GE said:

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Can anyone here validate the numbers underlying the graphs?

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This. I can make graphs too.

UntoldSpirit said:

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There's no evidence of fraud until CNN and MSNBC say there is evidence. We know this already and its been proven time after time.


There was no evidence the Obama Administration spied on the Trump campaign. CNN said so.

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Trump had the full power of the federal government for almost four years and couldn't prove any wrong doing.

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There was no evidence Joe Biden did anything wrong when Hunter took foreign money for jobs in which he had no qualifications. Joe is on tape bragging about getting a foreign government's prosecutor fired that wanted to investigate Hunter's employer. CNN said there was no evidence. Nothing there.

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Multiple Republican senators told Joe to get the prosecutor fired.

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Hunter's laptop. Sorry, CNN said it can't be verified. Despite multiple witnesses, digital records, and an FBI investigation, it isn't verifiable and it is disinformation, so says CNN and MSNBC.

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Rudy could have handed a copy over and refused to.

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As long as the MSM holds the line, and says "there is no evidence of voter fraud", then for half of the country, there is no evidence, regardless of the evidence.

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There's no evidence or Trump woulda showed it in press conference instead of crying like a little *****.

There is never any evidence or they woulda "lock her up"

SLAM said:

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More graphs from Milwaukee. Every candidate follows the distribution except for Biden whose is hilariously off.

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I really don't understand it, but I am not that smart. Wouldn't a good way to test this would be to compare to distributions in other counties/states where we do not suspect widespread fraud. If the model follows everywhere but a few locations, would that not serve as reinforcing evidence of fraud and refute any argument that this is not a reliable tool for election data.

And more importantly, if this is legit, is anyone getting this to the correct people (e.g., the legal teams) to investigate with their statistical experts?

https://github.com/cjph8914/2020_benfords/blob/main/Chicago_Wards_Precincts_Benfords_Data.ipynb

GitHub data for you to test based upon the Chicago graphs I posted earlier.

taxpreparer said:

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tdb867 said:

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Trump's vote count fits my hypothetical curve better RRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

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Yea, statistics don't count when analyzing election data, but are totally reliable when forecasting global warming.

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Not only reliable, but the jacking with data to model future ZOMG catastrophic climate hell is a science that is settled.

Non believers are science deniers! REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEHHHHHHUUUUREEEEEEEEEEE

I left a long post yesterday trying to explain the Benford analysis as best I could with my slightly above average understanding/use of it. As I said in that, a data set "failing" a Benford analysis doesn't prove fraud, just as "passing" one doesn't prove there is no fraud. All it does it shine a spot light on where integer irregularities exist and need to be investigated.

I would say that a data set of only 500ish numbers is a bit on the low side of a population that I would typically use a Benford analysis on. It's not "too" small to use it, but the likelihood of a false negative due to randomness is much higher. Second, and another poster pointed this out, if there are unnatural constraints on a data set (i.e. batch size limits, uniform precinct/ward voter size, ect.) on some or all of the data, then this would cause irregularities in the Benford analysis.

The important thing to really remember/take away is that a Benford analysis is never "proof" of fraud. What this does mean is that someone should be looking into the "why" the data set came out to this. It's virtually impossible for anyone sitting behind a computer without actual access to the underlying data (actual vote counts, collection/submission process information, ect) to determine that fraud has occurred. I imagine that Republican legal teams are all over this as it is a very easy test to perform. Which, would mean that there is either a legitimate reason why the data set comes out like this, or we will be hearing about actual claims of fraud in a court case in Wisconsin in the coming days.

Agreed. I don't think this is proof of anything.

But when you have 5 data sets from an event and 4 of them follow the curve and one doesn't, it makes you ask why. Especially when the single data set that doesn't follow the curve is the one that ended up winning.

To me, that's enough to call things into question and require further analysis and examination. It may end up being a big nothing burger, but to have so many people just waive their hands as "this doesn't matter" is BS.

Totally agree. My professional skepticism (hint at what I do for a living) says, "explain this to me". If there isn't a logical or reasonable reason this occurred, I would want an audit of votes cast in these wards.

I'm pretty sure that I remember the SoS of Wisconsin saying they do an audit on 5% of all votes cast, but I would want an audit, including confirmation with the actual voter of legitimacy/accuracy of ballot of at least 5% (randomly selected) of the votes cast in these wards to feel relatively good that there was no funny business. If more than 1% of those audited came back funky, blow the whole thing up.

I think it is also important, overall, to look at errors discovered during the statewide audit. If there are a low amount of errors discovered (below 1%) but the errors go both ways (i.e. there are both trump and biden votes that are "bad" or otherwise a "failure") in a fairly even split, then the likelihood that errors, due to fraud or mistakes, changing the outcome of the election is next to zero. If all errors go in the same direction (i.e. every error discovered no matter how few improve trump or biden significantly disproportionately to the way "legal" votes were cast) even if they are small (less than 1%) that would need to be investigated as it would be a strong indicator of potential fraud.

But, as all of these States employee consulting firms, I'm sure that this is part of audit process as it is pretty much auditing 101.

At the end of the day, the highly decentralized nature of voting in out county leads to an increased risk of fraud at any single location, but highly reduces the abilities of it to be perpetuated across a vast area. While that isn't good at the "local" level, it makes it really hard to affect elections at the national level. Getting a ton of people in on committing crimes, and then staying quite about it, is pretty hard. I would say that, while it is messy and takes forever, this is really a good reason why we don't want to have a single "national" election czar and it's safer under our current system.

Appreciate your input, BigC.

BigC said:

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Totally agree. My professional skepticism (hint at what I do for a living) says, "explain this to me". If there isn't a logical or reasonable reason this occurred, I would want an audit of votes cast in these wards.

I'm pretty sure that I remember the SoS of Wisconsin saying they do an audit on 5% of all votes cast, but I would want an audit, including confirmation with the actual voter of legitimacy/accuracy of ballot of at least 5% (randomly selected) of the votes cast in these wards to feel relatively good that there was no funny business. If more than 1% of those audited came back funky, blow the whole thing up.

I think it is also important, overall, to look at errors discovered during the statewide audit. If there are a low amount of errors discovered (below 1%) but the errors go both ways (i.e. there are both trump and biden votes that are "bad" or otherwise a "failure") in a fairly even split, then the likelihood that errors, due to fraud or mistakes, changing the outcome of the election is next to zero. If all errors go in the same direction (i.e. every error discovered no matter how few improve trump or biden significantly disproportionately to the way "legal" votes were cast) even if they are small (less than 1%) that would need to be investigated as it would be a strong indicator of potential fraud.

But, as all of these States employee consulting firms, I'm sure that this is part of audit process as it is pretty much auditing 101.

At the end of the day, the highly decentralized nature of voting in out county leads to an increased risk of fraud at any single location, but highly reduces the abilities of it to be perpetuated across a vast area. While that isn't good at the "local" level, it makes it really hard to affect elections at the national level. Getting a ton of people in on committing crimes, and then staying quite about it, is pretty hard. I would say that, while it is messy and takes forever, this is really a good reason why we don't want to have a single "national" election czar and it's safer under our current system.

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This is along my thinking as well and it's why I think an audit and recount are definitely warranted.

Thanks for the contributions to the thread, it's nice having an actual expert comment on these types of analyses.

Yes, thank you for the factual background info. It really helps. This has been a great thread.

BigC said:

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Totally agree. My professional skepticism (hint at what I do for a living) says, "explain this to me". If there isn't a logical or reasonable reason this occurred, I would want an audit of votes cast in these wards.

I'm pretty sure that I remember the SoS of Wisconsin saying they do an audit on 5% of all votes cast, but I would want an audit, including confirmation with the actual voter of legitimacy/accuracy of ballot of at least 5% (randomly selected) of the votes cast in these wards to feel relatively good that there was no funny business. If more than 1% of those audited came back funky, blow the whole thing up.

I think it is also important, overall, to look at errors discovered during the statewide audit. If there are a low amount of errors discovered (below 1%) but the errors go both ways (i.e. there are both trump and biden votes that are "bad" or otherwise a "failure") in a fairly even split, then the likelihood that errors, due to fraud or mistakes, changing the outcome of the election is next to zero. If all errors go in the same direction (i.e. every error discovered no matter how few improve trump or biden significantly disproportionately to the way "legal" votes were cast) even if they are small (less than 1%) that would need to be investigated as it would be a strong indicator of potential fraud.

But, as all of these States employee consulting firms, I'm sure that this is part of audit process as it is pretty much auditing 101.

At the end of the day, the highly decentralized nature of voting in out county leads to an increased risk of fraud at any single location, but highly reduces the abilities of it to be perpetuated across a vast area. While that isn't good at the "local" level, it makes it really hard to affect elections at the national level. Getting a ton of people in on committing crimes, and then staying quite about it, is pretty hard. I would say that, while it is messy and takes forever, this is really a good reason why we don't want to have a single "national" election czar and it's safer under our current system.

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Question? What about the number of rejected ballots? I have seen no numbers on that but I do know the Dems in Georgia organized a group to take non-conforming ballots, go back to the voter to have them "fix" them so they could be counted. Actually knocking on people's doors to do it.

Shouldn't there be some analysis on where the rejection rates compare to past elections?

Quote:

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Question? What about the number of rejected ballots? I have seen no numbers on that but I do know the Dems in Georgia organized a group to take non-conforming ballots, go back to the voter to have them "fix" them so they could be counted. Actually knocking on people's doors to do it.

Shouldn't there be some analysis on where the rejection rates compare to past elections?

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That's a totally different situation that what this thread was originally discussing. But, you do bring up a good point with your question, or rather two different points I believe.

The first, related to the "fixing" of absentee/mail in ballots, is actually referred to as "curing" ballots. The process varies, significantly (like so many other things), from state to state with many not even having a cure process. Typically, members of whatever governmental agency is tasked with handling elections in each state will be tasked with contacting voters who's ballots are rejected for certain reasons based on the state's specific laws. The reason is typically a lack of signature, signature that does not "match" voter records, lack of a copy of ID (if required by state), illegible/unclear ballot selections. It's kind of like, you left your name off of your test of you got a little sloppy on filling something out. To "cure" the ballot, the voter will typically have to provide identification as to the validity of them being who they say they are as well as well as sign an affidavit that outlines whatever is "cured".

As far as a political party actually completing this process, I don't think that is really possible. Someone who has been sworn in by the county or state or something is going to have to inspect and verify this information as well as sign the affidavit by the voter. Some things, like a copy of a required ID assuming signatures match, may be able to be done electronically, but typically I believe a voter is required to actually go into some sort of government office to complete this. It is possible (but I think it is rare) that the government officials may go to the voter to do this, but that is not the norm.

Now, what a political party is most certainty doing, is trying to get people to respond to request from the state to cure their ballots and/or take the initiative to check if their vote was counted and cure it if not it hasn't. The amount of voter information available to the public varies state by state, but I would be surprised to find out that Democrats (and Republicans) are not checking their registered members to see if they voted and then following up to see if it is possible that there is a rejected absentee ballot out there. If so, they would most likely take steps to assist the voter in completing that such as educating the voter on the process and providing transportation to the appropriate government office. But, I don't believe they can "do it" for them.

The second point that I think your question gets at relates to the type of error that rejected ballots typically encounter. Now, what I mean by this is not the rejected ballots themselves, but the error of these. There is a concept when you have any kind of approve/reject process of type 1 and type 2 errors. Type 1 errors would be when a ballot is "fine" but gets rejected and a type 2 error is when a ballot is "bad" but it is allowed to count anyway. Now, when you set parameters on what rejects a ballot, there is a balance between these two types of errors based on what society believes to be more egregious in the specific situation. A good example of this is with criminal cases. Typically, our society has believed that letting a guilty person go free (a type 2 error) is less egregious than sending an innocent man to prison (a type 1 error).

So, with that being said, if there is a process to "fix" rejected ballots, I would think that it would be less harmful to reject "good" ballots than counting "bad" ones, so I would expect a higher reject rate than in a state that had no curing process where you don't want to be rejecting a bunch of "good" ballots by putting really stringent parameters. This is probably most noted in how closely a signature needs to match.

As far as comparing rejection rates to previous elections, I'm not sure if I would believe that would be a good tool. Believe it or not, COVID has caused this election to be executed in a way unlike any previous election in "modern" times. This has led to a super significant (multiple increases in orders of magnitude in almost all states) increase in mail in ballots. While that typically might not change the rates of rejections, there are some things we know about mail in ballots that would suggest the rejection rate would increase. Mainly that first time mail in voters are much more likely to be rejected due to a procedural issue such as forgetting to sign something or send something in with the ballot. This is kind of intuitive in that the first time someone does anything, they are usually not as good at it as subsequent times you perform the task.

However, I'm sure that the Republicans are reviewing this to make sure that all of the rejected ballots aren't registered Republicans or something along those lines as you cant know who those ballots were cast for at the individual level. If it turns out that the rejected rate is highly partisan, I'm sure they would be investigating this further.

TL/DR: Good question, but not really about the topic at hand. I don't think Democrats (or Republicans) can go around having people fix their ballots, but they can (and should be) communicating with their members regarding potential rejected ballots and educating them on the process to cure them and proving appropriate assistance such as transportation. Secondly, not sure if a rejection rate analysis compared to prior years would make much sense due to the massive difference in the current election. However, there should be a review of the party affiliation of rejected ballots to make sure that they don't skew heavily one way or the other (relative to actual registration in the specific area).

I never assumed their wasn't fraud, in fact,, I'm certain there was, so putting stuff out like this is warranted and necessary. Gracias.

BTW, Sidney Powell was on Dobbs tonight and brought up The Hammer, which shocked me. If someone like her can bring that up, then with her contacts, it's entirely possible it was used.

The left is editing the wiki page for BenFord's Law to obfuscate it's use in detecting fraud. We're now in total information warfare.

UntoldSpirit said:

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There's no evidence of fraud until CNN and MSNBC say there is evidence. We know this already and its been proven time after time.

There was no evidence the Obama Administration spied on the Trump campaign. CNN said so.

There was no evidence Joe Biden did anything wrong when Hunter took foreign money for jobs in which he had no qualifications. Joe is on tape bragging about getting a foreign government's prosecutor fired that wanted to investigate Hunter's employer. CNN said there was no evidence. Nothing there.

Hunter's laptop. Sorry, CNN said it can't be verified. Despite multiple witnesses, digital records, and an FBI investigation, it isn't verifiable and it is disinformation, so says CNN and MSNBC.

As long as the MSM holds the line, and says "there is no evidence of voter fraud", then for half of the country, there is no evidence, regardless of the evidence.

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I absolutely disagree! CNN would report Democrats arrested by the DOJ. You expect more of CNN than you do of the federal justice system...why is that?

SLAM said:

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Quote:

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The left is editing the wiki page for BenFord's Law to obfuscate it's use in detecting fraud. We're now in total information warfare.

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What? When was this edit done?

AccountantAg said:

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I don't understand this, can someone do a benford law for dummies explanation?

Why would a 1 be the most common number?

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As an accountant you would be highly intrigued. I learned of it about a year ago from a Certified Fraud Examiner during a fraud CPE course. It was a live class but I think anyone can watch a recording for no credit. I'll try to find the link sometime this weekend. In the meantime check out Season 1 Episode 4 of Netflix's Connected.

So I get what the model is supposed to predict and everything. But what numbers are they running off the ballots? The number of the ballot itself or what?

SLAM said:

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The left is editing the wiki page for BenFord's Law to obfuscate it's use in detecting fraud. We're now in total information warfare.

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Benford's Law change in Wikipedia needs to be tweeted out.

mazag08 said:

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_mpaul said:

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Very interesting. Even if they end up giving it Biden, there should be more than enough ammo to attempt to neuter the effectiveness of Biden or Harris over the next four years, exactly like they tried to do to Trump.

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That's fine. Biden is still going to get us back into the Paris Climate Accords, nueter Trump's trade agreements, sign executive orders (Republican judges don't play team red like Hawaii does), and be in power during the next election where fraud is now enabled and celebrated.

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All they have to do is judge shop. Trump judge one line 1! Don't be dense - we are going to do the same thing.

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Trump had the full power of the federal government for almost four years and couldn't prove any wrong doing.

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Trump's incompetence or possible corruption doesn't make Hillary's blatant criminal activities acceptable. Hillary colluded with Russia to get her elected after she accepted 500K from the Russian stockholders who's company took control of 20% of US uranium.

TAMU1990 said:

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mazag08 said:

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_mpaul said:

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Very interesting. Even if they end up giving it Biden, there should be more than enough ammo to attempt to neuter the effectiveness of Biden or Harris over the next four years, exactly like they tried to do to Trump.

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That's fine. Biden is still going to get us back into the Paris Climate Accords, nueter Trump's trade agreements, sign executive orders (Republican judges don't play team red like Hawaii does), and be in power during the next election where fraud is now enabled and celebrated.

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All they have to do is judge shop. Trump judge one line 1! Don't be dense - we are going to do the same thing.

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The justice system is dead...no judge can save our republic.

Social Worker Hit With 134 Felony Fraud-Related Counts for Trying to Vote on Behalf of the Disabled
https://redstate.com/alexparker/2020/11/06/kelly-reagan-brunner-texas-voter-fraud-acting-as-agent-ken-paxton-n276337

This would absolutely explain the inconsistencies in Biden's numbers with Benford's Law. Of course it also means the election itself is invalidated.

captkirk said:

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Social Worker Hit With 134 Felony Fraud-Related Counts for Trying to Vote on Behalf of the Disabled
https://redstate.com/alexparker/2020/11/06/kelly-reagan-brunner-texas-voter-fraud-acting-as-agent-ken-paxton-n276337

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He's not likely to get the support of the news

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Another "conservative" outlet directing focus on the media instead of the root of the problem.

It seems like the data is for individual wards. The population of each ward seems to range between 500 and 1200, with a few outliers, and an average population of 700 or so.

In that case, wouldn't it be more unlikely for 1's to be the first digit? Biden would not be expected to have less than 200 of each ward's votes, and the number of chances for Biden to have over 1,000 is highly limited by the way that wards are deliberately broken down into groups of 500-1200. It's almost like an inverse of the Benford's Law situation, since that works because 1 has a much greater opportunity for being the first digit.

It makes sense to me that 5 would be the most common digit if the average ward has about 700 people in an area Biden is expected to take 2/3 of the vote.

Pumpkinhead said:

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Good luck with an argument like this in court when you had the first modern election in a pandemic that caused an unprecedented skewing of Dem mail-in votes compared to GOP Election Day votes. And good luck explaining how systematic cheating happened in Georgia with a GOP governor and GOP election supervisor running the show.

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How many times does this have to be posted - showing statistical irregularities does not prove fraud nor would it be used to prove fraud in courts. However, it shows that something odd is happening and could point to particular polling centers or batches of votes that should be more closely audited. By doing that you may be able to prove fraud if fraud did occur. So stop with the "good luck using math to prove it", the "oh so now math is good", or the "but global warming" responses. If you don't think this will lead to anything that's fine - post that. Otherwise please go discuss other topics on another thread instead of continually trying to blimp the topic being discussed on this one.

bingobango85 said:

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It seems like the data is for individual wards. The population of each ward seems to range between 500 and 1200, with a few outliers, and an average population of 700 or so.

In that case, wouldn't it be more unlikely for 1's to be the first digit? Biden would not be expected to have less than 200 of each ward's votes, and the number of chances for Biden to have over 1,000 is highly limited by the way that wards are deliberately broken down into groups of 500-1200. It's almost like an inverse of the Benford's Law situation, since that works because 1 has a much greater opportunity for being the first digit.

It makes sense to me that 5 would be the most common digit if the average ward has about 700 people in an area Biden is expected to take 2/3 of the vote.

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No, then in some wards with 500 people you would have 24% chance of 1, 2, 3, 4 and smaller chances for other numbers. I wards with 1,200 people you would have almost 3x more chance to get a 1 on the first digit than any other number. If the ballot numbers are broken down like this it still should fit the curve.

That doesn't make sense, though. This isn't rolling dice. Your logic for the low end would only make sense if there were a lot of small wards with less than 400 people. The wards are designed to have more than 400 people, ideally targeting that 700-800 sweet spot. If it's an urban area that supports Biden, there's just such a miniscule chance that he would only get 100 or 200 votes from that ward. Likewise, the wards that have 1100 and 1200 wouldn't mean that Biden got over 1000 votes, getting to that upper 1. It means he would have 500-800 votes, most likely.

Benford's Law only makes since if the numerical range of your data set has multiple orders of magnitude. There needs to be equal opportunity for numbers like 23 or 78 as well as numbers like 3,568 or 497 or 10,478. By covering that larger range of numbers the Law can play itself out. If everything is within one order of magnitude (in this case 100's) the first digit should symmetrically congregate around the mean.

fasthorse05 said:

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I never assumed their wasn't fraud, in fact,, I'm certain there was, so putting stuff out like this is warranted and necessary. Gracias.

BTW, Sidney Powell was on Dobbs tonight and brought up The Hammer, which shocked me. If someone like her can bring that up, then with her contacts, it's entirely possible it was used.

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I was quite frankly shocked that she went there. But then again I thought about the fact that she does have security clearance and her client is Flynn. She does have the access to such information to confirm or dispute the idea.

Still skeptical of the idea but her vouching for the possibility caught my attention.