Benford’s Law Does Not Prove Fraud in the 2020 US Presidential Election

You may have seen something going around in the wake of the 2020 US Presidential Election where people are claiming they can prove there was fraud in the votes using math.

They are wrong. This is a post you can share to explain why.

ETA: RadioLab did a really excellent episode on this which includes a lot of what’s below including interviews with me and Dr. Mebane who did the election analysis at umich. If you don’t want to read all this, go check that episode here: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/breaking-benford

I am an expert with published research on Benford’s Law, the statistical pattern they are talking about. I’m going to tell you why they are doing it wrong and why, even if they did it right, it wouldn’t indicate fraud.

Benford’s law basically says that the first digit of numbers in some naturally occurring systems follows a pattern. You may intuitively think that numbers that start with 1 are just as common as numbers that start with 9, but in lots of systems, around 30% of numbers start with 1 and the frequency declines to where only like 5% of numbers start with 9. This is seen ALL OVER! I showed that it applied in social networks to friend counts and that it could be used to detect bots. It’s used in financial and accounting investigations and can even be used in court as evidence of fraud. The length of all the rivers on earth follow this pattern. Atomic weights. JPEG coefficients. It’s mindblowing!

If you want to know more about it, Netflix has a series out called Connected and episode 4 (Digits) is all about it. I’m in that documentary, so say hi when I come across your screen.

Probably because of that documentary, lots of people are saying “I can take the election counts from precincts and look at their distribution of first digits and see if there is fraud!”

THIS DOES NOT WORK.

Whether Benford can be used to detect election fraud has been studied for decades. What everyone who studies this knows is that analyzing first…