Using Numerical Anomalies to Test for Fraud in Colonial New South Wales Elections

Abstract

When fabricating numbers, humans tend to make systematic errors, favouring some numerals over others. Analysing twenty‐first‐century elections in which fraud has been alleged, researchers have observed anomalous patterns in the last digits of vote counts. I show that vote counts for the 2022 Australian election exhibit no anomalies, and then turn attention to nineteenth‐century colonial elections in New South Wales. Pooling data for elections from 1843 to 1887, I find a less uniform pattern in final digits. Even so, formal statistical tests cannot reject the hypothesis that vote counts in these elections were unaffected by fraud.