title:         Election Forensics:  Vote Counts and Benford's Law
authors:       Walter R. Mebane
entrydate:     2006-07-17 16:48:05
keywords:      election forensics, Benford's law, vote fraud, election fraud,
Florida 2004, Mexico 2006
abstract:      How can we be sure that the declared election winner actually
got the most votes?  Was the election stolen?  This paper considers a
statistical method based on the pattern of digits in vote counts (the
second-digit Benford's Law, or 2BL) that may be useful for detecting fraud or
other anomalies.  The method seems to be useful for vote counts at the precinct
level but not for counts at the level of individual voting machines, at least
not when the way voters are assigned to machines induces a pattern I call
roughly equal division with leftovers (REDWL).  I demonstrate two mechanisms
that can cause precinct vote counts in general to satisfy 2BL.  I use
simulations to
illustrate that the 2BL test can be very sensitive when vote counts are
subjected to various kinds of manipulation.  I use data from the 2004 election
in Florida and the 2006 election in Mexico to illustrate use of the 2BL tests.

http://polmeth.wustl.edu/retrieve.php?id=620

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