Comment by stouset

> Unless done carefully this will almost certainly fail Benford’s Law.

IIRC Benford's law relies upon things that have power-law underpinnings, such as iterated growth% at different rates. In contrast, relative vote amounts at a given point in time don't have many ways to exhibit that, particularly when the total number of voters is fixed rather than having voters divide like bacteria during polling day.

However it might work if you were checking the growth in total eligible voters in different locations over time.

I like to imagine Benford's Law a bit like throwing randomly distributed darts through the air at a paper target, exept the target is graph paper with log-10 subdivisions. The "leading 1" zones are simply bigger targets. [0]

[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Logarithmic_scale.sv...

It's my understanding that legitimate vote totals aren't likely to conform to Benford's law in the first place.

Even if that's the case, though, there might very well be other applicable tests this would run afoul of.

The Biden election in 2020 also failed Benford's law - unless you're suggesting that one was fake, it seems that failing Benford's law is okay.