

Benford's Law and the Iranian Election - jgrahamc
http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/06/benfords-law-and-iranian-election.html

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

------
ilikebread
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.

------
tiberius
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?

~~~
jgrahamc
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>

~~~
DanielBMarkham
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_s
You place no value on someone explaining their methods?

~~~
DanielBMarkham
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.

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

