Benford's Law and the Iranian Election(jgc.org)

38 pointsby jgrahamc17 anni fa11 comments

http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/06/benfords-law-and-iranian-election.html

5 comments

Thanks for writing that up in spite of the unspectacular negative finding.

Benford's law probably does not apply here. The data has to be distributed in a logarithmic fashion (or something close). This would be closer to applying Benford's law to the populations of the certain regions. In any case it just does not make sense to use it without a little justification.

tiberius17 anni fa

IANA(M/S/EE), but is this applicable? I thought Benford's Law applied to fabricated numbers, e.g. in expense reports. But wouldn't it be too obvious to just invent vote counts like that?

If the vote counts are not fabricated, but results of a manipulated process (i.e. miscounting votes), wouldn't that mean that Benford's law still applies?

yummyfajitas17 anni fa

Benford's law applies to probability distributions which are (roughly) uniform on a logarithmic scale, and which span over several orders of magnitude.

If a manipulated process generated such a distribution then it would satisfy Benford's law.

However, it isn't clear to me apriori why election returns should satisfy Benford's law, so I'm unsure why this test is meaningful to begin with.

jgrahamc17 anni fa

There's a professor at Ann Arbor who knows more about this than me :-) He's done work in this area and claims that Benford's Law's distribution for the second digit of vote counts can be significant. My little analysis appears to say "this data matches Benford's Law in the first and second digits"

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wmebane/

While searching for him I see that he's written a paper very similar to my little experiment about the Iranian election: http://www.umich.edu/~wmebane/note17jun2009.pdf

DanielBMarkham17 anni fa

It's a seven page PDF which reaches no conclusions.

Is it me, or couldn't he just say "Looked at this using Benford's Law. Can't say one way or the other."?

scott_s17 anni fa

You place no value on someone explaining their methods?

DanielBMarkham17 anni fa

I wasn't looking for a lecture, only an answer.

An "Executive Summary" at the beginning would have saved time for many readers, I believe.

wglb17 anni fa

In other words, make it so that the conclusion can be tweeted.

idiopathic17 anni fa

Exactly, I thought the allegations were not that they made up the numbers but that they swapped around one candidate's votes for another.

Very cool law though, it will come in useful in the future.

seb17 anni fa

Here is another paper about applying Benford's law to the iranian election: http://arxiv.org/pdf/0906.2789v1.pdf

[deleted]17 anni fa