When Does the Second-Digit Benford’s Law-Test Signal an Election Fraud?
-
Susumu Shikano
und
Verena Mack
Summary
Detecting election fraud with a simple statistical method and minimal information makes the application of Benford’s Law quite promising for a wide range of researchers. Whilst its specific form, the Second-Digit Benford’s Law (2BL)-test, is increasingly applied to fraud suspected elections, concerns about the validity of its test results have been raised. One important caveat of this kind of research is that the 2BL-test has been applied mostly to fraud suspected elections. Therefore, this article will apply the test to the 2009 German Federal Parliamentary Election against which no serious allegation of fraud has been raised. Surprisingly, the test results indicate that there should be electoral fraud in a number of constituencies. These counter intuitive results might be due to the naive application of the 2BL-test which is based on the conventional χ2 distribution. If we use an alternative distribution based on simulated election data, the 2BL-test indicates no significant deviation. Using the simulated election data, we also identified under which circumstances the naive application of the 2BL-test is inappropriate. Accordingly, constituencies with homogeneous precincts and a specific range of vote counts tend to have a higher value for the 2BL statistic.
© 2011 by Lucius & Lucius, Stuttgart
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Titelei
- Inhalt / Contents
- Guest Editorial
- Abhandlungen / Original Papers
- The Production of Historical “Facts”: How the Wrong Number of Participants in the Leipzig Monday Demonstration on October 9, 1989 Became a Convention
- “True Believers” or Numerical Terrorism at the Nuclear Power Plant
- One-eyed Epidemiologic Dummies at Nuclear Power Plants
- Are Most Published Research Findings False?
- What Fuels Publication Bias?
- The Identification and Prevention of Publication Bias in the Social Sciences and Economics
- Benford’s Law as an Instrument for Fraud Detection in Surveys Using the Data of the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP)
- When Does the Second-Digit Benford’s Law-Test Signal an Election Fraud?
- Difficulties Detecting Fraud? The Use of Benford’s Law on Regression Tables
- Plagiarism in Student Papers: Prevalence Estimates Using Special Techniques for Sensitive Questions
- Pitfalls of International Comparative Research: Taking Acquiescence into Account
- Buchbesprechungen / Book Reviews
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Titelei
- Inhalt / Contents
- Guest Editorial
- Abhandlungen / Original Papers
- The Production of Historical “Facts”: How the Wrong Number of Participants in the Leipzig Monday Demonstration on October 9, 1989 Became a Convention
- “True Believers” or Numerical Terrorism at the Nuclear Power Plant
- One-eyed Epidemiologic Dummies at Nuclear Power Plants
- Are Most Published Research Findings False?
- What Fuels Publication Bias?
- The Identification and Prevention of Publication Bias in the Social Sciences and Economics
- Benford’s Law as an Instrument for Fraud Detection in Surveys Using the Data of the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP)
- When Does the Second-Digit Benford’s Law-Test Signal an Election Fraud?
- Difficulties Detecting Fraud? The Use of Benford’s Law on Regression Tables
- Plagiarism in Student Papers: Prevalence Estimates Using Special Techniques for Sensitive Questions
- Pitfalls of International Comparative Research: Taking Acquiescence into Account
- Buchbesprechungen / Book Reviews
