Benford's law for fraud detection

[Truthsearcher]

I don't know how many of you have heard of Benford's test. It's basically a very easy and simple way to spot fake numbers.

It basically says in an random set of numbers in a base 10 system, the likelihood of each number appearing is

1 30.1%

2 17.6%

3 12.5%

4 9.7%

5 7.9%

6 6.7%

7 5.8%

8 5.1%

9 4.6%

When numbers a totally out of synch with those numbers, you know you're not dealing with completely random numbers and dealing with fake made up numbers.

Now here is graph for the number of votes in each precinct for both Trump and Biden in each precinct in Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia

Notice the top 3 Trump numbers are all in line with the Benford curve, whereas the Biden numbers are ridiculously out of line with Benford's law.

This is how even a cursory look at the data alert you to human made up numbers.

[Truthsearcher]

https://i.imgur.com/KznBEmn.jpg

[Diogenesis]

when fraud is not extinguished, it grows exponentially.

when allowed in politicians, countries and justice die.

[Rurudyne]

Benford?

Joe the Fraud-Man Biden

“More fraud! Ugh ugh ugh!”

[Boogieman]

“in an random set of numbers in a base 10 system”

Well, there’s the error in your logic. Vote counts are not random sets of numbers.

[Truthsearcher]

All naturally occurring numbers follow this law of distribution.

[freeandfreezing]

Lets get our math wizards to work. Here are some charts from crowd sourced analysis on 4chan/pol:

The original thread from 4chan is here, the usual warnings about the coarse language, etc. apply.

Note that the Trump results seem to follow the expected distribution, but the Biden results do not. That is quite unusual, and in most forensic accounting investigations would lead to suspicion.

[freeandfreezing]

Vote counts are not random sets of numbers.

Learn about Beford's law.

[Pollard]

I made the image bigger but it's getting more blurry. Trump is the top three and biden's the bottom. You can see the 3-4am bump for biden in Philly on the left.

[freeandfreezing]

Benford's Law

From Wikipedia

[DoodleBob]

I’m very familiar with Benford’s law. What is the x-axis? I can’t tell from the picture - the resolution isn’t strong.

[ml/nj]

EXCELLENT !!

Here are the graphs:

ML/NJ

[freeandfreezing]

Fixed link

[orlop9]

Great Post

I trust our friends are looking into this

[freeandfreezing]

The X axis is the first digit of the result from a precinct, or ward depending on the location, the Y axis is frequency.

[Pollard]

From wiki. What it should look like. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford's_law

[LilFarmer]

I wish there was a chart or timeline like this of GA. I know Trump was up by 300,000 election night, then they counted in secret and he was down to 100,000 by morning. Now he leads by only 12,825

[freeandfreezing]

Here is a link to the original chart, it is easier to read than the scaled down versions posted here.

[freeandfreezing]

These graphs are not related to the timeline. They show the distribution of the first digits of the reported counts. It turns out that for a random set of values, like election results, the distribution of digits tends to follow a fixed pattern.

When people fake data they put in digits that they think are random, but really aren't. So the pattern of digits is used in fraud investigations of all kinds.

[Pollard]

It would pretty much look like Milwaukee for Biden with one or two tall bars on the left.

[William Tell]

"This is how even a cursory look at the data alert you to human made up numbers."

I've never heard of "Benford's Law" but I can see how it could come about. I would imagine that it applies only to complete numbers. If you examine a large enough list of random numbers drawn from the range from, let's say, 0 to 999,999 then I would expect that the least significant digit would be distributed evenly; that is, there would be the same amount of each of the ten digits.

I believe that somebody reported that one state had too many precincts reporting totals that ended in "00". That would be very hard to explain unless humans were involved in picking the numbers.