The author mentions that anomaly in the article, but goes on to assume that the sorting is picked by the state printing the ticket (probably for the benefit of being able to continue the case study).
I also noted that the differing color of the "04 02" in that image can be spotted with the naked eye if zoomed in - no advanced analysis techniques necessary.
I think the techniques used were far more interesting than the particular case study - while the media and non-camera-original nature of the images made the author's most basic techniques somewhat ineffective, the fakes were overall very poorly executed.
If it were the case that the numbers on this ticket were unsorted, you would expect all of the rows to be unsorted, whereas everything except 04 & 02 are in order, including the numbers that follow in the same row. Still interesting to see the "forensic" approach to this.
I also noted that the differing color of the "04 02" in that image can be spotted with the naked eye if zoomed in - no advanced analysis techniques necessary.
I think the techniques used were far more interesting than the particular case study - while the media and non-camera-original nature of the images made the author's most basic techniques somewhat ineffective, the fakes were overall very poorly executed.