In a recent article published in Explore Big Sky, Gallatin County Vice
Chair Tammy Hall made the claim that Tester may have won because of vote fraud.
Here’s the part of the article that's relevant:
"Tammy
Hall, first vice president for Gallatin County Republican Women, felt
the local Republican effort to get out the vote was strong, but said
voter fraud in the county was a factor in the outcomes.
“When
you’ve got 8,000 people registering to vote on the same day, you’ve
lost control,” said Hall, also one of 22 delegates representing Montana
at the Republican National Convention in August."
As a political scientist, there’s nothing more annoying than
someone who lobs into the body politic claims of voter fraud without a shred of
empirical evidence with which to back the claim. Trust is vital in republican
government, and without it, our elected officials cannot hope to government.
Part of the reason Congress cannot function is the historically low-levels of
trust voters have in the institution. Claiming voter fraud when your candidate
or party doesn’t win—instead of engaging in a profound retrospection based upon
real data—does not help matters. And it certainly doesn’t help your party or
candidate plan for the next election if you just put your head in the sand and
scream that the other side cheated.
Voter fraud is serious business, but it can be
detected using some rather simple statistical tests. Walter Mebane, a political
methodologist at the University of Michigan, has written extensively on the
matter. Go to his website and see his research. In a chapter in the book Election Fraud (edited by Mike Alvarez, Thad Hall, and Susan Hyde), Mebane proposes the use of a simple statistical test, called the Second Digit
Benford’s Law Test for Vote Counts, to detect the likelihood of fraud. Simply
put, the digits in a group of numbers are likely to have a particular
distribution. Mebane explains:
“Benford’s Law states
that in a list of statistical data, such as vote tallies from different
precincts, the digits of the numbers that make up those data points follow a
specific distribution. In each significant digit position, smaller numerals
appear more often than larger numerals. In a set of data that follow Benford’s
Law, the first significant digit is the number 1 roughly 30 percent of the
time. There is what I call a second-digit Benford’s Law (2BL) distribution when
the first digits have no particular pattern but the second digits of the data
points do follow the pattern given by Benford’s Law. In this case the second
significant digit is 0 (zero) about 12 percent of the time” (Mebane 2008).
Very simply put, if we see variation from the
Benford’s law in the distribution of the second digit in precinct level vote
returns, we have possible evidence of voter fraud. It is not proof of fraud,
but it raises the possibility that monkey business may be at work.
Because I’m not a political methodologist and not as
smart as Mebane, I searched the web for a routine that would allow me to
examine precinct level data in a statistical software package political
scientists, economists, and sociologists use called Stata. I found such a routine
called Digdis. I installed the routine, downloaded precinct vote totals for the
Senate race from the Montana Secretary of State’s website, and ran a quick
analysis on the second significant figure of the precinct totals. Here’s a
screen capture of the Stata output:
The data show the number of 1-9 digits in the second
significant position, the percent expected value in the distribution according to Benford’s Law, the variation
from that expected percentage, and the statistical significance of said variation. In no instance
does the difference in the expected value from the actual value rise to
conventional levels of statistical significance (p<.05).
In other words, across the 794 voting precincts, the
vote totals reported in the Senate race show NO STATISTICALLY DISCERNIBLE
EVIDENCE OF VOTE FRAUD.
Before screaming about fraud, it might make some
sense to learn a little about the likelihood of it and build a solid empirical
case based upon quantitative evidence to demonstrate some proof of those claims.
To paraphrase Dan Rather, voter fraud in the Senate race? “That dog just don’t
hunt”.
