Comment by dllthomas
1 year ago
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.
1 year ago
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.
I’m not a statistician so I may be confusing it with Zipf’s law. But IIRC tallies from individual precincts should roughly conform to Benford’s law.
Precints have roughly even populations and therefore typically don't conform to Benford's law. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etx0k1nLn78&t=76s&pp=ygUQYmV...
I think the concern is that precinct size tends to cluster in ways that mean results can cluster in ways that - for a large portion of the data - does not span a full order of magnitude.
To elaborate, if we imagine a polity with precincts that turn out 10,000 people each election, with two major party candidates that each get between 20% and 80% of the vote, we'd see precisely 0% precincts with a leading digit of 1, much less the ~30% predicted by Benford's law. Of course that doesn't exactly describe any real polity, but it doesn't seem surprising that real elections would be enough like that to screw with the pattern.