re: Mathematician- election numbers could not have occurred naturally

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Theodore P. Hill, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Georgia Tech, Atlanta, cautioned that regardless of the distribution uncovered, the application of Benford’s Law would not provide definitive evidence that fraud took place.

“First, I’d like to stress that Benford’s Law can NOT be used to “prove fraud”,” he told Reuters by email. “It is only a Red Flag test, that can raise doubts. E.g., the IRS has been using it for decades to ferret out fraudsters, but only by identifying suspicious entries, at which time they put the auditors to work on the hard evidence. Whether or not a dataset follows BL proves nothing.”

Walter Mebane, Professor at the Department of Political Science and Department of Statistics at the University of Michigan (here) authored a December 2006 article (here) around the application of Benford’s Law to the US presidential election results.

On Nov. 9, 2020, in response to “several queries” Mebane published a paper called “Inappropriate Applications of Benford’s Law Regularities to Some Data from the 2020 Presidential Election in the United States” (here). His paper says, “The displays shown at those sources using the first digits of precinct vote counts data from Fulton County, GA, Allegheny County, PA, Milwaukee, WI, and Chicago, IL, say nothing about possible frauds” before examining the reasons behind this statement.

“It is widely understood that the first digits of precinct vote counts are not useful for trying to diagnose election frauds,” he writes.

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