- Joined
- Aug 16, 2020
FYI this partI am literally an Engineer.
Yes it is a mathematical proof, but what is the key thing we ALWAYS CHECK??? The Data set to see if there are any outliers.
Is the Mathematical proof applicable to this situation?
Now i have not worked with Benfords law as it is not applicable to my kind of work. I don't deal with money or any thing that would benefit from this kind of analysis.
I found this on Wikipedia as i read op on how it works.
Election data
Benford's law has been controversially used as evidence of fraud in the 2009 Iranian elections.[34] A 2011 study by the political scientists Joseph Deckert, Mikhail Myagkov, and Peter C. Ordeshook argued that Benford's law is highly problematic and misleading as a statistical indicator of election fraud.[35] The method was also criticized by Walter Mebane.[36]
So did some digging on this claim and the paper who sited it.
Source (35)
This is the article, but not to bore you and as this is my day off i will not dig into it more then a few things.
From the Article. Part of the Conclusion page 16. 9 Lines down.
it, in combination with what we know about the stochastic processes sufficient to yield digits in conformity with Benford’s Law, is that the Law is not universally applicable magic box into which we plug election statistics and out of which comes an assessment of an election’s legitimacy. This is not to say it is fruitless to search for special electoral contexts in which 2BL has some relevance, but our analysis suggests that the data required to validate that relevance must be richer than simple election returns
Now they could be wrong, but i am going to trust experts with nothing to gain in this over random people on the internet and this is literally the Dunning Kruger effect.
Now i am willing to hear your explanation why the Benford's Law is applicable and why it works with the current data set??.
"A 2011 study by the political scientists Joseph Deckert, Mikhail Myagkov, and Peter C. Ordeshook argued that Benford's law is highly problematic and misleading as a statistical indicator of election fraud.[35] The method was also criticized by Walter Mebane.[36]"
Was added on Nov 5th. Too lazy to grab the version before that but it basically said that not everyone agreed it was applicable to elections. That part that led to the citation you looked at was added explicitly because of current events.
EDIT: A good way to test this btw would just be to grab election data from around the world and see if the law holds true and note where anomalies lie. If someone compiles data I think it'd be reasonably easy to just run the numbers in any programming language or spreadsheet software of choice.