Case studies

This has all been very interesting but not exactly useful. So, can Benford's Law be useful? The answer is yes. In fact, analyses using Benford's Law is admissible in the United States courts. To get an idea for some uses of this analysis, let's take a look at a moderately well-publicized case where Benford's law was used.

The 2009 Iranian presidential election committee gathered analyses into whether the elections were fraudulent or not. Some of these used Benford's Law. One major article on this was A first-digit anomaly in the 2009 Iranian presidential election by Boudewijn F. Roukema (http://arxiv.org/abs/0906.2789). In this study, the author analyzes the first digit of vote counts in the election results publicized by the Iranian Ministry of the Interior on June 14, 2009. First, he analyzed first-round results for elections in immediately preceding years in other countries. This established a baseline or control to compare with. He also took into account the pre-election...