Pedestrian application of Benford’s Law to Exit polls

September 18, 2004

I have been in computer hell ever since my laptop decided two weeks ago not to charge properly. Then I got a new charger and it’s the connector in the motherboard, so it may die again. Apparently the only solution may be to get a new motherboard from the States. When I finally got it to work it gave me an error, called Microsoft who said reinstall Windows, I did. Unfortunately, after installing Windows I could not get the Wireless network to even give me the right menu. Called Dell and had my first experience with a call center in India, very efficient, polite and knowledgeable and I am back on the air for the time being with my laptop.


Lots to post, for now, someone in the comments asked/said how come Benford’s Law had not been applied to the Exit polls, so I did it. Now, understand that all I did was plot the fraction ocurrenecs for a first digit for the exit polls for both the Si’s and the No’s and got the following histogram:


 



 


This seems to be textbook Benford’s Law for the data from the 325 centers polled by Proyecto Venezuela. I don’t know if mathematicians do other tests to evaluate how “good” or “bad” it fits with Benford’s law. If anyone knows, let me know.

This entry was posted on September 18, 2004 at 1:01 pm and is filed under Venezuela.

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