Breaking Benford

Radiolab

WNYC Studios

Science, Natural Sciences, History, Society & Culture, Documentary

4.6 • 43.5K Ratings

🗓️ 13 November 2020

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the days after the US Presidential election was called for Joe Biden, many supporters of Donald Trump are crying foul. Voter fraud. And a key piece of evidence? A century-old quirk of math called Benford’s Law. We at Radiolab know Benford’s Law well, and have covered it before. In this political dispatch, Latif and Soren Sherlock their way through the precinct numbers to see if these claims hold up. Spoiler: they don’t. But the reason why is more interesting than you’d expect.

This episode was reported by Latif Nasser.

Support Radiolab by becoming a member today at Radiolab.org/donate.

Links:

Walter Mebane, “Inappropriate Applications of Benford’s Law Regularities to Some Data from the 2020 Presidential Election in the United States”

Transcript

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0:00.0	Wait, you're listening to radio lab from W and Y.
0:20.0	Well, first, am I imagining that Chad already knows about, because we just talked about
0:25.3	it when I was promoting my show, right?
0:27.8	About Ben Frisla.
0:29.1	Let's tell him that.
0:30.1	Remind him.
0:31.1	He knows, but he forgets.
0:32.1	Yeah, just, okay.
0:33.1	Well, I think, I think my, hey, I'm Luttifnosser.
0:36.0	This is radio lab.
0:37.4	And today, in the week after the election was called for Joe Biden, but in this sort of
0:43.8	weird middle space when Donald Trump has refused to concede, our editor, Soren Wheeler
0:49.2	and I sat Chad down with him.
0:51.0	Right.
0:52.0	I think we, because we wanted to tell him about something from our past that has come
0:56.2	back to haunt us.
0:57.2	Okay.
0:58.2	So a few months ago, you may remember, I was telling you about the Netflix show I made
1:05.5	connected, right?
1:06.5	Right.
1:07.5	And I was telling you about one of the episodes, which is about something that before
1:12.7	my time, radio lab had also separately done an episode about, which was this thing called
	...

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