[maxharris]

> That's because there is no direct causation between legitimate elections and a Benford's law style distribution.

This doesn't make any sense to me. Why do we see it in physical constants and so many other places, but not election results?

I did look through that paper by Deckert, Myagkov and Ordeshook from the Wikipedia citation, and I find it extremely difficult to follow. (A literature search reveals a number of other papers with varying conclusions.) I haven't done any stats since college, and that was over a decade ago, so I don't claim to be an expert. Still, if you actually understand something, you should be able to explain it from first principles!

I did some more digging, and I did find this very well-written piece on Benford’s law. It is something I can actually follow: https://towardsdatascience.com/benfords-law-a-simple-explana...

In general, I think it is best to avoid argument from intimidation. I also don't think that linking conspiracy theorizing with someone that just wants to understand something better is a kind thing to do.

[taxicab]

> I haven't done any stats since college, and that was over a decade ago, so I don't claim to be an expert.

That's the whole point. This isn't my field of expertise and it certainly isn't yours. No offense, but the 45 minutes you spent between my post and this one is not a "literature review." I am a professional scientist and for my most recent publication it took me three weeks to cover the literature on my one narrow finding. That was already after spending the last five years in a PhD becoming an expert in my field! The three weeks was spent deeply reading almost every significant paper on the topic I was publishing on. That is what literature review means and you don't really understand the nuances of applying Benford's law to election fraud by spending 45 minutes browsing wikipedia and skimming abstracts.

If the political science experts who have spent decades studying the facts surrounding Benford's law disagree that it is a reliable indicator of fraud then what are we doing running sketchy analyses and then making huge leaps to claim it as "mathematical proof that the democrats stole the election." And yes, that is a conspiracy theory with all of the hallmarks of one. It is to the point that state election officials are having to waste their time to go on television and debunk literal lies and disinformation that are being broadcast by certain political figures. Judges are already tossing Trump's lawsuits because even his lawyers have to tell the judges that they have no evidence of fraud. The continued assertion that Democrats are "stealing the election" is the conspiracy theory here and it is literally dangerous. A bomb threat was called into a Philadelphia counting center. Vote counters are being escorted to and from counting locations by the police for their protection from armed mobs that are aggregating in some areas. You'll have to excuse me if I'm already tired of seeing these baseless claims show up over and over again when not even Trump himself can pull out evidence to support them when it comes time to do so in court.

If you want to learn about Benford's law then good on you. I think that it is a really interesting topic and there is some good entertainment to be had in learning about it. However, it's delusional for people like the author of this article to spend an evening learning about it and then act like it is the magic bullet from the Kennedy assassination.

[aapl88888]

There is a rebuttal to the paper you cited

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/political-analysis/a...

[salawat]

As an alleged scientist, I'd think you'd be much less likely to engage in "proof by credentials". Particularly here, on a site frequently traveled by folks who as a matter of habit tend to walk a path in life far more adjacent to the Arts (scientific, technological, and yes, sociological) than most.

To engage im brow beating of the person when you have data in front of you that shows admmittedly interesting skews evidences to an impartial observer an entrenched interest in avoiding the topic. You're doing the same type of thing I came down on people for during the 737 MAX fiasco, and as we've all found out, many of our "armchair experts" from that time ended up being right.

I have no love for either candidate, or the implication made by this data has for the country at large. In fact, that this is the most closely watched election in decades is exactly why these statistical anomalies are so important to look at. Not for Trummp's sake mind, but because usually there's no point in sweating it because most of the time there isn't really that much choice in candidate, so everyone just moves on and doesn't look that hard in the interests of keeping things moving along. Further, you have had drastic operational changes that have effected the efficacy of traditional poll watching. These statistical anomalies are the outcome. Claims that no one has evidence of any fraud in this is a bit llike claiming gerrymandering doesn't happen. It absolutely does, it just doesn't have a well formulated legal test making a determination that it has tenable in the Courts. There's a few drips of precedent around it here and there, but nothing to the scale of being in the national toolkit.

In a slight sense I agree with you; because I'm not sure that anyone wants to approach the can of worms created by dealing with the issue of "Okay, lets say this was a fraud. What then? Do over?" However, if life has taught me anything though, it's that nothing worth keeping and depending on is worth being spared the rigor of really testing and working out the warts of it from time to time. There is something odd afoot if we're heavily departing from historicals in so many places at once and if there is any merit to statistics at all as an auditing tool, and we rely upon these techniques elsewhere to perform as a sniff test, then you're either arguing the technique is flawed (which I don't fully buy; there being academic controversy on something doesn't disclude it from still being useful) and calling into doubt everything based on it; or you're asserting that for some reason Benford's magically doesn't work in the United States, and we've just capriciously used it as a specious reason to classify other country's elections as fraudulent for diplomatic purposes. Either of those is enough to justify some scrutiny. I don't, however, think the Courts are necessarily the right avenue for this disagreement to take place in.

In short, sit back, relax, and chew on the data. Forget how close to home it hits. Definitely don't dogpile those who are out of curiosity. Interesting times indeed.

If I had to offer up an interim solution for how the country should be run until any controversy gets resolved, I'd say that Executive authority should in a limited fashion be distributed to the cabinet as overseen by a re-affirmed Speaker of the House and Senate, working as co-equal partners. Not President and Vice President, but both together carrying equal weight. If one disagrees, the answer is no, if unanmity is reached on a direction, the answer is yes. The House and Senate must reaffirm any extension of that arrangement with a two thirds vote and Unanimous agreement between both houses. If the Congress can't manage to even do that, everyone gets dismissed and barred from reelection, and it goes back to the People to re-prime the pump. An alternative is to simply re-run the Presidential election. The Congressional statistics don't seem to be a subject of contention anywhere near as much as the Presidential. That seems to me the most consistent way to handle things given by my reading of the Federalist Papers, and other source material from around the Founding, and also has the perk of just kind of making sense given the current political situation.