2020_benfords

This is the relevant investigation https://github.com/cjph8914/2020_benfords

From a comment: > This repo is attempting to apply Benford's Law to vote count distribution, so that's what actually needs to span multiple orders of magnitude. Precinct distribution is a factor in vote count distribution but it doesn't tell the whole story. I don't see the Milwaukee data in this repo, but take a look at the Chicago data: https://github.com/cjph8914/2020_benfords/blob/main/data/chi... Biden's vote totals are solidly contained within one order of magnitude, the 100-999 range. Trump's vote totals range from single digits into the hundreds, across three orders of magnitude. Jo Jorgensen is mostly in the 0-20 range, across two orders of magnitude.

I stumbled across the analysis below. Without wanting to be political, I'm sure that there is some valid explanation, but I'm curious. They Jupyter notebooks on github here: https://github.com/cjph8914/2020_benfords seem to show discrepancies in electoral data in Alleghany PA, Chicago IL, and Milwaukee WI. What is missing from their analysis? Is there a way to explain this (bad data, bad analysis, etc)? Should oddities be examined more closely?

https://github.com/cjph8914/2020_benfords/issues/9 for more context.

Benford's law relates to a method for finding manipulation of data, such as election results. More on that here: https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=46343 See GitHub for sources and charts. https://github.com/cjph8914/2020_benfords

What's convincing about it? The author doesn't even first verify that population sizes in each precinct/ward follow Benford's law before trying to apply it to the vote counts. If you read the issues, someone already pointed out that the distribution is not wide enough to expect Benford's law to hold even in principle https://github.com/cjph8914/2020_benfords/issues/9 The underlying issue is that vote counts are tallied over regions whose size and population are chosen to fall into reasonable bounds, so they don't follow a power law like e.g. the size of cities.

Here's the research and code. It's all open source. I find it very convincing but that's just me. Do your own analysis https://github.com/cjph8914/2020_benfords

You can analyze the data yourself. There are sources and python scripts included https://github.com/cjph8914/2020_benfords

Github code: https://github.com/cjph8914/2020_benfords

Check the issues as well https://github.com/cjph8914/2020_benfords/issues/3

I posted this mostly to see what people smarter than me think about it, as I haven’t seen anyone properly “debunk” this yet. The guy uploaded the code (and ran it on some other states) here: https://github.com/cjph8914/2020_benfords