Why do Biden's votes not follow Benford's Law?
Why Hacker News recommends it
Commenters cite it as a visual debunking of Benford-based election fraud claims and as a guide to when Benford's Law does and does not apply.
What it is
Matt Parker examines claims that Biden's 2020 vote counts violate Benford's Law, explaining the law and why it often does not apply to precinct-level election data.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2020 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends nitrogen · 2020-12 · on “California Public Utilities Commission fired director who exposed missing $200M”
I am replying for the sake of the hidden sibling comment: I don't watch any major media coverage of politics, but a mathematician and comedian I follow on YouTube (from a different country who presumably has no horse in the race) has analyzed some of the numerical allegations of fraud: - [LINK] - [LINK] - [this video]
Recommends MrJohz · 2023-04 · on “Investigating and preventing scientific misconduct with Benford’s law”
Matt Parker did a good video with lots of visuals to explain why Benford's Law works in general, but why it cannot always be simply applied to election results. [this video]
Cites tzs · 2020-11 · on “Trump says he fired top cybersecurity official Christopher Krebs”
Precincts in most places are designed to have roughly the same number of voters. Hence, Benford's law does not work for them. Here's a good explanation, using Chicago precinct data [1]. A good rule of thumb is that if Benford's law does not apply to the legal voter population of your precincts/counties/wards/districts/whatever, or when applied to the total number of registered voters in those areas, then it won't apply to the results of a fair election either. (This is why if you ask every adult you know their height in inches and then look at the distribution of first digits, it will look nothing at all like a Benford's law distribution. The heights are going to be the sum of two normal dis
Cites ehsankia · 2021-01 · on “U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests”
> Can you link me to those majority of cases? [LINK] [this video] And this third one just shows how much of a joke some of the claims in the lawsuits are: [LINK] Like, this is basic high school level statistics they can't even get right.
Cites contravariant · 2021-07 · on “Using Benford’s Law to Detect Bitcoin Manipulation”
Benford's law doesn't give much of a guarantee except in highly specific scenarios. You can however show it's pretty accurate if you've got a 'smooth' probability distribution spanning multiple orders of magnitude (how much of a guarantee you can give depends on how specific you define what it means to be 'smooth'). The rigged elections example you gave was, I believe, mostly explained by the fact that the number of votes they were looking at were all roughly the same order of magnitude [1]. [1]: [this video]
Cites gdavisson · 2023-04 · on “Investigating and preventing scientific misconduct with Benford’s law”
I don't know about that particular analysis, but there've been a number of such claims that don't stand up (mostly because, as you ask, the districts themselves don't follow Benford's law). See, for example, "Inappropriate Applications of Benford’s Law Regularities to Some Data from the 2020 Presidential Election in the United States" by Walter R. Mebane, Jr. [0], and "Why do Biden's votes not follow Benford's Law?" by Matt Parker [1]. This fits the general pattern that there's been a lot of suspicion raised about fraud in the 2020 election, but none of it actually seems to pan out. [0] [LINK] [1] [this video]
Cites runarberg · 2024-03 · on “How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers”
First of all it looks at suspiciously limited data (Oct 26th to Nov 11th) when we know more data is available. This is a known tactic from climate deniers who claim e.g. that data from a single weather station in Canada from October 2006 to June 2014 shows the world is actually cooling. Second of all it makes vague assumptions about distributions without clarifying or even justifying why it should have a different distribution. This is straight from the playbook of Trump’s election denialism where some variation of election results was somehow proof of tampering[1]. With statistics you can find any results you want if you look at limited enough data from a large enough pool, and you can find
Cites adgjlsfhk1 · 2024-08 · on “Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election”
Precints have roughly even populations and therefore typically don't conform to Benford's law. [this video]