This article, called “Joe Biden’s Votes Violate Benford’s Law (Mathematics)” is, if nothing else, interesting. Math is not my wheelhouse, to say the least. Maybe it’s right and maybe it’s garbage, but Benford’s Law is real, and is used to detect fraud, as this article explains.
Prof. Reynolds, who posted the link, on his blog, says that Facebook will not post the link in any form. That itself is a red flag. Why is Facebook preventing readers from learning about a process that might lend a clue to whether the current election vote totals have been manipulated or not? What is Facebook afraid of?
The rush to conclude the election rather than examine these legitimate questions is its own red flag.
Ethics Alarms 
Facebook is not even waiting until after Jan. 20th to make more blatant moves against “enemies” of the new order. They’re apparently moving against firearms-oriented pages. They’ve just disappeared the International Shooting Sport Federation’s page (the governing body for Olympic shooting sports) ARTICLE HERE, and are shutting down others, like one I follow oriented towards supporting black gun owners.
Welcome to Biden’s Amerika.
Facebook is afraid of the truth.
Michael T Ejercito wrote, “Facebook is afraid of the truth.”
False, they are only making sure that their preferred truth dominates their social media platform.
They prefer that 2 + 2 = 5 and they are limiting any truth that differs from that or may question the validity of their conclusion. They are employing the Salem Witch Trial School of Thought.
Wait, don’t they support “truth over facts”? I didn’t get the memo on the policy change.
Jack, I would love to stay up all night, composing a Comment Of The Night about the points I want to make in response to your post here. But, my health requires me to get sleep. Now more than ever, I need SLEEP for what health and survival that my body can sustain. So all I can do, before logging out and making an effort to sleep, is to condense my commentary at this time as best I can, in a way that will surely fail to make all of my points altogether, or, fail to make most or all of them sufficiently clear.
Perhaps “the points I mean to make” are too much, too complex, of a thesis to be made in a mere comment in a blog thread. Perhaps other, more articulate and prolific commenters will rise to this occasion before I awaken again in the coming day, and will say what I would like to say right here, with brilliant brevity and clarity. You know, by God, I expect to sleep better now, just for writing that previous sentence. I have followed this blog long enough that now, I almost EXPECT someone else to say what I am thinking before I can post it – and say it better than I ever could.
Fraud. It’s everywhere. Forget, or disregard, for a minute, the “math path” to validation of fraud’s existence, particularly as applicable to year 2020 US election results.
Back to the core topic: fraud. Fraud is a case where “everybody does it” is NOT an unethical rationalization. It is simply a fact. It is a truism. Each of us practices fraud in one way or another, to one extent or another. Go ahead, deny that. QED (Sorry – there I went, “being mathematical.”). “Res ipsa loquitur.” Denial is perhaps the most popular – certainly, a most convenient – Step One in perpetration of any kind of fraud.
Jack, in your post here, I can see fraud that both you and I have allowed ourselves to tolerate, to self-blind to, and, even, to practice despite our noblest, strongest, life-long efforts not to.
From here on and in the future, I will probably refer to this country as “The Fraudulent State of America.” The FS of A. We live in a country, a society, where the “red flag” for appearance of (or for reasonable suspicion of) fraud is, in practice, a white flag. In reality, the flag, whatever color we choose to give it, reflects resignation to the inevitability and inescapability of suffering (that is, presuming, accepting, tolerating, even enabling and condoning and celebrating) fraud.
The FS of A has now completed – however fraudulently – election of its 46th Fraud-In-Chief.
No amount of “counter-fraud” will undo the results of the fraud that has brought us to where we are now.
No amount of fraud-less thinking or action will be the least bit effective at removing (or even diminishing or inhibiting) the practice of fraud from our society, or at mitigating the effects of the culture of fraud that pervades the FS of A, or – as one might dream, like MLK – at repairing the damages of historical fraud.
I’ll stop here for now. My assertions above stem from continuation of the line of thinking that compelled me to say, in another comment in another recent EA thread:
“I don’t think it’s over. But I don’t think it’s going to end any other way, but to push Trump out of power.
I am excited for what LIES ahead. When fraud works, why stop practicing it? Biden has practiced it like a pro for at least 50 years. That’s quite a crop of successors coming up after him, too.
Maybe America has been as great as it is all along, as a result of having the world’s best practitioners of fraud in power, generation after generation. Maybe China’s “lead” Party can finally fix that little flaw.”
Link to thread where my comment in bold above was posted:
https://ethicsalarms.com/2020/11/06/election-2020-the-appearance-of-impropriety-or-real-impropriety-part-i-georgia-on-my-mind/
Failed to insert a “close italics” HTML mark above, after “inevitability and inescapability.”
Fixed!
If there is voter fraud at this point there isn’t much that can be done.
Here’s the problem with identifying voter fraud after the votes have been counted, the illegal votes are already intermixed with the legal votes and there is absolutely no way of identifying which individual ballots are the fraudulent ones. You might ask why; well it because it would be illegal to identify on an actual individual ballot the person that cast the ballot, our actual ballots are 100% confidential.
Once ballots are placed in the legal ballot pile they cannot be removed for any reason other than the ballot itself was filled out incorrectly, validity of the voter becomes 100% irrelevant to the ballot because chain f custody is broken and a ballot cannot be tracked back to a voter.
If there is evidence of massive voter fraud found in a particular precinct, city, county or state after the ballots have already counted the only thing they can do is to hold another election in that area.
Voter fraud MUST be stopped BEFORE the illegal ballots get in the mix of legal ballots.
Someone please correct me if my understanding is incorrect.
The only scenario I can think of where fraudulent ballots could be detected is if they were mass produced by printing. But, I’m pretty sure if fraudulent ballots were submitted they had some “army” of participants somewhere that filled them out by hand.
Obviously, if fraudulent ballots were mass produced via printing then they could be identified because under inspection they would be identical. Then there is also the possibility printed ballots could be produced with specialized software to make each ballot unique.
It’s just grasping at straws at this point. I feel the election was stolen but I have no proof, nothing. Therefore, I’m going to have to accept the result but in the back of my mind I will always think the election was stolen.
There’s evidence. It’s circumstantial, to be sure, but that’s often the starting point for uncovering a crime.
If only we had some democratic institution made up of professional, objective truth-seekers who viewed it their duty to investigate such situations…
I concur that there is probable cause.
Jack cited a poll (yes, I know, a poll) showing that over seventy percent of Democratic voters believe in the Russian collusion myth.
How many Republican voters will believe this election was stolen even on the flimsiest of evidence?
The article posts just fine to Parler, where I and many of my friends have gone.
Blood pressure too low this morning? This thread will take care of that:
Using Benford’s law at the precinct level is invalid in many cases. Benford’s law works best with values that span many orders of magnitude.
I took the data for Chicago as an example. The precincts are most likely selected based on a particular size. So, there is not a natural distribution of the population, registered voters, the actual voters or the way that they voted. Using Benford’s law on the registered voters, the highest numbers are 6, 7, and 8. This would seem to indicate a violation of Benford’s law, but it really shows that Benford’s law cannot be used for this data. The only reason that the non-Biden candidate’s precinct level data look like they follow Benford’s law is that their votes are spread from 1 digit to 3 digits. Almost all of Biden’s precinct level data are 3 digit numbers (2053 of 2069 precincts). For the entire city of Chicago, Biden got 82.25% of the vote. So, applying Benford’s law to Biden’s precinct level data is really just applying Benford’s law to the precinct registered voter count.
Benford’s law works better on a larger scale, such as at the county level across the entire US because county populations (2019 estimates) vary from 86 (Kalawao County, Hawaii) to 10,039,107 (Los Angels County, California). This is many orders of magnitude and the counties were generally created irrespective of population and populations changed over time, so they are naturally diverse.
Thanks Ken. Helpful.
My feeble brain tried to understand the application of Benford’s Law. I understand it in principle – that totals at the macro level tend to follow a predictable pattern, which supports Benford’s Law; things get weird when totals fall dramatically outside that pattern, thus violating Benford’s Law and tending toward intentional manipulation. I get lost in the application of numbers or digits 1 through 9. Pardon my ignorance, but what do the digits represent in the equations? Any clarity would be appreciated.
jvb
My guess on the simplest answer to this is that elections are not random processes. Districts within a State, and precincts within a district, are usually set up to have a roughly equal number of persons eligible to vote. Because of this, it is likely that the first digit for the winning vote total in most districts within a State, and most precincts within a district, will within a singe leading digit or two span.
I would suspect that if we looked at the LAST digit in the vote totals for the candidates, that should provide a roughly equal distribution across the ten digits, provided there is a relatively large number of precincts under consideration.
The following article explains how to apply Benford’s Law, but as a warning about assuming fraud in a data set, it states:
1. Reconsider the data’s suitability for Benford analysis. Before suspecting fraud, CPAs should reexamine the data set for the possibility of built-in bias toward certain numerals, and if bias is found, the results of your Benford analysis should be disregarded.
https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/issues/2017/apr/excel-and-benfords-law-to-detect-fraud.html
I have not commented since the election and probably won’t comment much after this one.
There are many lawyers here and I simply want to ask one question.
Why is proof of fraud required when proof of suppression is not?
It seems to me that any illegal vote is not only a fraud but also suppression. Every illegitimate vote cast for one candidate nullifies a legal vote cast for the opposition. How a vote is suppressed is irrelevant.
I am told that any voter fraud that occurs is relatively limited and is unlikely to alter the outcome so where are the massive numbers of people whose votes are suppressed by the requirement for a photo ID.
I would posit that the continuing belief that fraud or suppression creates illegitimately elected candidates imposes much higher costs on society than a handful of persons unable to procure a photo ID. Yes, everyone has a guaranteed right to vote but implicit in that right is the right to know your legal vote was not nullified by an illegal one.
As I see it, the right to vote is not in the act of voting but in the ability to add your voice to the process. Illegal votes silence that voice.
I think you are correct, Chris. But, the “Republicans want to suppress your vote” is a well-crafted canard. It is the difference between counting “all votes cast” and counting “all votes legally cast”. The Left is masterful at setting the dialog and definition of terms. The Right is incapable of countering that. As the Left controls the narrative, Republicans lose the fight before the starting bell because it uses words defined by the Left, and if the Left sees itself losing the argument, it automatically changes the definitions. A perfect example: Judge Coney Barrett talked about “sexual preferences” during her confirmation hearings. Within minutes, the Left attacked her and changed the definition of “preference” to include an offense that absolutely does not exist. The Right complained about it but that is all. In fact, some on the Right conceded that Coney Barrett’s statement was inappropriate.
With that kind of buckling under pressure, the Left will continue its march toward annihilating all dissent. The Right needs to take note. The Left has already pledged to dump over a billion dollars into Georgia to get two more Democrat senators, along with a fawning media industry firmly in the Left’s control. The Right needs to respond with just as much vitriol. A slash and burn mind set (kind of like Sherman’s “retreat” through Atlanta) is in order. As one of my colleagues stated, and echoed by Newt Gingrich last week, you don’t put down a coup with social media posts and tweets. You put down an insurrection with bullets to the head and blood in the streets.
jvb