Related papers: A first-digit anomaly in the 2009 Iranian presiden…
A simple and quick general test to screen for numerical anomalies is presented. It can be applied, for example, to electoral processes, both electronic and manual. It uses vote counts in officially published voting units, which are…
Instant runoff voting (IRV) is an increasingly-popular alternative to traditional plurality voting in which voters submit rankings over the candidates rather than single votes. In practice, elections using IRV often restrict the ballot…
We analyze the susceptibility of instant runoff voting (IRV) to a lesser-studied paradox known as a \emph{reinforcement paradox}, which occurs when candidate $X$ wins under IRV in two distinct elections but $X$ loses in the combined…
In the days immediately following the contested June 2009 Presidential election, Iranians attempting to reach news content and social media platforms were subject to unprecedented levels of the degradation, blocking and jamming of…
We introduce new power indices to measure the a priori voting power of voters in liquid democracy elections where an underlying network restricts delegations. We argue that our power indices are natural extensions of the standard…
We discuss a common suspicion about reported financial data, in 10 industrial sectors of the 6 so called "main developing countries" over the time interval [2000-2014]. These data are examined through Benford's law first significant digit…
Benford's Law describes the finding that the distribution of leading (or leftmost) digits of innumerable datasets follows a well-defined logarithmic trend, rather than an intuitive uniformity. In practice this means that the most common…
Considering the first significant digits (noted d) in data sets of dissipation for turbulent flows, the probability to find a given number (d=1 or 2 or... 9) would be 1/9 for an uniform distribution. Instead the probability closely follows…
Single Transferable Vote (STV) is a voting method used to elect multiple candidates in ranked-choice elections. One weakness of STV is that it fails multiple fairness criteria related to monotonicity and no show paradoxes. We analyze 1,079…
We hypothesize that if election results are manipulated or forged, then, due to the well-known human attraction to round numbers, the frequency of reported round percentages can be increased. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed raw data…
Benford's law is an empirical edict stating that the lower digits appear more often than higher ones as the first few significant digits in statistics of natural phenomena and mathematical tables. A marked proportion of such analyses is…
Instant-runoff voting (IRV) is used in several countries around the world. It requires voters to rank candidates in order of preference, and uses a counting algorithm that is more complex than systems such as first-past-the-post or scoring…
Many mathematical, man-made and natural systems exhibit a leading-digit bias, where a first digit (base 10) of 1 occurs not 11\% of the time, as one would expect if all digits were equally likely, but rather 30\%. This phenomenon is known…
The first digit (FD) phenomenon i.e., the significant digits of numbers in large data are often distributed according to a logarithmically decreasing function was first reported by S. Newcomb and then many decades later independently by F.…
The Newcomb-Benford law, also known as the first-digit law, gives the probability distribution associated with the first digit of a dataset, so that, for example, the first significant digit has a probability of $30.1$ % of being $1$ and…
The occurrence of digits 1 through 9 as the leftmost nonzero digit of numbers from real-world sources is distributed unevenly according to an empirical law, known as Benford's law or the first digit law. It remains obscure why a variety of…
Many systems exhibit a digit bias. For example, the first digit base 10 of the Fibonacci numbers, or of $2^n$, equals 1 not 10% or 11% of the time, as one would expect if all digits were equally likely, but about 30% of the time. This…
The first digit law, also known as Benford's law or the significant digit law, is an empirical phenomenon that the leading digit of numbers from real world sources favors small ones in a form $\log(1+{1}/{d})$, where $d=1, 2, ..., 9$. Such…
The standard voting methods in the United States, plurality and ranked choice (or instant runoff) voting, are susceptible to significant voting failures. These flaws include Condorcet and majority failures as well as monotonicity and…
Census counts are subject to different types of nonsampling errors. One of these main errors is coverage error. Undercount and overcount are two types of coverage error. Undercount usually occurs more than the other, thus net undercount…