Why do Biden's votes not follow Benford's Law?
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Published 2020-11-10
www.waterstones.com/book/humble-pi/matt-parker/978…
mathsgear.co.uk/products/humble-pi-signed-paperbac…
Check out Steve Mould's Numberphile video about Benford's Law.
• Number 1 and Benford's Law - Numberphile
Buy a signed copy of "How Many Socks Make a Pair?" by Rob Eastaway.
mathsgear.co.uk/products/copy-of-signed-copy-of-wh…
There’s more on Mark Nigrini’s work here:
www.nigrini.com/benfords-law/
"Benford's Law and the Detection of Election Fraud" 2011 paper.
www.cambridge.org/core/journals/political-analysis…
And for balance, here is a paper critical of that other paper (but only in the use of a 'second digit' check and they do not dispute the main Benford's Law claims.). pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e667/b8ad9f58992828ff820d…
And here is a paper by the same author specifically about the 2020 US election results:
www-personal.umich.edu/~wmebane/inapB.pdf
Get your Chicago Board of Election Commissioners data here!
chicagoelections.gov/en/election-results.asp?elect…
Yep, 2069 precincts. Some would say that's too many.
data.cityofchicago.org/Facilities-Geographic-Bound…
If you must, here are links to people using Benford's Law to suggest the Biden votes were fraudulent. Please do no harass or brigade anyone.
github.com/cjph8914/2020_benfords/blob/main/Chicag…
jonsnewplace.wordpress.com/2020/11/07/joe-bidens-v…
CORRECTIONS
- Hello loyal viewer. If you are reading this you most likely regularly watch my videos and know that I put corrections here. But the comment section on this video has been, to put it lightly, "wild". I don't think anyone is checking the corrections here! So I'm going to break with tradition and put the corrections in a pinned comment. But in short:
- I should have said I used the Chicago data (instead of a swing state, let's say) because that is what people claiming election fraud were using. I didn't pick it myself to make a point.
- Foolishly I cut a bit of the video where I talk about how Trump's data is also a bad Benford fit but that massive spike of 1s makes it look like a good match. Check out how low 3, 4 and 5 are.
- There has been specific criticism of aspects of that paper I read from, but only the usual back-and-forth of academics. Everyone agrees with the idea that Benford is not a magic tool to detect election fraud (nor is any statistical tool really; they all require careful interpretation).
- As always, let me know if you spot any other mistakes.
Thanks to my Patreon supporters who mean I can spend TWO DAYS trawling through election stats and making plots. I'm meant to be writing a new book you know. So, thanks a lot.
www.patreon.com/standupmaths
As always: thanks to Jane Street who support my channel. They're amazing.
www.janestreet.com/
Filming and editing by Matt Parker
Music by Howard Carter
Design by Simon Wright and Adam Robinson
MATT PARKER: Stand-up Mathematician
Website: standupmaths.com/
US book: www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/610964/humble-pi-…
UK book: mathsgear.co.uk/collections/books/products/humble-…
All Comments (21)
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Not to get political, but what the hell is a number?
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If you write the numbers in binary, apparently almost all the numbers start with a 1
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These kinds of misunderstandings are, I think, a subset of a larger problem of people getting 'evidence' confused with 'indicators.' One is often the other, but not necessarily so. The indicator should cause you to look closer, but if you look closer and find no evidence you shouldn't continue to tout the indicator.
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I'm gonna need this video close at hand this year
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Let's look at the comments section to see what the experts think
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Im sure the comments will be all perfectly reasonable and coherent discussion on the complete video.
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For a while I always thought it was crazy how powers of 2 always seemed to start with a 1 when the number of digits goes up. Thought it was pretty cool that you would get “pseudo powers of two” since the lead digit often went 1,2,4. Then one day I realized that it literally HAS to start with a 1 every single time 🤦♂️
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Omg... I know this is an old vid and this comment will never been seen, BUT.... knowing Benford's law, the title piqued my interest. 🤔 Decided to watch and a Biden 2024 campaign ad preluded Matt's video. If I was a conspiracy theorist I'd have gone nuts!! 😂
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The way I see it, these things are like metal detectors. They're great at finding points of interest, but you have to start digging to see if it's a coin or a bottlecap.
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I love how you pointed out the importance of context in interpreting data! It's so often overlooked.
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I love what you did with the trump data to show how easy it is for something to look suspicious without more context and why you need to listen to people who know about data rather than just trying to draw your own uninformed conclusions. Love the video!
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Matt Parker, giving someone the benefit of the doubt and not saying they're wronger than wrong.
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Fellow data geek here, this was a TEXTBOOK example of how an analyst approaches their work. Bravo, well done!
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Getting some insight behind the votes from a mathematician is refreshing.
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So what I've learned is that I should use an RNG when doing my taxes. Thanks!
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I applaud you for making a video about politics... about maths.
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"AND ELECT ION DATA" To be honest, if there were someone named "Ion Data" running for any position, I'd be very tempted to elect them based on the name alone.
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1:58 Let's not get distracted that there are 1000π counties in the US
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You've done a great job here ... and it's really intriguing. Too bad most of the people who need to understand this will not bother.
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tl;dr: Violations of Benford's law are an interesting starting point for audits, not a proof of malfeasance or errors.
