Sociopath Community

AppleGenius said: 

AliceInWonderland said: 

I'm too ignorant to say if it's even appropriate to assume an election process should follow Benford's Law but nonetheless I think the idea is interesting and worth looking into, plus it's relevant the current discussion.

After Monkey/LiYang's post on Benford's law, I also took a quick look. However, I similarly do not understand why elections should follow Benford's law. It seems like there's some empirical grounding.

 Yeah, there seems to be some good reason into why such a process would obey the law but I'm still early in my research to say anything definitive about it. 

If it is realistic then that makes this election all the more funny. 

Video of the news cutting off a presidential news conference stating they can't play it because what the president is saying is untrue. 

https://streamable.com/wd6uwb

Metanarrtives are once again being forged. 

“We all know why Joe Biden is rushing to falsely pose as the winner, and why his media allies are trying so hard to help him: they don’t want the truth to be exposed. The simple fact is this election is far from over. Joe Biden has not been certified as the winner of any states, let alone any of the highly contested states headed for mandatory recounts, or states where our campaign has valid and legitimate legal challenges that could determine the ultimate victor. In Pennsylvania, for example, our legal observers were not permitted meaningful access to watch the counting process. Legal votes decide who is president, not the news media.

“Beginning Monday, our campaign will start prosecuting our case in court to ensure election laws are fully upheld and the rightful winner is seated. The American People are entitled to an honest election: that means counting all legal ballots, and not counting any illegal ballots. This is the only way to ensure the public has full confidence in our election. It remains shocking that the Biden campaign refuses to agree with this basic principle and wants ballots counted even if they are fraudulent, manufactured, or cast by ineligible or deceased voters. Only a party engaged in wrongdoing would unlawfully keep observers out of the count room – and then fight in court to block their access.  

“So what is Biden hiding? I will not rest until the American People have the honest vote count they deserve and that Democracy demands.”

- Statement from President Donald J. Trump

AliceInWonderland said: 

Video of the news cutting off a presidential news conference stating they can't play it because what the president is saying is untrue. 

https://streamable.com/wd6uwb

Metanarrtives are once again being forged. 

I've also heard that Facebook/Twitter/... are deleting posts regarding voter fraud.

Crimson said:

"We all know"

I never trust phrases like that. 

So what I'm gathering is that Benford's distirbution is actually a very widespread phenomena and many processes fall comfortably. It seems like the fundamental requirement is the magnitude or scale of the data set, it must be large, and the randomness of the data set, it must be random but not too random. 

The authors of the papers I'm reading seem pretty convinced by voting processes in your common democratic society to obey Benford's law but can violate it naturally through strategy. it just so happens that those strategies are extremely unlikely to occur given behavioral constraints. 

However given the law can be violated naturally it had me thinking that, ofc under the assumption you accept the current hypothesis concerning the connection between the law and voting, that maybe it technically could have been violated via the mail in order process given Democrats advocated it in mass (hence it becomes part of their voting strategy) and Trump advocated against (it's not apart of his and even rejects it which may cause his voters to reject it). I guess this could be figure the validity of this theory by seeing the distribution of trump voters who voted by mail and when they were counted, plus you must consider that mail in votes were chosen to be counted after in-person votes. Would that violate the law naturally? I'm really not sure. 

AppleGenius said: 

AliceInWonderland said: 

I'm too ignorant to say if it's even appropriate to assume an election process should follow Benford's Law but nonetheless I think the idea is interesting and worth looking into, plus it's relevant the current discussion.

After Monkey/LiYang's post on Benford's law, I also took a quick look. However, I similarly do not understand why elections should follow Benford's law. It seems like there's some empirical grounding.

 Yes.

Stock market laws measure people's investing habits. There are only so many people with the money and the expertise to gamble on the stock market, so ofc sudden spikes are suspicious.

Voting costs nothing, and in a country where only around half of eligible voters bother to show up, where mail has been held up bc of illness prevention measures, there could be a spike at any time.

 As for the dead ppl voting, what makes you so sure that they're not among the 8000 or so November COVID deaths? At a time like this, there's a very strong likelihood that more than the usual number of people are dying within days after casting their votes.

Xena said: 

AppleGenius said: 

AliceInWonderland said: 

I'm too ignorant to say if it's even appropriate to assume an election process should follow Benford's Law but nonetheless I think the idea is interesting and worth looking into, plus it's relevant the current discussion.

After Monkey/LiYang's post on Benford's law, I also took a quick look. However, I similarly do not understand why elections should follow Benford's law. It seems like there's some empirical grounding.

 

Voting costs nothing, and in a country where only around half of eligible voters bother to show up, where mail has been held up bc of illness prevention measures, there could be a spike at any time.

 That male showing up doesn't necessarily effect the frequency of of magnitudes across the distribution though. 

The fraud that benfords law detects is when certain digits clearly show preference. This method to detect voter fraud doesn't merely count votes, it looks at very specific digits in the distribution of votes that are resistant to naturally occurring phenomena like you've stated here. It's technically possible to make the law be violated naturally but it is extremely difficult to do so and unlikely when not intentional. 

AliceInWonderland said: 

So what I'm gathering is that Benford's distirbution is actually a very widespread phenomena and many processes fall comfortably. It seems like the fundamental requirement is the magnitude or scale of the data set, it must be large, and the randomness of the data set, it must be random but not too random. 

The authors of the papers I'm reading seem pretty convinced by voting processes in your common democratic society to obey Benford's law but can violate it naturally through strategy. it just so happens that those strategies are extremely unlikely to occur given behavioral constraints. 

However given the law can be violated naturally it had me thinking that, ofc under the assumption you accept the current hypothesis concerning the connection between the law and voting, that maybe it technically could have been violated via the mail in order process given Democrats advocated it in mass (hence it becomes part of their voting strategy) and Trump advocated against (it's not apart of his and even rejects it which may cause his voters to reject it). I guess this could be figure the validity of this theory by seeing the distribution of trump voters who voted by mail and when they were counted, plus you must consider that mail in votes were chosen to be counted after in-person votes. Would that violate the law naturally? I'm really not sure. 

Not sure.

It is possible that the Benford's law could be violated just due to random chance if your sample size is large enough (there are enough many individual populations).

If that is true, then there's also the possibility that people are just cherry-picking data. That is, if they're looking at small populations and doing the Benford's `test` on each individual Biden-vote population, the actual question they're asking is `how likely is it that there exists a few statistical Biden-vote anomalies within a larger population.`This question is independent of the question if a given population shows signs of a voter fraud  -- which is how they've portrayed the question.

If they now find anomalies in one or two examples, and only showcase those, then there would be nothing surprising if the Trump votes do not show anomalies but the Biden votes do (if most individual populations follow Benford's law).

I'd be interested if they can show that there are no statistical anomalies within *any* individual population when inspecting Trump votes. Now the graphs only show that the Trump votes follow Benford's law within one or two, cases, which would tell absolutely nothing if the data is cherry-picked.