Was George Gascn Elected by Fraud?
It appears that the election of Los Angeles County District Attorney, George Gascn, on November 3, 2020, was engulfed in substantial, and perhaps irrefutable, fraud. To determine this, I applied standard statistical fraud identification tools to the election data. In this race, Gascn, previously district attorney of San Francisco County, challenged Jackie Lacey, the incumbent. Lacey, who held the office for the prior eight years (2012 to 2020), and is considered to have conducted her duties in a tough-on-crime manner. I begin with the publicly available final election report, as posted on the web by the Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters. Anyone can download this at Past Election Info (lavote.net)  First, here are the vote totals, by voting method (note that Lacey won the In Polling Place total across Los Angeles County):  The difference in total vote tally is 264,237 votes, in favor of Gascn. Let me now briefly describe Benfords Law, sometimes known as the law of first digits. This statistical tool, used frequently by fraud examiners, relies on the fact that the frequency of first digits in multidigit natural transactions, or tallies, occurs with predictable sameness. The identification of first digits is best explained by example:  Benfords Law has been written about in a number of technical and professional journals, as well as in other articles presenting the likelihood of fraud in other November 3, 2020, elections. For all instances of first digits in real, natural data, Benfords Law predicts that the frequency of first digits (1 through 9, zero is never a leading digit) will occur at or near the following percentages of the transactions or tallies (for a sample size of 250 or more). Lets look at an actual election chart for which Benfords Law does chart for which Benfords Law does not indicate fraud, shown below. Note that the candidates first digit percentages (blue solid and black dashed lines) closely follow the Benfords predicted values in the standard Benford table above. The Chi-squared reference in the chart, showing near perfect correlation to Benfords Law, will be explained below. Again, the above chart shows what Benfords analysis might show if an election is conducted honestly. However, in cases where the naturally generated numbers are manipulated, the data will likely show deviation from the Benford curves. (The manipulation changes data, including the first digits, and therefore the first digit percentages are also changed.) Perhaps surprisingly, legitimate election data for multiple candidates follows the Benfords Law predictions regardless of the quantity of votes cast for the winner and the loser. Now, lets look at data for the November 3, 2020, Los Angeles County District Attorney race. Lets first apply Benfords law to the official voting data to look for indications of fraud. Here is the overall chart of both candidates counts of precinct tally first-digits, compared with the Benford targets. Note how different this election chart is from the example election chart shown earlier. Both the Gascn and Lacey precinct vote tallies above display indications of fraudulent manipulation. This is a good-sized data sample (3,004 precinct tallies) and the first digits of naturally generated precinct counts should closely match the Benford curve. They do not match. Many Gascn precinct vote counts in the 200s, 300s and 400s were apparently overwritten with values in the 500s, 600s, 700s, 800s and 900s, and as we will see, even 1,000s. Chi-Squared test is another statistical tool that measures the similarity of two curves (two sets of sequential data) and provides a numerical value for the correlation. I have calculated the Chi-squared values in this case, both the Gascn and Lacey data have zero correlation to the Benford predicts. While this would indicate that both candidates data were manipulated, I will focus on the Gascn voting data. Of all vote totals in the final County Registrars report, 79.4% were cast by mail. If there was intent to defraud the voters of LA County and steal this election for Mr. Gascn, it would likely center on votes by the mail-in method. So, lets now focus on those votes cast by mail (VBM). We go deeper into the data to see if in fact votes by mail appear to have been added to Gascns totals in the 500s through 900s, as indicated by the chart above, and that they were also added in the 1,000s. Here are a table and chart splitting out these precinct tallies (Again, all data are taken directly from the official County Registrar report.) It appears that the vote tallies for Gascn in the 200s to 400s are disproportionately low, and are disproportionately high for the 500s through 900s, as indicated in the histogram above. This is consistent with the initial indicator of fraud in the Benford graph for this election. Therefore, many Gascn precinct vote counts in the 200s, 300s and 400s were likely overwritten with values in the 500s, 600s, 700s, 800s and 900s. If this occurred, those acts are fraudulent. Lastly, lets look at precinct tallies of 1,000 and higher. It appears District Attorney George Gascn won a fraudulent election process. If that is true, that this election was conducted with criminal fraud, we may need a legal and investigative agency other than the Los Angeles County District Attorneys office to investigate. Images: Los Angeles County Clerk's Office, Author