Benford's Law…The Forensic Accounting Tool That Could Reveal Almost Any Election Fraud
A test commonly used in forensic accounting called the Second-Digit Benford’s Law (2BL) just might make it possible to spot a numerical irregularity just by looking at it.
The story behind the test itself, favored by statisticians, is fascinating. According to TK, physicist Frank Benford was working at the GE Research Laboratories in the 1920s when he noticed that there seemed to be more numbers with low first digits in the data sets he worked with. After testing numerous geographic, scientific, and demographic distributions, Benford calculated the expected frequencies for particular digits appearing in a particular position.
For example, if we have a set of numbers that includes the number 154, Benford’s Law predicts a 30 percent chance that 1 would be the first digit, and about a 9.6 percent chance that 5 would be the second digit. Therefore, if you look at a distribution and see a lot of numbers with the digit 5 in the second position, it implies something strange is going on.(see pic)
But how does Benford’s Law help us detect election fraud? Some mathematicians argue that an application of Benford’s Law called the Second-Digit Benford’s Law (2BL) test can be applied to vote totals to detect irregularities that may indicate fraud. Dr. Walter Mebane, a professor at the University of Michigan, has done substantial work on the application of the 2BL test to vote counts, and argues that 2BL can be used to detect potential voting irregularities. In 2004, he applied 2BL to known fraudulent elections in Philadelphia, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland. In three instances, the 2BL test detected the voting irregularities. He applied the test again in 2009 to the highly-contested Iranian presidential election with similar findings. Similarly, The Guardian applied the 2BL test to Vladimir Putin’s 2012 landslide victory in Russia’s presidential elections, and found numerical shenanigans.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-forensic-accounting-tool-that-could-reveal-almost-any-election-fraud