Benford's law probably does not apply here. The data has to be distributed in a logarithmic fashion (or something close). This would be closer to applying Benford's law to the populations of the certain regions. In any case it just does not make sense to use it without a little justification.
IANA(M/S/EE), but is this applicable? I thought Benford's Law applied to fabricated numbers, e.g. in expense reports. But wouldn't it be too obvious to just invent vote counts like that?
If the vote counts are not fabricated, but results of a manipulated process (i.e. miscounting votes), wouldn't that mean that Benford's law still applies?
Benford's law applies to probability distributions which are (roughly) uniform on a logarithmic scale, and which span over several orders of magnitude.
If a manipulated process generated such a distribution then it would satisfy Benford's law.
However, it isn't clear to me apriori why election returns should satisfy Benford's law, so I'm unsure why this test is meaningful to begin with.
There's a professor at Ann Arbor who knows more about this than me :-) He's done work in this area and claims that Benford's Law's distribution for the second digit of vote counts can be significant. My little analysis appears to say "this data matches Benford's Law in the first and second digits"
