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发帖数: 1 | 1 The proliferation of elections in even those states that are arguably
anything but democratic has given rise to a focused interest on developing
methods for detecting fraud in the official statistics of a state's election
returns. Among these efforts are those that employ Benford's Law, with the
most common application being an attempt to proclaim some election or
another fraud free or replete with fraud. This essay, however, argues that,
despite its apparent utility in looking at other phenomena, Benford's Law is
problematical at best as a forensic tool when applied to elections. Looking
at simulations designed to model both fair and fraudulent contests as well
as data drawn from elections we know, on the basis of other investigations,
were either permeated by fraud or unlikely to have experienced any
measurable malfeasance, we find that conformity with and deviations from
Benford's Law follow no pattern. It is not simply that the Law occasionally
judges a fraudulent election fair or a fair election fraudulent. Its "
success rate" either way is essentially equivalent to a toss of a coin,
thereby rendering it problematical at best as a forensic tool and wholly
misleading at worst. |
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