Brazil slides back into the mire - Benford's Law

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Showed up here in 2020 too.  From CD Media:

Forensic Experts Suggest Mathematical “Red Flags” In First Round of Brazilian Presidential Election, Cites Benford’s Law
This dossier was provided to us by a credible expert source and was created by a small group of technical experts in the fields of mathematics, political science, and forensic analysis, all who are well versed in election statistics and electoral anomalies.

The source provided this document and demonstrated the credibility of the authors who are presenting here their statistical findings on the first round of the Brazilian elections (held Sunday October 2nd).

The source group applied Benford’s Law, a highly recognized statistical formula, to analyze publicly available data provided by the Brazilian Electoral Court (TSE). The formula showed inconsistencies in voting tabulation in several regions across the country.

The links to the TSE’s publicly available data is in the document, and other experts are invited to conduct the same Benford’s Law test on the data. The voting tabulation graphs are also available — showing the region, the candidate, and the digit analyzed. Several charts show Benford’s Law curve in a certain format, while the actual curve of the vote tabulation veers completely off from it. This is what points to manipulation according to the expert source.

Much more at the site.
Some very large irregularities in the 2020 elections too - close swing-states that Biden "won".

Benford's Law is pretty immutable when it comes to a random distribution of numbers. 
Some history from InfoGalactic:

The discovery of Benford's law goes back to 1881, when the American astronomer Simon Newcomb noticed that in logarithm tables the earlier pages (that started with 1) were much more worn than the other pages. Newcomb's published result is the first known instance of this observation and includes a distribution on the second digit, as well. Newcomb proposed a law that the probability of a single number N being the first digit of a number was equal to log(N + 1) − log(N).

The phenomenon was again noted in 1938 by the physicist Frank Benford, who tested it on data from 20 different domains and was credited for it. His data set included the surface areas of 335 rivers, the sizes of 3259 US populations, 104 physical constants, 1800 molecular weights, 5000 entries from a mathematical handbook, 308 numbers contained in an issue of Reader's Digest, the street addresses of the first 342 persons listed in American Men of Science and 418 death rates. The total number of observations used in the paper was 20,229. This discovery was later named after Benford (making it an example of Stigler's Law).

It is used a lot in accounting as a "sniff test" for fraud.  It is simple and it works.

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This page contains a single entry by DaveH published on October 30, 2022 5:01 PM.

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