Absolutely fascinating research!<p>I wonder if someone has some free time to run the models on several recent elections that were filled with fraud. I'm interested in: Austrian presidential elections [0], Turkish elections [1] and Democratic party primaries [2][3]. Each of them was analyzed for voting fraud and fraud was found in each of them (some were full of massive vote fraud like Turkish elections).<p>PS: What's with all the downvotes? Is the evidence of massive voter fraud in the West so unsettling that you have to downvote me?<p>[0]
>Austria presidential poll result overturned<p><a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36681475" rel="nofollow">http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36681475</a><p>[1]
>Turkey Elections Massive Vote Fraud<p><a href="https://erikmeyersson.com/2015/11/04/digit-tests-and-the-peculiar-election-dynamics-of-turkeys-november-elections/" rel="nofollow">https://erikmeyersson.com/2015/11/04/digit-tests-and-the-pec...</a><p>[2]
>Hillary Clinton Favored By Election Fraud In Democratic Primaries<p><a href="http://www.inquisitr.com/3127046/hillary-clinton-favored-by-election-fraud-in-democratic-primaries-federal-lawsuit-filed-against-officials-to-protect-california-primaries/" rel="nofollow">http://www.inquisitr.com/3127046/hillary-clinton-favored-by-...</a><p>[3]
>Election Fraud Watch 2016 (J: awesome blog that tracks election fraud in primaries)<p><a href="https://electionfraud2016.wordpress.com/" rel="nofollow">https://electionfraud2016.wordpress.com/</a>
I thought this would just be an application of Benford's law, but they note in the beginning that using Benford's law doesn't work for elections (citing this paper: <a href="http://www.vote.caltech.edu/sites/default/files/benford_pdf_4b97cc5b5b.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.vote.caltech.edu/sites/default/files/benford_pdf_...</a>)<p>Does anyone know why Benford's law doesn't work here but does work for other made up numbers in applications like accounting?
It's kinda sad to see our elections to be used as reference for falsification detection research...<p>This isn't exactly new, such analysis was done as early as 2011, i.e. <a href="http://lleo.me/dnevnik/2011/12/07_gauss.html" rel="nofollow">http://lleo.me/dnevnik/2011/12/07_gauss.html</a><p>Although, they were more focused on the peculiar distribution, than on integer spikes.
This is fascinating.<p>I'm tempted to argue the improbably-round numbers might be due to lazily counting/sampling the ballots rather than actual malicious fraud... but I guess sloppily running the election still constitutes fraud in some sense.
Is there a field that studies inconsistencies of this type?<p>Recently on HN there was a related test (the Grim test) <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11787560" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11787560</a>
It would be very interesting to see this method used for other elections to see what unexpected results can be found.
Although still interesting, it is not a huge surprise that there has been large vote fraud in Russia.
Nice work. It's interesting they used Russia as the source of election results data. Did I miss an exlaination of their data selection criteria in the paper?
Why Electronic Voting is a BAD Idea - Computerphile<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI</a>
This is brilliant. I wonder how the authors got the initial motivation to do the study -- seems like quite a bit of work to find a very specific statistical anomaly; doubt they went into it blindly not really knowing there was something to find...
On reading just the abstract, there does not appear to be any control in this experiment. I'd have expected them to mention inclusion of election results known with certainty to not be fraudulent.<p>Likewise, I'd expect there to be proof of fraud by other reliable means in order to validate this method. It is not enough for them to just assert that there can be no other explanation for this data, so these were fraudulent results, so our method must be working.<p>Absent a control, the strong conclusion that fraud can be detected this way seems unsupported.