Evidence of fraud in Iran?
Melody Dickison sent me a link to a paper by Walter R. Mebane, Jr. of the University of Michigan. It's a statistical analysis of Iranian voting results from 2005 and 2009.Note on the presidential election in Iran, June 2009
I don't understand any of the statistics, but I sort of understand the conclusion [emphasis mine]:
In general, combining the first-stage 2005 and 2009 data conveys the impression that while natural political processes significantly contributed to the election outcome, outcomes in many towns were produced by very different processes. The natural processes in 2009 have Ahmadinejad tending to do best in towns where his support in 2005 was highest and tending to do worst in towns where turnout surged the most. But in more than half of the towns where comparisons to the first-stage 2005 results are feasible, Ahmadinejad’s vote counts are not at all or only poorly described by the naturalistic model. Much more often than not, these poorly modeled observations have vote counts for Ahmadinejad that are greater than the naturalistic model would imply. While it is not possible given only the current data to say for sure whether this reflects natural complexity in the political processes or artificial manipulations, the numerous outliers comport more with the idea that there was widespread fraud than with the idea that all the departures from the model are benign.
posted by Ken Wedding @ 2:56 PM
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From the Monkey Cage blog. Links to the original sources at the blog.
Combining findings at the Province and County Level from Iran's Election
"Our digit-based tests can’t tell us whether Ahmedinejad actually won the election. Even without manipulation, he might very well still have won. But we feel reasonably confident that the province-level numbers were tampered with."
More Evidence of Fraud in Iran: The Devil is in the Digits
"In a fair election, each number (0, 1, 2, etc.) should appear as often as any other in the last digit. But that’s not the case in the numbers from Iran: Among other things, wefind too many 7s and too few 5s. The deviations we find suggest there’s little chance the Iranian election results weren’t manipulated."
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