seem to be a subject of contention anywhere near as much as the Presidential. That seems to me the most consistent way to handle things given by my reading of the Federalist Papers, and other source material from around the Founding, and also has the perk of just kind of making sense given the current political situation.

Re: Violating the Benford's Law

#29

This has to be one of the funniest + stupidest attempts I have seen at this. The first part of analysis says that Wisconsin turnout percentage is up "5.5 standard deviations" - as if turnout percentage follows any type of random distribution. The number of voters in Idaho increased 30% as well - is their fraud there? Clearly this is a result of a "virtual statistical impossibility" and not the fact that this was the…

I just can't trust the results of MI, WI, PA. Hundreds of thousands of mail-in votes that arrive at 4AM after election day were just enough to change the outcome of the election. And how is that out of a batch of 130,000+ mail-in votes all of them were for one candidate.

Because trump told his followers to not submit mail in ballots. Since this has been pointed out to you multiple times I’m curious why you think his supporters would mail in ballots despite their candidates plea not to?
Post reply on HN