IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/polals/v19y2011i03p269-272_01.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Comment on “Benford's Law and the Detection of Election Fraudâ€

Author

Listed:
  • Mebane, Walter R.

Abstract

“Benford's Law and the Detection of Election Fraud†raises doubts about whether a test based on the mean of the second significant digit of vote counts equals 4.187 is useful as a test for the occurrence of election fraud. The paper mistakenly associates such a test with Benford's Law, considers a simulation exercise that has no apparent relevance for any actual election, applies the test to inappropriate levels of aggregation, and ignores existing analysis of recent elections in Russia. If tests based on the second significant digit of precinct-level vote counts are diagnostic of election fraud, the tests need to use expectations that take into account the features of ordinary elections, such as strategic actions. Whether the tests are useful for detecting fraud remains an open question, but approaching this question requires an approach more nuanced and tied to careful analysis of real election data than one sees in the discussed paper.

Suggested Citation

  • Mebane, Walter R., 2011. "Comment on “Benford's Law and the Detection of Election Fraudâ€," Political Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 19(3), pages 269-272, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:polals:v:19:y:2011:i:03:p:269-272_01
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S104719870001281X/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ausloos, Marcel & Ficcadenti, Valerio & Dhesi, Gurjeet & Shakeel, Muhammad, 2021. "Benford’s laws tests on S&P500 daily closing values and the corresponding daily log-returns both point to huge non-conformity," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 574(C).
    2. Fang, Guojun & Chen, Qihong, 2020. "Several common probability distributions obey Benford’s law," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 540(C).
    3. Sitsofe Tsagbey & Miguel de Carvalho & Garritt L. Page, 2017. "All Data are Wrong, but Some are Useful? Advocating the Need for Data Auditing," The American Statistician, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 71(3), pages 231-235, July.
    4. Montag, Josef, 2017. "Identifying odometer fraud in used car market data," Transport Policy, Elsevier, vol. 60(C), pages 10-23.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:polals:v:19:y:2011:i:03:p:269-272_01. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/pan .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.