6 ms·

Violating the Benford's Law

13 points by sergioro 6y ago

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
taxicab 6y ago
This is the third time this conspiracy theory has been submitted here. Knock it off.
- sergioro 6y ago
  Please tell us why this is a conspiracy theory. The article has references to the data sources, including web-archived snapshots of official government websites.
- maxharris 6y ago
  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...
  - taxicab 6y ago
    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 in materials science so that he can understand for himself that jet fuel doesn't melt steel beams. Trump's polling numbers also don't follow Benford's law in some cases. That's because there is no direct causation between legitimate elections and a Benford's law style distribution. The fixation on wildly cherry picked data and missaplied statistics is the conspiracy theory. There are already court cases with the best experts in the land looking at the counts. Guess what? They are starting to be laughed out of court because they have no evidence to support their claims. It is either supremely arrogant or delusional to claim that you have found this thing that you spent five minutes learning about on the internet that proves magically that the Democrats stole the election while world renowned experts aren't able to prove it to a judge. There is no liberal conspiracy to steal an election. Trump made the same claim in 2016. He made it during the Republican primaries about his opponents (that they cheated him). He said the system was rigged when he settled the fraud lawsuite for trump university. Hell... he even said he was being cheated when his tv show wasn't awarded an Emmy. This is just what he does and instead of spreading lies he needs to accept that he lost (probably... we'll see soon) and stop dividing the country.
    - sergioro 6y ago
      > occurred in front of hundreds of bipartisan observers There is evidence that in PA and MI republicans were not allowed to observe the vote counting. Why are they not allowed to observe? > There is no liberal conspiracy to steal an election. Trump made the same claim in 2016. In WI, MI there hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots all arriving after election day. And they almost entirely for one candidate. I don't remind this happening in 2016, or never in US history.
      - taxicab 6y ago
        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)
        sergioro 6y ago
        > 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 prevented from observing the vote count, and apparently some observers were kept so far away that they had to use binoculars to observe.
        vaidhy 6y ago
        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.
- maxharris 6y ago
  If you are downvoting me, I would appreciate it if you simply read my comment all the way through before doing it. I am not your enemy, nor am I yours. I would appreciate it if you’d be just a little kinder.
  - taxicab 6y ago
    It's not possible to downvote immediate replies on HN.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- aapl88888 6y ago
  You can analyze the data yourself. There are sources and python scripts included https://github.com/cjph8914/2020_benfords https://github.com/cjph8914/2020_benfords
handmodel 6y ago
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 most publicized election of all time.
- maxharris 6y ago
  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 https://twitter.com/statsguyphd/status/1324352213595181059
  - pedrosorio 6y ago
    Take a look at this: https://mobile.twitter.com/gelbach/status/1324760993692590081 https://mobile.twitter.com/gelbach/status/132476099369259008...
    - maxharris 6y ago
      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.
- sergioro 6y ago
  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.
  - 6y ago
aapl88888 6y ago
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 https://github.com/cjph8914/2020_benfords
- yorwba 6y ago
  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 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.
X3Xs4gF9oB 6y ago
Here's a new paper from Walter Mebane (University of Michigan Political Science and Statistics) on inappropriate applications of Benford's Law to the 2020 election: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wmebane/inapB.pdf http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wmebane/inapB.pdf

13 points by sergioro 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

taxicab 6y ago

This is the third time this conspiracy theory has been submitted here. Knock it off.

sergioro 6y ago
Please tell us why this is a conspiracy theory. The article has references to the data sources, including web-archived snapshots of official government websites.
maxharris 6y ago
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...
- taxicab 6y ago
  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 in materials science so that he can understand for himself that jet fuel doesn't melt steel beams. Trump's polling numbers also don't follow Benford's law in some cases. That's because there is no direct causation between legitimate elections and a Benford's law style distribution. The fixation on wildly cherry picked data and missaplied statistics is the conspiracy theory. There are already court cases with the best experts in the land looking at the counts. Guess what? They are starting to be laughed out of court because they have no evidence to support their claims. It is either supremely arrogant or delusional to claim that you have found this thing that you spent five minutes learning about on the internet that proves magically that the Democrats stole the election while world renowned experts aren't able to prove it to a judge. There is no liberal conspiracy to steal an election. Trump made the same claim in 2016. He made it during the Republican primaries about his opponents (that they cheated him). He said the system was rigged when he settled the fraud lawsuite for trump university. Hell... he even said he was being cheated when his tv show wasn't awarded an Emmy. This is just what he does and instead of spreading lies he needs to accept that he lost (probably... we'll see soon) and stop dividing the country.
  - sergioro 6y ago
    > occurred in front of hundreds of bipartisan observers There is evidence that in PA and MI republicans were not allowed to observe the vote counting. Why are they not allowed to observe? > There is no liberal conspiracy to steal an election. Trump made the same claim in 2016. In WI, MI there hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots all arriving after election day. And they almost entirely for one candidate. I don't remind this happening in 2016, or never in US history.
    - taxicab 6y ago
      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)
      - sergioro 6y ago
        > 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 prevented from observing the vote count, and apparently some observers were kept so far away that they had to use binoculars to observe.
        vaidhy 6y ago
        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.
maxharris 6y ago
If you are downvoting me, I would appreciate it if you simply read my comment all the way through before doing it. I am not your enemy, nor am I yours. I would appreciate it if you’d be just a little kinder.
- taxicab 6y ago
  It's not possible to downvote immediate replies on HN.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
aapl88888 6y ago
You can analyze the data yourself. There are sources and python scripts included https://github.com/cjph8914/2020_benfords https://github.com/cjph8914/2020_benfords

handmodel 6y ago

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 most publicized election of all time.

maxharris 6y ago
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 https://twitter.com/statsguyphd/status/1324352213595181059
- pedrosorio 6y ago
  Take a look at this: https://mobile.twitter.com/gelbach/status/1324760993692590081 https://mobile.twitter.com/gelbach/status/132476099369259008...
  - maxharris 6y ago
    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.
sergioro 6y ago
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.
- 6y ago

aapl88888 6y ago

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 https://github.com/cjph8914/2020_benfords

yorwba 6y ago
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 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.

X3Xs4gF9oB 6y ago

Here's a new paper from Walter Mebane (University of Michigan Political Science and Statistics) on inappropriate applications of Benford's Law to the 2020 election: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wmebane/inapB.pdf http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wmebane/inapB.pdf