While I don't believe VT is remotely perfect in this realm, I think the other thing to consider, given that vt and Wyoming are the top, is that the per capita measures always skew data when it comes to things like this. Places with low population density have higher per capita representation. There is the same amount of government officials per town, but if the town has 1/5th the people, well 2 corrupt officials equates to a 5x higher per capita corruption number. It is a misapprorpriation of data and stats done by poor scientists, or worse, untrained reporters who don't actually understand statistical science and therefore shouldn't utilize it. Per capita of the total population when looking at a discrete subpopulation (government workers) does not equalize the numbers, they are not intrinsically related because, well, the number of government officials in a given area is completely arbitrarily defined by people, and therefore not predictable by basic statistics.

So I don't think this article actually says anything, because states with high pop density (NY, CA) appear low corruption for the same reason. It is an uncontrolled bias in the data manipulation.

• a data & information scientist