Well first, it was published "Summer 2011", right at the top,
and second, why be snarky? Cambridge is clearly more reputable than some guy on YouTube...not to knock that guy, but he's still just some guy on youtube
I appreciate the link but still never heard of him; like most though, I've heard of Cambridge. Publishing on youtube requires no peer review or approval,so it's literally just some guy, and in the context here it's still odd to slap down Cambridge for a youtube video
Netflix's "Connected" had an episode which was probably prescient on this topic.
There was an election analyst at the end of the episode, who said that Benford's law is broken when people vote strategically against a candidate or change their vote when their preferred candidate drops out.
> Benford's law is broken when people vote strategically against a candidate or change their vote when their preferred candidate drops out.
That has nothing to do with why Benford's law doesn't work. Benford's law doesn't apply to precinct vote counts because precincts are roughly equally sized and Benford's law only applies to data that approximately follows a power law distribution and spans at least a few orders of magnitude.
> The only reason we are talking about fraud is because a narcissist said so, because he can’t accept he lost.
Suppose that's true. So what? We analyze the results. We apply science. It can't change the result if it wasn't supposed to.
You give the devil his due. Because then given the result doesn't change, you can't be accused of covering up a fraud when it wasn't actually there. Which is what happens in the alternative.
Casting doubts and entertaining the witch hunt is damaging the democracy by eroding the trust of people in the election system. Opening the way for a coup in the future.
Isn't that what the Russia gate did. It casted doubts about the election results for 4 years of his presidency. And still no definitive proof after 4 years. I don't understand the double standard now. I hope he pardons Snowden and Manning on the way out, as a final act of revenge on the system.
During the debates Biden pledged to wait for the vote to be certified before declaring victory.
That is absolutely not what Russiagate was about. No one, so far as I am aware, was claiming that the election results were improperly counted in 2016 [1]. Instead, Russiagate was about illegal Russian interference in, and potential Republican collaboration with, political advertising that may have swayed people's votes.
[1] In favor of the Republicans, I mean. Some Republicans, primarily Trump, did claim fraud in favor of the Democrats, but were unable to find any evidence for their claims.
The implication is that he committed a criminal act that he deserved to be impeached for (and indeed he was, although the Senate did not vote to convict), following the normal constitutional procedures. There is no implication that the election result should be annulled and the presidency should go to Clinton instead. Trump is no less an illegitimate president than Nixon, Bush, or Hayes was.
When discussing elections, "certified" without qualifications (or, equivalently, "legally certified" or "officially certified") conventionally refers to formal action by the government entity overseeing the election results declaring them legally final (potentially, pending certain appeals), whereas "independently certified" refers to a less formal declaration of the results by a third party other than the candidates and their proxies or government administrators such as election observers or independent media outlets.
Waiting for the election to be "independently certified", which is what Biden was asked about, is a very different thing than waiting for it to be "certified" without qualification.
> ...whereas "independently certified" refers to a less formal declaration of the results by a third party other than the candidates and their proxies or government administrators such as election observers or independent media outlets.
Can you provide a reference for that assertion? I tried to find it myself, the best thing I found is this blog post, describing the wording "independently certified" as curious:
If someone questions the election results and you respond by checking everything over and doing a manual recount and giving them every opportunity to make their case and it still doesn't go their way, you can claim with confidence that they were full of it. Shutting them down before that happens is how you erode the trust of people in the election system.
No one has suggested blocking recounts in states where the margin is close enough that one candidate is entitled to a recount. You are attacking a strawman.
One of their claims was voting machine irregularities where the machine would count votes for one candidate as being for the other. Doing a recount using the same voting machines could thereby preserve the alleged irregularity, which is why I specified a manual recount.
And no one is suggesting blocking a manual recount in the states where a candidate is entitled to one.
> Suppose that's true. So what? We analyze the results. We apply science. It can't change the result if it wasn't supposed to.
You are implying that it is perfectly fine for Trump to spread wild conspiracy theories with no evidence because if those conspiracy theories are false then they will be proven false and no harm will be done. Except irreparable harm WILL be done to the democratic process in America, because there are tens of millions of Americans who worship Trump as an infallible god and will forever believe his claim that the election was stolen from him, even if all the allegations are thoroughly debunked and no evidence turns up demonstrating any kind of fraud.
> And no one is suggesting blocking a manual recount in the states where a candidate is entitled to one.
There are plenty of people suggesting that Trump should concede immediately without going through any of those processes.
> You are implying that it is perfectly fine for Trump to spread wild conspiracy theories with no evidence because if those conspiracy theories are false then they will be proven false and no harm will be done.
The problem with Trump is that just about everything he says is a half-truth. It won't be entirely true but it also won't be entirely false.
Some people think he does this on purpose. It causes his opponents to cover him by pointing out the part that's false and his supporters to defend him by talking about the part that's true, but in either case they're both talking about Trump and they're both talking about the issue Trump wants people to talk about. I assume that anyone who can figure out how to get Trump to stop doing this would be awarded a Nobel Prize.
The trouble is that it means you can't just dismiss everything he says as a lie, because it's only half lie. I expect that when this is all over he'll have uncovered some modicum of voting irregularities but probably not enough to flip as many states as he needs to win, if any. But he's entitled to try.
Even in states without a close margin a risk limited audit should be automatically performed. The good thing is if the margin is big then you only need to recount a small number of votes to prove dodgy counting didn’t change the result.
> If someone questions the election results and you respond by
...demanding sufficient evidence that there is reason to expend resources looking for a problem before taking them seriously, especially if they are the apparently-defeated candidate.
> demanding sufficient evidence that there is reason to expend resources looking for a problem before taking them seriously
Isn't that what's happening? They make their claims, others dispute them, it's a public debate. The original post was an objection to "talking about fraud" -- but talking about it is part of the process of evaluating whether the evidence is sufficient. The answer could be no, but you don't know that before you hear them out.
> especially if they are the apparently-defeated candidate.
It would be interesting to know of a case in which the apparently-victorious candidate was making allegations of election fraud sufficient to affect the outcome.
> Suppose that's true. So what? We analyze the results. We apply science. It can't change the result if it wasn't supposed to.
If you're a heterosexual man, imagine asking your spouse for a paternity test on your children. And when that goes over like a lead balloon (which it would), imagine replying "So what? We analyze the results. We apply science. It can't change the result if it wasn't supposed to."
> you can't be accused of covering up a fraud that wasn't actually there. Which is what happens in the alternative.
So you think that Trump has no problem complaining about fraud when he has no evidence, but won't complain about fraud after an investigation shows there was none? Not a chance—he'll just complain that the investigation was a fraud as well.
There are two separate issues at stake though that are getting conflated.
One is of whether fraud happened. So far, the stuff before the courts have mostly been thrown out due to lack of evidence. Which supports the idea of due diligence and that the system works.
The second is whether the system itself is compromised. The problem here is that one can keep irrationally escalating accusations saying that the watchmen of the watchmen of the watchmen are all in cahoots. And we know from stuff like flat earth society that there are people willing to believe anything. The danger here is that if you have a large portion of the population and their political representatives believing that the system is rigged, that they might as well do everything in their power to rig it in their favor, which erodes the pillars of democracy.
I'm mildly curious about the details of Benford's law, etc., but one of the strongest signals that something is afoot is how widespread the censorship has been on this. When I see that, I start with the assumption that what's being censored is likely true.
The other night, I realized that of the various sources I trawl, some of the best analysis going on to knock down invalid theories of fraud is happening on TD. (Note that I said "best", not necessarily "good".) Why is this happening? Because those discussions have been wiped off of most other sites.
No matter how you feel about the claims, this is an appalling state of affairs.
Someone near and dear to me is in the Trump camp and claiming the election was stolen for no reason other than Trump's empty accusations. But now backing it up with conspiracy theory quality sources on the topic. How can I attempt to counter this with logic? What would you say to someone who believes this nonsense?
I would suggest that it would be wise to acknolage that it's a good thing to give our elections process some much-needed vigorous scrutiny and that you look forward to the outcome and look forward to making the process better.
Fraud happened. I suggest you go find those published affidavits for the current courts cases pending. I bet you didn't read ANY of those affidavits before you come to the conclusion of "he can't accept lost". Read it and then conclude he lost or maybe just maybe you have been in the bubble? Another confirmed news that don't trend in your usual news outlets are the servers retrieved from Germany. I let you do some home work rather than I dish you all the proves. You need to learn how to research and not just what FB or CCN tells you.
I make no claims of validity. So don't down vote me. Just reporting what is going on.
An hour ago Trump Tweeted:
“REPORT: DOMINION DELETED 2.7 MILLION TRUMP VOTES NATIONWIDE. DATA ANALYSIS FINDS 221,000 PENNSYLVANIA VOTES SWITCHED FROM PRESIDENT TRUMP TO BIDEN. 941,000 TRUMP VOTES DELETED. STATES USING DOMINION VOTING SYSTEMS SWITCHED 435,000 VOTES FROM TRUMP TO BIDEN"
I just posted a link to latest Trump tweet, and got flagged.
Don't understand why simply reporting something as relevant as what Trump tweeted is reason enough to get flagged. when its directly relevant to this article, and what your president tweeted is news worthy. When your president retweets that 2.7 million votes where deleted during this election by dominion software. I think thats pretty relevant to this article. Shocking as that is. I made no claims of its validity. Just simply the source.
If reposting Tumps (still your president) tweets is not allowed. Can I post the source behind his tweet.
Its crazy to me that both "Let him present his evidence" and censoring when he does present his evidence, comes from the same side.
Its clearly not relevant to this piece on the applicability of Benford's law. While I personally think its inappropriate for HN for a number of reasons, others might disagree and we have community moderation tools to resolve that disagreement, and it would at least be less inappropriate submitted as an independent story, rather than a comment on this one.
First paragraph, second sentence: "...as we examine the work of a dedicated Trump-supporter who appears to have uncovered all of the proof necessary to dispel this myth that Joe Biden won the presidential election."
This is nothing but sound and fury, signifying nothing, and hiding being dispassionate "no claims" doesn't absolve you from posting obvious inflammatory garbage.
> I just posted a link to latest Trump tweet, and got flagged.
The tweet you was about an item of political controversy excessively well-covered in the mainstream media (making it generally off-topic even as an independent story for HN), and was not at all germane to the post about Benford's law that it was offered as a comment on (making it off-topic as a comment on that post.)
There are venues in which linking that tweet might be appropriate, one can even imagine a hypothetical HN comment thread on which it might be on-topic. However, it wasn't on-topic where it was offered.
> Don't understand why simply reporting something as relevant as what Trump tweeted is reason enough to get flagged. when its directly relevant to this article
Trump's tweets -- well, this Trump tweet, I suppose its theoretically possibly he might sometime tweet something where this would not be true -- are completely irrelevant to the utility of Benford's law in detecting voting fraud.
> and what your president tweeted is news worthy
Conventional newsworthiness (because we have a conventional newsmedia) is generally tangential and often a negative to HN-relevance.
> When your president retweets that 2.7 million votes where deleted during this election by dominion software.
Were this a thread about Dominion software, or about the general incidence of electoral fraud, or about this particular election at all, there might be an argument that that was relevant. Its not, and its not.
> I made no claims of its validity
Even if the tweet were otherwise relevant, its validity, whether or not you make an explicit representation about it, is not irrelevant to the question of whether it should be upvoted, downvoted, flagged, or simply left unmoderated when presented here.
You claim is that its off topic. But how can it be off topic when Trumps tweet is about election fraud, and the title of post is also about election fraud. Both dominion and Branford's law use statistical results for proof where the overlap happens.
This standard doesn't really get held up in other discussions on here, people mention tangentially relevant things on here all the time.
The explanation is actually far simpler than the paper explains:
Benford's law requires that the dataset cross multiple orders of magnitude to kick in. Precincts are generally of the same order of magnitude of size (1000s of people), which is insufficient for Benford's law to apply.
It needs to both span multiple orders of magnitude and also obey a power law or similar distribution (although almost all natural data sets that span multiple orders of magnitude do).
No politics, so this shouldn't be here. But man... of all the things going around, the two HN posts trying to counter the fraid claims focus on the absolute weakest of those arguments. No one takes the Benford arguments seriously. People take the weakest arguments, "debunk" them and declare everything as bs. Which it might be, but other findings are orders of magnitude more significant than this.
56 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadStand-Up Maths on Youtube already beat you to it.
Netflix's "Connected" had an episode which was probably prescient on this topic.
There was an election analyst at the end of the episode, who said that Benford's law is broken when people vote strategically against a candidate or change their vote when their preferred candidate drops out.
That has nothing to do with why Benford's law doesn't work. Benford's law doesn't apply to precinct vote counts because precincts are roughly equally sized and Benford's law only applies to data that approximately follows a power law distribution and spans at least a few orders of magnitude.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etx0k1nLn78
Suppose that's true. So what? We analyze the results. We apply science. It can't change the result if it wasn't supposed to.
You give the devil his due. Because then given the result doesn't change, you can't be accused of covering up a fraud when it wasn't actually there. Which is what happens in the alternative.
Casting doubts and entertaining the witch hunt is damaging the democracy by eroding the trust of people in the election system. Opening the way for a coup in the future.
During the debates Biden pledged to wait for the vote to be certified before declaring victory.
Proof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1miwDWst-IQ
[1] In favor of the Republicans, I mean. Some Republicans, primarily Trump, did claim fraud in favor of the Democrats, but were unable to find any evidence for their claims.
The mantra for Trump's opponents and the media in the first year or so of his presidency was that "Russia hacked the election".
No, he didn't.
Waiting for the election to be "independently certified", which is what Biden was asked about, is a very different thing than waiting for it to be "certified" without qualification.
Can you provide a reference for that assertion? I tried to find it myself, the best thing I found is this blog post, describing the wording "independently certified" as curious:
https://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2020/10/what-does-it-mean...
> Suppose that's true. So what? We analyze the results. We apply science. It can't change the result if it wasn't supposed to.
You are implying that it is perfectly fine for Trump to spread wild conspiracy theories with no evidence because if those conspiracy theories are false then they will be proven false and no harm will be done. Except irreparable harm WILL be done to the democratic process in America, because there are tens of millions of Americans who worship Trump as an infallible god and will forever believe his claim that the election was stolen from him, even if all the allegations are thoroughly debunked and no evidence turns up demonstrating any kind of fraud.
There are plenty of people suggesting that Trump should concede immediately without going through any of those processes.
> You are implying that it is perfectly fine for Trump to spread wild conspiracy theories with no evidence because if those conspiracy theories are false then they will be proven false and no harm will be done.
The problem with Trump is that just about everything he says is a half-truth. It won't be entirely true but it also won't be entirely false.
Some people think he does this on purpose. It causes his opponents to cover him by pointing out the part that's false and his supporters to defend him by talking about the part that's true, but in either case they're both talking about Trump and they're both talking about the issue Trump wants people to talk about. I assume that anyone who can figure out how to get Trump to stop doing this would be awarded a Nobel Prize.
The trouble is that it means you can't just dismiss everything he says as a lie, because it's only half lie. I expect that when this is all over he'll have uncovered some modicum of voting irregularities but probably not enough to flip as many states as he needs to win, if any. But he's entitled to try.
Now if only somebody would win that Nobel Prize.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-limiting_audit
I think PA and Georgia already do this!
...demanding sufficient evidence that there is reason to expend resources looking for a problem before taking them seriously, especially if they are the apparently-defeated candidate.
Isn't that what's happening? They make their claims, others dispute them, it's a public debate. The original post was an objection to "talking about fraud" -- but talking about it is part of the process of evaluating whether the evidence is sufficient. The answer could be no, but you don't know that before you hear them out.
> especially if they are the apparently-defeated candidate.
It would be interesting to know of a case in which the apparently-victorious candidate was making allegations of election fraud sufficient to affect the outcome.
If you're a heterosexual man, imagine asking your spouse for a paternity test on your children. And when that goes over like a lead balloon (which it would), imagine replying "So what? We analyze the results. We apply science. It can't change the result if it wasn't supposed to."
> you can't be accused of covering up a fraud that wasn't actually there. Which is what happens in the alternative.
So you think that Trump has no problem complaining about fraud when he has no evidence, but won't complain about fraud after an investigation shows there was none? Not a chance—he'll just complain that the investigation was a fraud as well.
One is of whether fraud happened. So far, the stuff before the courts have mostly been thrown out due to lack of evidence. Which supports the idea of due diligence and that the system works.
The second is whether the system itself is compromised. The problem here is that one can keep irrationally escalating accusations saying that the watchmen of the watchmen of the watchmen are all in cahoots. And we know from stuff like flat earth society that there are people willing to believe anything. The danger here is that if you have a large portion of the population and their political representatives believing that the system is rigged, that they might as well do everything in their power to rig it in their favor, which erodes the pillars of democracy.
The other night, I realized that of the various sources I trawl, some of the best analysis going on to knock down invalid theories of fraud is happening on TD. (Note that I said "best", not necessarily "good".) Why is this happening? Because those discussions have been wiped off of most other sites.
No matter how you feel about the claims, this is an appalling state of affairs.
Can’t say I would have thought that to be possible 10 years ago. Hah.
An hour ago Trump Tweeted:
“REPORT: DOMINION DELETED 2.7 MILLION TRUMP VOTES NATIONWIDE. DATA ANALYSIS FINDS 221,000 PENNSYLVANIA VOTES SWITCHED FROM PRESIDENT TRUMP TO BIDEN. 941,000 TRUMP VOTES DELETED. STATES USING DOMINION VOTING SYSTEMS SWITCHED 435,000 VOTES FROM TRUMP TO BIDEN"
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump?
Which appears to be sourced from this:
https://noqreport.com/2020/11/11/data-deep-dive-on-dominion-...
I make no claims of validity, just relevance.
https://noqreport.com/2020/11/11/data-deep-dive-on-dominion-...
Its clearly not relevant to this piece on the applicability of Benford's law. While I personally think its inappropriate for HN for a number of reasons, others might disagree and we have community moderation tools to resolve that disagreement, and it would at least be less inappropriate submitted as an independent story, rather than a comment on this one.
This is nothing but sound and fury, signifying nothing, and hiding being dispassionate "no claims" doesn't absolve you from posting obvious inflammatory garbage.
The tweet you was about an item of political controversy excessively well-covered in the mainstream media (making it generally off-topic even as an independent story for HN), and was not at all germane to the post about Benford's law that it was offered as a comment on (making it off-topic as a comment on that post.)
There are venues in which linking that tweet might be appropriate, one can even imagine a hypothetical HN comment thread on which it might be on-topic. However, it wasn't on-topic where it was offered.
> Don't understand why simply reporting something as relevant as what Trump tweeted is reason enough to get flagged. when its directly relevant to this article
Trump's tweets -- well, this Trump tweet, I suppose its theoretically possibly he might sometime tweet something where this would not be true -- are completely irrelevant to the utility of Benford's law in detecting voting fraud.
> and what your president tweeted is news worthy
Conventional newsworthiness (because we have a conventional newsmedia) is generally tangential and often a negative to HN-relevance.
> When your president retweets that 2.7 million votes where deleted during this election by dominion software.
Were this a thread about Dominion software, or about the general incidence of electoral fraud, or about this particular election at all, there might be an argument that that was relevant. Its not, and its not.
> I made no claims of its validity
Even if the tweet were otherwise relevant, its validity, whether or not you make an explicit representation about it, is not irrelevant to the question of whether it should be upvoted, downvoted, flagged, or simply left unmoderated when presented here.
This standard doesn't really get held up in other discussions on here, people mention tangentially relevant things on here all the time.
Benford's law requires that the dataset cross multiple orders of magnitude to kick in. Precincts are generally of the same order of magnitude of size (1000s of people), which is insufficient for Benford's law to apply.
Two, Walter R. Mebane, an expert on election fraud, had a response to that paper: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/political-analysis/a...
And three, Mebane also released a short paper reviewing the 2020 results: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wmebane/inapB.pdf
tl;dr: There are very minor anomalies in some numbers but either way we have to wait till we get the final numbers in before we can do real analysis.