Due to the nature of my job, I always have 'itchy hands' towards datasets. Last week I went through 2011,2015 and 2019 election results and there was an urge in me to do something about the sweet data .

Hence, I have decided to work on 2019 general election. I am going to attempt to show the anomalies in the 2019 general election. I will do this analysis solely on Benford Law.

Benford's Law
Frank Albert Benford Jr. was an American physicist (1883 – 1948) who postulated the popular Benford law. In a simple term, the law states that if you choose the first digit from a collection of numbers, it must follow a giving pattern. In order words, if no manipulation or tampering has occured, the first digit of an unbiased sets of numbers must follow a giving pattern. The deviation from this giving pattern shows the level of anomalies in the collection.

Benford law is used to detected fraud in accounting and other disciplines. If the accounting figures has high deviation from Benford curve, it means someone might have manufactured some figures, and there is need to look further into the report.

Benford must be apply to numbers that vary widely- numbers in which 1 to 9 has equal chance of appearing. Hence applying Benford law to election result across the country will give each number equal chance of appearing.


See Benford curve below.

First screenshot: 2019 election result per state per selected candidate

second screenshot: table showing leading figures from the election result.

The chart below shows Buhari's 2019 election result against Benford's curve. To a large extend, Buhari's result conformed with Benford's Law.

Note that variance in the chart could be due to willful alteration of results or error from electoral officer. Also note that estimation of figures also affects Benford law. However, since election results do not deal with decimal numbers, such problem cannot be associated with it.

Atiku's election result had large variance with Benford curve. There were high anomalies in the result. This could mean that the result was tampered with (this doesn't mean opposition. It could be tampered with by his 'people') or Atiku's popularity was very skewed (i.e very popular in some area and very unpopular in other areas) or there are other factors which Benford's law could not account for that was present during 2019 election.

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