The Devil Is in the Digits: Evidence That Iran's Election Was Rigged
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Use more detailed results from the Iranian election and you don't see this effect.
Another problem is how reasonable the null hypotheses are. Should we really expect Iranian vote counts to fit Benford's Law in a fair election, for example? I don't know.
I have no reason to believe the election was fair, but I think any scientific results reported directly in news media without peer review a week after a very controversial election are highly suspect.
They sum it up nicely but it's too easy to miss:
"The probability that a fair election would produce [these number distribution disparities] is less than .005. In other words, a bet that the numbers are clean is a one in two-hundred long shot."
Key thing to take away from the article if you're going to perform election fraud, use a computer to produce your random numbers.
In isolation you can look at the odds for 17+ and 4-, but two <5, or two > 16 would also look odd. As would a single >20 or <4. And, they started looking at 2 digits but the pattern is only in the last digit so there are looking at 3 groups.
PS: Also how did you calculate the odds? A single number of 17 or more increases the odds of a number of 4 or less. I am not really sure how you would calculate the odds outside of a simulation.
Careful with that reasoning. Suppose there are four candidates, and the last digits of their total vote counts are 8,7,2,8. Fewer than 1 in 9999 fair elections would produce a vote count with exactly those digits!
Does this mean that the vote was rigged?
Post-factum searching for (perceived) oddities and calculating probabilities of their occurences in uniform distributions shows some misunderstanding of statistics.
How did they calculate this probability. I can see what they did in other spots, but this number seems to come out of nowhere to me.
This is all academic. Even the Guardian Council has admitted that there were more voters in 50 areas than eligible to vote.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/world/middleeast/23iran.ht...
Also note: "But many districts where the excess votes were recorded are small, remote places rarely visited by business travelers or tourists, analysts said"
And so on, problem after problem.
I dare say, the next election there will be "handled" better... :-)
> "The probability that a fair election would produce [these number distribution disparities] is less than .005. In other words, a bet that the numbers are clean is a one in two-hundred long shot."
Man, reading that makes me roll my eyes and wonder how the average person reading this site has such poor statistical intuition as to mod this up.
It's like rolling a die six times, and arguing that getting the exact numbers I got has an exceptionally low chance of occurring, so the die must be rigged.
You have two options: either you trust your (unproven) assumption that the coin is fair and that you just witnessed a very unlikely event and say "the past outcomes do not affect the probability of the next throw, it's 0.5."
The other option, on the other hand, is to conclude that your assumption that the coin is fair is false, at which point you estimate the next throw based on the previous sequence and say "1.0".
None of these are right or wrong, it just depends on what prior you trust.
> Others have pointed to the surprisingly poor performance of Mehdi Karroubi, another reform candidate, and particularly in his home province of Lorestan, where conservative candidates fared poorly in 2005, but where Ahmadinejad allegedly captured 71 percent of the vote.
If, for example, Broward County had come up 71% for Bush in an election, that would have been considered proof of election fraud around here. In this case, it's rationalized away. Poof.
Choice words from this Yazdi figure: "Islam cannot accept that a group of people congregate and decide to initiate laws for themselves" (Ettela'at, 1 Oct. 1993) (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Taghi_Mesbah_Yazdi#Quo... )
I kind of envy you Westerners. You have a simple moral principle that tells you which side to pick, a never-failing axiom: democracy is always best. But the recent history of my country (Russia) has given me a huge and readily observable data point against your axiom. So I can't honestly share your faith, even though I'd like to.
The idea of protesting against bad governments, all the way to armed rebellion, is perfectly okay with me. But I intensely dislike the idea of appealing to a foreign power to settle an internal dispute, especially if the appeal gets prompted by same foreign power. The classical conception of sovereignty, now sadly defunct, had an apt name for this technique: treason. Today it's called "color revolution".
And when they can't do it by themselves and call for help, this is treason even when they didn't wanted the government that rules them in the first place?
Now that's black and whit simplistic view of world.
Is the concept of treason even relevant when you live in a your country and somebody rules it without your (and other people living there) agreement?
I mean - I live in Poland, after WW2 Soviet Union ruled here (ok, not directly but by proxy:), is treason of such proxy government really treason? For me it's heroism, because people in Poland didn't wanted that government in the first place.
Also - for me peaceful revolution is better than blood bath revolution any time.
I hope you'll agree that there's another moral principle at play here: don't shoot peaceful people to death in the streets. I couldn't care less about elections when a government stoops to that.
It is not the responsibility of critics to show that an election was fraudulent. It is the responsibility of a government to convince the populace that the election was legitimate. If a large portion of Iran thinks that the election was fraudulent, that's a good enough reason to support their efforts to replace that government.
Al Gore should have gotten his Nobel for preserving the republic by letting the 2000 election die in an orderly fashion rather than for his climate scaremongering.
The regime had their chance to relent, and they only cracked down. It's not up to them anymore.
The Iranian government is autocratic and has probably abused its power to maintain that power. I take that as a given in any discussion of recent events. But that fact alone does not mean they will lose their power. Unfortunately, it probably is up to them, since they have most of the power in Iran.
In order for the Iranian government to lose its power, it must either relent and cede some power in the hopes of maintaining what some of what they have, or the Iranian people have to revolt. Both are more likely to happen if there is solid evidence that the election is rigged.
My simple rational is that you're going to have more support from the people and lower levels of the government if one can provide compelling evidence the elections were fixed. There's a difference between most people thinking the elections are fixed, and actually having evidence to support the conclusion. Such knowledge emboldens people.
Wouldn't it be easiest to say, "Okay, Ahmadi is going to win 57% to 65% in all reporting districts," and so on and so forth and then use those fractions and the known eligible voter numbers to come up with the actual counts?
In which case, shouldn't we be looking at the last digits of the percentage of votes won by district?