Allegations of Fraud in 2020 US Election

[wareyin]

We don't have to assume votes follow Benford's Law, we can observe that they do. And US populations do follow Benford's Law.

The problem with your claim (aside from the skewed y axis already pointed out) is that no, votes are in fact not observed to follow Benfords Law. It's a "coin flip".

And your source is presenting some unknown snapshot of vote counts taken before the vote count is even completed, assuming that their numbers are even correct. Given how misleading and incorrect the rest of the claim is, I'm inclined to doubt the numbers are any more accurate.

Eta: as for the US population, is suggest you check the "Distributions known to disobey Benfords Law" section from your link.

 

[Paul2]

Of course he's addressing the second charts, not the first ones. But the first ones, the first digit distribution (not the second digit distribution) are the really damning ones. And adjusting the vertical scale can't rescue them.

You'd know that if you understood Benford's Law.

Furthermore, I don't know where those second digit graphs came from, but they aren't part of the link I gave, so even assuming dishonesty on the part of whoever made those graphs, it's not really relevant to my link.

So do your civic duty and report this to the authorities. I want to hear what they say. Keep us apprised (as Rachel Madow likes to say).

I wonder if this type of statistical analysis is admissible as evidence for fraud in court or before a judge. Any precedent on that?

Remember, that these statistics can either be (1) evidence in and of themselves that fraud was perpetrated, or (2) merely suggestive of fraud that would require more investigation to see if fraud actually occurred. Let's remember to not confuse the two.

 

[Meadmaker]

I haven't done a deep dive into the Benford's law thing, so I can't dismiss it completely out of hand, but there are several things that aren't passing the sniff test for me. Central to all of them is this comment from one of the paragraphs.

"Biden’s Vote Tallies Violate Benford’s Law"

What? Which vote tallies? What does that mean? When people say "elections follow Benford's law", what does that mean? The specific site I was mentioning referred specifically to Allegheny County. So.....what are those vote tallies?

I guess they must be precinct by precinct vote counts? That's the only thing I can think of where there might be numbers that could be selected for a dataset.

Well, precincts are chosen to be a reasonable number of voters for poll workers to handle. They are deliberately set up so that they have somewhere between a couple of hundred or maybe 1,000 or so voters.

Benford's law only works if the quantities being measured span several orders of magnitude. Without that, the law doesn't work. Really. That's what causes the phenomenon. So, if you take something that was deliberately chosen to NOT vary across several orders of magnitude, then it would be rather bizarre if it followed Benford's law.

Like I say, it's conceivable that someone, somewhere, who understood Benford's Law and actually did a correct analysis has uncovered something fishy, but so far I haven't actually seen anyone who has given any indication that they understand the law, understand how to apply it, or have made any meaninful computations about it.

Maybe something will come up.

 

[johnny karate]

Please don't. We don't have to take part in this ****, and doing so now could be harmful. Ignore him.

Please note, I'm not saying that you should ignore what the Trumpkins are trying to do to your country, but simply that directly engaging them when they are trying to sow distrust in democracy by endlessly discussing **** like this is actually causing harm.

I understand your concerns but do not agree that they apply to discussions on this forum.

In general, I think that we should give these clowns as many opportunities as possible to embarrass themselves.

 

[shuttlt]

Well, precincts are chosen to be a reasonable number of voters for poll workers to handle. They are deliberately set up so that they have somewhere between a couple of hundred or maybe 1,000 or so voters.

Do you have a cite for this? The great and reliable Wikipedia has things like "the surface areas of 335 rivers" and "the street addresses of the first 342 persons listed in American Men of Science" as examples of things the law applies to. The law itself was first observed in the pages of log tables which I don't think have orders of magnitude more pages than this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford's_law#Example

 

[The Great Zaganza]

Has anyone addressed the fact that all State Officials say there was no significant problem?

This is not a Trump-Biden issue, this is a Trump-State issue.

 

[Skeptic Tank]

No, his claims that massive voter fraud has taken place.

Do you believe those claims?

It seems to me that he was indicating he strongly suspected it, rather than that he was asserting in an ironclad manner that he knew it to be the case.

Either way, I'm not really in the business of believing or not believing his claims. I find it believable, but I'm not like firmly signing off on it or something.

I am certainly prepared to believe shenanigans of the sort he's suggesting did happen. There's other info I'm seeing that already had me thinking that was very likely.

Basically I'd like anything that results in further division and historic meltdowns from BLM / Antifa / the left to be true or come to be believed as true.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrQIG99IZQ0

 

[Meadmaker]

Do you have a cite for this? The great and reliable Wikipedia has things like "the surface areas of 335 rivers" and "the street addresses of the first 342 persons listed in American Men of Science" as examples of things the law applies to. The law itself was first observed in the pages of log tables which I don't think have orders of magnitude more pages than this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford's_law#Example

As they say, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

You are absolutely correct that it was first observed on the pages of log tables.

In fact, what the mathematician observed is that, in the 19th century, when he went to a library and pulled out book of logarithm tables, he observed that the pages with the 9s were not as well worn as the pages with the 1s. This, he thought, was very odd.

What log tables are used for is to take really big or really small numbers and make it easy to do math on them with addition instead of large multiplications. Why would people be more interested in numbers that start with 1 than in numbers that start with 9? He thought about it, figured out why, and came up with Benford's law.

(I don't remember if that guy was Benford. Benford may have been someone else who discovered it independently.)


It isn't the number of pages in the log book that follow Benford's law. It isn;t even the numbers on the pages. It's the number of times people looked up a specific page in a book of logarithms, because the phenomena they were doing calculations on spanned wide orders of magnitude. As a result, they were more likely to look up the logarithm of soemthing that started with 1 than something that started with 9.

 

[acbytesla]

It seems to me that he was indicating he strongly suspected it, rather than that he was asserting in an ironclad manner that he knew it to be the case.

Either way, I'm not really in the business of believing or not believing his claims. I find it believable, but I'm not like firmly signing off on it or something.

I am certainly prepared to believe shenanigans of the sort he's suggesting did happen. There's other info I'm seeing that already had me thinking that was very likely.

Basically I'd like anything that results in further division and historic meltdowns from BLM / Antifa / the left to be true or come to be believed as true.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrQIG99IZQ0

Koo Koo for Cocoa Puffs!

Needs to be repeated.

In other words, you believe all the conspiracy theory bs without a shred of evidence. Good one Tank!

More than 4 million Americans voted for Biden over Trump. So please please please keep up the whining about a few thousand questionable votes cast here and there. You're only highlighting how ridiculous that Trump ever became President since he was outvoted in that election by 3 million votes.

 

[crescent]

Has Orly entered the fray yet?

 

[Dave Rogers]

Of course he's addressing the second charts, not the first ones. But the first ones, the first digit distribution (not the second digit distribution) are the really damning ones.

They're addressed further down the page. Benford's Law only really works with datasets spanning many orders of magnitude, and doesn't work at all well with the sort of data being looked at. Add in the cherry picking effect and the fact that an over-representation of leading 1's is no less a violation of Benford's Law than an under-representation - which the source strongly suggests it doesn't - and it becomes seriously unconvincing. And did you see the bit where the source that supposedly states Benford's Law is useful to detect election fraud actually says it isn't?

Dave

 

[Upchurch]

Of course he's addressing the second charts, not the first ones. But the first ones, the first digit distribution (not the second digit distribution) are the really damning ones. And adjusting the vertical scale can't rescue them.

Other answers on that page address the Chicago data and it's small size.

So, what kind of fraud are you claiming?

 

[Meadmaker]

Do you have a cite for this? The great and reliable Wikipedia has things like "the surface areas of 335 rivers" and "the street addresses of the first 342 persons listed in American Men of Science" as examples of things the law applies to. The law itself was first observed in the pages of log tables which I don't think have orders of magnitude more pages than this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford's_law#Example

I'm not sure if you are asking for a cite about distributions and Benford's law, or about precinct sizes. If the former, here's a quote from the wikipedia article:

It tends to be most accurate when values are distributed across multiple orders of magnitude, especially if the process generating the numbers is described by a power law (which is common in nature).

 

[Stacyhs]

All we have are allegations of voter fraud by a pathological lying POTUS who has been claiming for months that the only way he'd lose is due to voter cheating. Not a single confirmed case of significant voter fraud that would affect the outcome of any election has been proved. Are there individual cases of voter fraud? No doubt. An ISF member has told us of his own Trump supporting family forging his dying father's signature on the ballot. But enough to change the outcome of the election? What evidence do we have of that? We have courts throwing out Trump's lawsuits for lack of evidence, fake videos, and disproved claims. We have the Lt. Gov of Georgia, a Trump supporting Republican, publicly stating he has seen no evidence of voter fraud. Maryland GOP Gov. Hogan says the same thing. While some GOP governors are standing with Trump, they are wording their support carefully by saying they want all legal votes counted which falls far short of backing his claims that fraud is taking place.

 

[Resume]

Has Orly entered the fray yet?

No, please no.

 

[wareyin]

I'm not sure if you are asking for a cite about distributions and Benford's law, or about precinct sizes. If the former, here's a quote from the wikipedia article:

I don't know about you, but I for one get tired of people who cited an article needing to have it pointed out that the information they are either asking for (in this case) or arguing against (in Zigs case) is actually in the page they cited.

 

[shuttlt]

As they say, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

You are absolutely correct that it was first observed on the pages of log tables.

In fact, what the mathematician observed is that, in the 19th century, when he went to a library and pulled out book of logarithm tables, he observed that the pages with the 9s were not as well worn as the pages with the 1s. This, he thought, was very odd.

What log tables are used for is to take really big or really small numbers and make it easy to do math on them with addition instead of large multiplications. Why would people be more interested in numbers that start with 1 than in numbers that start with 9? He thought about it, figured out why, and came up with Benford's law.

(I don't remember if that guy was Benford. Benford may have been someone else who discovered it independently.)


It isn't the number of pages in the log book that follow Benford's law. It isn;t even the numbers on the pages. It's the number of times people looked up a specific page in a book of logarithms, because the phenomena they were doing calculations on spanned wide orders of magnitude. As a result, they were more likely to look up the logarithm of soemthing that started with 1 than something that started with 9.

You are right about the logbook and the pages not being the thing. However, I don't see that the same objection applies to the other two examples.

Where are you getting the requirement for so many orders of magnitude?

 

[Meadmaker]

You are right about the logbook and the pages not being the thing. However, I don't see that the same objection applies to the other two examples.

Where are you getting the requirement for so many orders of magnitude?

From the wikipedia page about Benford's Law, although I was familiar with it long before I read the wikipedia page.


Well, not long before. I had never heard of Benford's Law before I saw the Netflix show about it this summer. I think the name of the series had the word "Connected" in it. Kind of entertaining, although it tiptoed a bit too close to wooish for my tastes.

 

[shuttlt]

I'm not sure if you are asking for a cite about distributions and Benford's law, or about precinct sizes. If the former, here's a quote from the wikipedia article:

It tends to be most accurate when values are distributed across multiple orders of magnitude, especially if the process generating the numbers is described by a power law (which is common in nature).

Ok, so this says it tends to be more accurate the more orders of magnitude you have... sure. You are claiming that it is too inaccurate based on a sample size ~1000 to be used. The wikipedia article cites examples that seem to be in the low to mid hundreds. What are you basing your claim that it is too inaccurate to use to evaluate these cases on?

 

[Meadmaker]

It is not and never has been about the popular vote.

Neither is this thread, unless you want to put forth an allegation that the popular vote was stolen.