> Benford's Law seems pretty obvious once you think about it. Nate Silver actually did a bit of analysis on it around the time of the 2009 Iranian elections an

> Benford's Law seems pretty obvious once you think about it. Nate Silver actually did a bit of analysis on it around the time of the 2009 Iranian elections and the Al Franken-Norm Coleman recount. In short, he explained that while it does hold in certain circumstances, it's not really a 'law' that can be applied very broadly, unfortunately, even if the idea makes sense intuitively. For example, I believe he said that the Iranian ballots did not follow Benford's law, but that this was not necessarily very problematic, because election results in general have no reason to follow Benford's law. (I don't have the link, but that should be enough to find it in the 538 archives for anyone who's interested).