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Source. Hough, equation (8) and Lemma 2, printed pp. 372–373 of the published paper. Use from the sieve setup.
Statement. Let consist of good fibers and have positive -mass. Put . Define on by zero off , and, for , by
This measure is constant on each surviving fiber over , and
Complete proof. Proposition 1 makes every denominator in (8) a positive integer. Both numerator and denominator depend only on the underlying residue , which proves constancy. If that fiber has surviving residues, their total mass is . Summing over the disjoint good fibers gives the displayed identity. Thus unequal surviving cardinalities do not change the relative incoming masses of the good fibers.
Bears on. Problem 2.