Talk:Benford's Law
Mebane's response
University of Michigan's Walter Mebane, who did Benford's law research on the 2009 Iranian election, has written this: "Inappropriate Applications of Benford’s Law to Some Data from the 2020 Presidential Election in the United States." This paper argues that first digit analysis doesn't work here because precincts are relatively small so a lot of the first digits are 1. His paper about the Iranian election makes same point. It alse explains that he avoided this pitfall by using the second digit. The obvious solution is a second digit analysis of the U.S. election like the one Mebane did for Iran. Mebane himself did a second digit analysis for various U.S. elections held in 2006 and 2008. He doesn't dare to criticize the Dems, but he has to know that the U.S. has Third World vote counting and that there are some serious Benford law problems going on.
This reminds me of the controversy over the authorship of Obama's Dreams of My Father. This book was extravagently praised by Time magazine as "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician." (What about Grant or Teddy Roosevelt?) Yet Obama has done no other writing worth mentioning in literary terms. Jack Cashill wrote a series of articles that suggested that Bill Ayers, a 1960s radical and terrorist, was the ghostwritter. The Dems got Oxford don Peter Millican to criticize Cashill's analysis. Millican did refute the claim that the entire book could have been written by Ayers. But that raised the question, could Obama have written the parts of the book that Cashill had singled out? No credentialed academic ever followed up. This was just the end of the issue as far as the liberal media was concerned. In short, the Dems have fixed the academic system to prevent research on issues they don't want investigated. PeterKa (talk) 19:45, 9 November 2020 (EST)
- This cite reads:
- "Walter Mebane weighed in on the second digit analysis in a paper. He claims that Fulton county Georgia has inconsistent second digits for Democrats, but does not provide a statistical analysis as he claims he is lacking precinct data. Mebane also mentioned Chicago was inconsistent as well. He evaluated Milwaukee County and Allegheny County (not absentee ballots) and concluded that second digit distribution is consistent with Benford’s law.
- "Mebane’s final verdict regarding the elections in these and other jurisdictions is that analysts “should await the final production of completed vote counts and should draw on additional information about election processes that go beyond mere vote count data.”
- RobSFree Kyle! 15:37, 10 November 2020 (EST)
Matt Parker's video
I guess it wasn't fraud after all, at least not in Chicago. This video by Matt Parker analysizes the Chicago vote in terms of Benford's law and other mathematical tests: "Why do Biden's votes not follow Benford's Law?" Parker is a math popularizer and the author of Humble Pi. It would be nice if someone could do something similar for the vote in Wisconsin, Michigan, or Georgia. PeterKa (talk) 19:50, 13 November 2020 (EST)