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Allegations of Fraud in 2020 US Election

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ServiceSoon said:
And the definition of a word by one of the many official trustworthy institutions has been altered the day after a Supreme Court candidate used said word during an interview. The phrase which best describes this phenomena is ‘information war.’
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What annoys me is that my first instinct is still to trust these sources, then something causes me to catch myself and I check and they've tricked me again.
 
shuttlt said:
Unpack the logic here. If I am wrong and the forum is truly skeptical, then of course my evidence will fall short. If I am right, and the forum is becoming more and more of an ideologically possessed echo chamber, then my argument wouldn't be successful either. It would be a derail, and a logically pointless derail at that.
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True. And you can always cling to that because people aren't buying your arguments. Sounds like an excuse to me.

shuttlt said:
I haven't been linking to Joe the Plumber. back in the days when this was a skeptic forum there was a saying that went something like "there is no theory so bizarre that you can't find somebody with a PhD to support it". Scouring the Google for a study or two whose abstract seems to agree with you is not a good way to find out the truth.
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Maybe you can. But that doesn't mean the arguments are cogent. You can always find sellouts to deny global warming or to make a nonsense economics argument. I agree. But rarely do you get very many individuals to sacrifice their credibility so they are rarely more than a small minority.
 
dirtywick said:
I’ll be honest I’ve never heard of Benfords law. But if Benfords law indicates a fraudulent election, but you are unable to identify any fraud of any sort and the only indication that it was fraudulent was that Benfords law said so, maybe Benfords law isn’t very good at identifying election fraud.
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Typically you would have to do some kind of investigation to identify the specific nature of the fraud/error/whatever. It is quite hard based on pure election numbers to identify such specifics. That's why you do manual recounts, and check what ever documentation and witnesses exist, as was done to varying degrees by Clinton, Gore and Nixon just off the top of my head.
 
shuttlt said:
Typically you would have to do some kind of investigation to identify the specific nature of the fraud/error/whatever. It is quite hard based on pure election numbers to identify such specifics. That's why you do manual recounts, and check what ever documentation and witnesses exist, as was done to varying degrees by Clinton, Gore and Nixon just off the top of my head.
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Did Benfords law indicate fraud in any of those cases? Has it ever been used to predict fraud successfully?
 
acbytesla said:
Maybe you can. But that doesn't mean the arguments are cogent. You can always find sellouts to deny global warming or to make a nonsense economics argument. I agree. But rarely do you get very many individuals to sacrifice their credibility so they are rarely more than a small minority.
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Sure, which is why relying on one or two studies that happen to appear to agree with you out of a great number in a field that, I presume, you aren't familiar with is foolish. It's not as if arguing against some aspect of or use of Benford's law has the same political baggage as arguing against Global Warming regardless of the merits, so I don't think your analogy holds.
 
dirtywick said:
Did Benfords law indicate fraud in any of those cases? Has it ever been used to predict fraud successfully?
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I don't think my argument relies on that being the case. Circumstantial indications of fraud would typically mean you would have to investigate to find out what if any fraud actually occurred. I believe that broadly similar arguments were made in the Nixon case as we are getting now and that some pretty huge irregularities were found when the ballots were recounted.
 
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shuttlt said:
There is a difference between saying "I don't think it occurred" and saying "it didn't occur", or "it's been debunked". Also, it isn't true that there is "no evidence". The evidence just isn't conclusive.
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Is it your position that there exists evidence of mass voter fraud?
 
shuttlt said:
Sure, which is why relying on one or two studies that happen to appear to agree with you out of a great number in a field that, I presume, you aren't familiar with is foolish. It's not as if arguing against some aspect of or use of Benford's law has the same political baggage as arguing against Global Warming regardless of the merits, so I don't think your analogy holds.
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Frankly, I don't understand Benford's law.

Still, I remain highly skeptical of any mathematical model offered as evidence of fraud. At best you can say is that the results don't appear to follow a mathematical model and nothing else. I also know that people lie using numbers all the time.

In computer programming, we use the term GIGO.
 
Segnosaur said:
Where exactly is Barr's actual allegations of Fraud?

Memo doesn't say that their was anything specific they were going to investigate. Just a catch-all "If we get evidence we will investigate".

For a lying sack of crud like Barr, that's pretty non-committal.
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Haaaa. I copied and pasted the title of it, shouldn't have done that.
 
I must admit the one thing I didn't think I would be doing when starting this thread is discussing mathematics of this sort.

I read a couple of things that confused me. shutit has been talking about the last digit of a set of numbers, and whether or not the distribution of it follows Benford's Law. I hadn't addressed it, but it struck me as very odd. Why would the last digit follow Benford's Law? I know why the first follows Benford's Law. I was puzzled thinking about the second digit, but I eventually figured out why it, too, would follow Benford's Law.

But why would the last digit follow Benford's Law? That makes no sense.....but I didn't want to say anything because I wasn't sure. Well, now I'm sure. The last digit of anything won't follow Benford's Law.


Benford's law "happens", because uniformly spaced digits are used to measure phenomenon with exponential characteristics. The "last digit" isn't exponential.

And, as it turns out, neither is the first digit of precinct data. If the probability that Joe Biden would score between 1 and 10 votes was equal to the probability that he would score between 10 and 100 votes, and that probability was equal to the probability he would score between 100 and 1000 votes, then the exact number of votes would follow Benford's Law. It isn't and it doesn't.
 
shuttlt said:
I don't think my argument relies on that being the case. Circumstantial indications of fraud would typically mean you would have to investigate to find out what if any fraud actually occurred. I believe that broadly similar arguments were made in the Nixon case as we are getting now and that some pretty huge irregularities were found when the ballots were recounted.
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Long way of saying no
 
johnny karate said:
Is it your position that there exists evidence of mass voter fraud?
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Defends what you mean my "mass" and "voter fraud". There is at least as much evidence that something isn't right as there was before the recount in 1960 discovered mass "human frailty". Naturally prior to an investigation, it's circumstantial.
 
shuttlt said:
Sure, which is why relying on one or two studies that happen to appear to agree with you out of a great number in a field that, I presume, you aren't familiar with is foolish. It's not as if arguing against some aspect of or use of Benford's law has the same political baggage as arguing against Global Warming regardless of the merits, so I don't think your analogy holds.
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You keep claiming that the multiple studies presented which show Benfords Law does not apply to elections are somehow not representative of the consensus. Yet you've failed to bring one drop of evidence that vote counts do obey Benfords Law. Why not show us these many more studies that do agree with your take and show how wrong the, according to you, lone crank PhDs who wrote these papers are?
 
acbytesla said:
Frankly, I don't understand Benford's law.

Still, I remain highly skeptical of any mathematical model offered as evidence of fraud. At best you can say is that the results don't appear to follow a mathematical model and nothing else. I also know that people lie using numbers all the time.

In computer programming, we use the term GIGO.
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I'm aware of that. It seems to me that one reason to have some confidence here is that this technique has clearly seen quite a bit of use over a long period of time in other elections, hence it isn't something that has been plucked from nowhere just to defend trump. It doesn't really matter though, since I very much doubt that these mathematical arguments, regardless of how off the data is, will in and of themselves be accepted as proof of anything. At most they help open the door for an investigation.
 
Segnosaur said:
Where exactly is Barr's actual allegations of Fraud?

Memo doesn't say that their was anything specific they were going to investigate. Just a catch-all "If we get evidence we will investigate".

For a lying sack of crud like Barr, that's pretty non-committal.
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It seems like a fine memo to me. It authorizes field agents to investigate credible allegations of voter fraud. Well, that's good. However, it also notes that there will be specious allegations, and those should not be investigated.

In other words, if something looks suspicious, look into it. If it's just cranks complaining, ignore them.

No harm done, really.
 
dirtywick said:
I’ll be honest I’ve never heard of Benfords law. But if Benfords law indicates a fraudulent election, but you are unable to identify any fraud of any sort and the only indication that it was fraudulent was that Benfords law said so, maybe Benfords law isn’t very good at identifying election fraud.
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Benford's Law does not indicate a fraudulent election any more than an x-ray indicates a fracture. Both processes provide you with information in order to go to the next level of evaluation. Predetermined criteria will be applied to the added knowledge for scrutiny.
 
Meadmaker said:
It seems like a fine memo to me. It authorizes field agents to investigate credible allegations of voter fraud. Well, that's good. However, it also notes that there will be specious allegations, and those should not be investigated.

In other words, if something looks suspicious, look into it. If it's just cranks complaining, ignore them.

No harm done, really.
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BS.

The DoJ has a long standing policy of not getting involved in elections, similar to their policy of not indicting sitting presidents.

So what happens today? Esper, who doesn't like the military involvement with protesters and called Trump out on it, is fired. He is replaced by a Trump yes-man, who has no problem with the Insurrection Act.

Then Barr has this memo allowing the federal DoJ to be involved in the election.
 
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