tiberius

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?

I was thinking of the first few chapters (Part I of the book). But your question was rather generic, actually there are mathematical techniques sprinkled through the whole book.

The math section of Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest "An Introduction to Algorithms" is a good introductory math text for CS people (the remainder of the book is also excellent).