Comments on FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: Iranian Election Results by Province [UPDATED]

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2010-03-18T08:10:57.123-04:00

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2009-10-10T08:35:56.742-04:00

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As always, history will be the sole judge of this ...

2009-07-27T18:49:30.494-04:00

As always, history will be the sole judge of this outcome. In the meantime, it is quite impressive to me that an 85% turnout leading to the reelection of an incumbent with 63% of the vote in "the cleanest vote in the history of the Islamic Republic" has led to such a weakening of such a Republic and the division of its leadership. I dont know who "Matt" is but if he is intellectually honest, he must concede that Iran is quite a mess right now.

Who is in charge today in Iran?

1) The Supreme Leader?
Not only his authority was ignored by a million people demonstrating peacefully in Teheran and thousands around the world, by several clerics who declared the vote invalid, but his own president elect who, although he owned him a lot of support (to say the least) blatantly ignored his advice for one week regarding his choice of VP, then made him his chief of staff (quite a dismissal indeed!).

2) Amedhinejad
Elected with such a mandate, who dares question Amedhinejad's choices? Two of his ministers and the Supreme Leader from his own camp!! (it looks like a joke, isn it?). To the point where the president elect might end up looking like a liability for the own regime survival if he keeps dividing the conservatives and hard liners.

3) The Revolutionary guard and the Basij?
The success of the crack down against the protesters does reinforce the guard and Basij inside Iran, but it leads the world to think that Iran has become a military tyranny whose survival is dependent upon brute force. This completes the picture of the moral failure of the regime, and does not bode well for the nuclear negotiation to come.

The question is: how can Iran get out of this mess?

1 One senario is that the Supreme Leader buys himself a new "virginity" and agrees to some steps proposed by Rasfanjahni (a referendum on the contested election) in a move to create a national union and buy time for the Revolution. At the cost of maybe having a liberal winning, he would still control the country tightly behind the scene and be seen as a "uniter above the fray". Iran would be in a better position to negotiate nuclear help to appease the west in the short term (which democracy could attack the first Islamic democracy in the middle east?) and orient the program in the direction of its choosing later on...

2 Another scenario is that Amedhinejad and the Supreme Leader mend their relationship. However, this does not unite the country in the current climate. Also, Iran will need international recognition and will have to compromise on its nulear program. However, this is maybe the best chance for nuclear peace. Worst case, if the negotiation fail, Israel will strike and the hardliners will be strengthened for a while at the cost of losing their nuclear ambitions.

3 A third scenario is a military coup with a premature retirement of the Supreme Leader. This seems quite unlikely given that the chiefs of the Republican guard are loyal to the regime, but maybe the Supreme Leader own son or an iranian general could become dissaffected by the power vacuum and cease the opportunity? In that case, the nuclear ambitions are also over because Israel or the US would not let a military tyranny in Iran with a nuclear weapon.

This is definitely an exciting time for Iran. Lets watch what the Supreme Leader will do... or not.

http://democracyforum.blogspot.com/2009/06/fraud-i...

2009-06-28T15:06:14.982-04:00

http://democracyforum.blogspot.com/2009/06/fraud-in-iran.html

I was wondering if I would like to reply to Matt, ...

2009-06-17T03:13:54.636-04:00

I was wondering if I would like to reply to Matt, but now I'm positive I never will.

Nate silver, Your analysis is by far the most twi...

2009-06-17T02:14:40.748-04:00

Nate silver,

Your analysis is by far the most twisted form of propganda I have ever seen. I wonder if your actually working to spread propoganda or do real analysis. How you manage to take the only objective measure of the election prior to it (Scientific poll to 1100 respondents) and turn it into your Likhud style Isreal propoganda I have no Idea. How you add all the numbers of the previous poll done and some how twist the number I can only imagine was done purposefully.

This entire article is suspect.

Shame on you.

Continued from above, Ninth, The only piece of Ob...

2009-06-16T18:09:36.803-04:00

Continued from above,

Ninth, The only piece of Objective evidence we have is the polls prior to the election. You manages to totally discount the only objective evidence. I keep telling you the above data is not proven to be valid and non of your statements are corroborated. You have to have the emotional maturity to wait for more results prior to your cowboy judgement.

Tenth, please recognize that regardless of who would be the president in Iran , the entire country is still in the hands of the Ayatollahs, thus this whole think does not matter. But it would be significant for who ever is the Iranian president to have the support of Iranian people later in this summer’s negotiations. With 63% of the vote its much tougher for the west to force its will down Iran's throat regardless of the president and that is why this whole issue is being set up. This strategy is called “Divide and Conquer”. Please think a bit deeper than you are currently.

Eleventh, If you look at any election (Anywhere in the world) you would see that there are irregularities in all. How else could you explain a Black man whos name rhymes with osama winning the US election? Obama actually won some predominantly white states (Incredible). In the US , people also vote considering economy first. 4 years ago no one in their right mind imagined a black man would win the white house. But he did (Explain that irregularity). Also, when George Bush ran for the white house, did any sane person think that ( America’s Super Ahmandinejad) in George Bush would actually beat Gore and later Kerry? No but superb marketing and incredible politics did it. Whether you like it or not (and I don’t) Ahmadinejad played his card superbly. What matters now is a unified front and strong negotiations on Iran ’s part come later this summer.

Also, as mentioned in my first note, the correct comparison to this election is one where there was an incumbent running (not last time where all the candidates where running for the first time). If you get the numbers for those then you can have a stronger statistical comparison. As such your comparing apples with oranges.

I promise you that Mousavi will not become the president and he knows it. He should for the best of the country concede (like Gore did). But he has not. Why do you think? I would not be shocked if he soon leaves Iran and later go to a western country and live there and start saying many negatives about the very government he helped create. Both Rafsanjani and Mousavi have riches beyond what you and me can imagine (Stolen from Iranian people). Niether can actually use their cash outside Iran as American Sanctions has put both on their list of people whos accounts would be frozen if their money was taken out. This whole sham could also be the perfect excuse for them to seperate themselves from the current governement and get off that list.

Thanks and Apologize for the long reply.

To continue with my comment: Sixth, Moments after...

2009-06-16T18:08:52.363-04:00

To continue with my comment:

Sixth, Moments after the polls closed, Mousavi declared victory with out any proof being circulated. Why? It seems to me that if I was the government officials I would immediately realize that there is something funny going on. It seemed more to me that Mousavi was trying to pull a George Bush and announce a victory when he actually did not have one. Why would he stir up trouble like that? Both he and the other governmental officials knew that this pre-mature announcement could wreak havoc in Iran if not true (Just like it did). SMS and Hand held communications would be the first thing cut if I am an official to not allow trouble makers to organize and reduce their ability from creating frenzy.

Seventh, Riot police can be gathered relatively quickly. Every time there is any event going on, whether a soccer game or elections like this, officials are always ready to deal with it from ahead of times, ESPECIALLY IN IRAN .

Eighth, From what the official Iranian media announced, Tehran was actually won by Mousavi. This can explain why so many people in Tehran feel as though their votes did not count. Believe it or not, Tehran is not representative of the entire Iran . As you may know, once you leave Tehran , people are much more conservative and less wealthy. Do not think everyone in Iran is like Tehran . IF YOU THINK THERE IS INJUSTICE NOW, IMAGINE WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF MOUSAVI HAD ACTUALLY STOLLEN THE ELECTION. YOU WOULD REALLY SEE VIOLENCE THEN AS THE REAL MAJORITY WOULD GO ABSOLUTELY NUTS.

@Shaheen, Stop threateting who ever that voices hi...

2009-06-16T18:07:12.871-04:00

@Shaheen, Stop threateting who ever that voices his or her opinion. You remind me of the Savak.

First, I watched the debate on Iranian satellite and Ahmadinejad clearly demolished Mousavi. Especially when he stated that Mousavi and Rafsanjani sold the rights of many Iranian oil fields till 2014 for approximately $14 / barrel. Poor Iranians hate Rafsanjani and he did an excellent job linking the two together.

Second, The numbers of votes you’re seeing above are not official numbers. We still don’t know if any of the numbers this gentleman provided on this site are accurate.

Third, Iranians on average are poor rather than middle class. What do you think is their number one criteria for voting? ECONOMY (Subsidies). Ahmadinejad has for the past four years given them many subsidies regardless of the province to the poor. Would you vote for someone who has a history of subsidies vs. someone who is of your region but you do not trust will provide subsidies? And also, I hear (I am not sure) that Ahmadinejad is also part Azeri, How do you explain that?

Fourth, Higher turnouts does not mean higher percentages for Mousavi. As mentioned above, Its the economy stupid. The most apathetic people tend to be the lower class (Poor) people who feel they are powerless. When People show up more to vote, that means less apathy. Majority of Iranians are not middle class. Statistically speaking more poor would show up then middle class. That means more votes for Ahmandinajad then Mousavi.

Fifth, the invalid votes all added up together do not nearly make up the difference where Mousavi would win. This is what we call in the world of statistics “high degree of confidence that the projection at 30% would be accurate and representative of the entire sample”. And yes they did state that it was a projection.

Look, it's about probability. How probable is it t...

2009-06-16T16:33:27.328-04:00

Look, it's about probability. How probable is it that the people who have a whole history behind themselves of voting for the least important, least competent, but Azeri candidates (like Mehralizadeh in the last presedential election), suddenly decided to choose the "best", the best being the one who is so widely famous for having fucked up the country in most respects and according to most reports?

The only report that claims the results to be totally expected is the Washingtonpost report you keep citing. You can't tackle hundreds of pieces of evidence by citing one piece of evidence a hundred times.

Some of the comments are simply ridiculous, to be ...

2009-06-16T09:37:40.212-04:00

Some of the comments are simply ridiculous, to be honest. "He couldn't have got that many votes there, he couldn't have got that few votes there." How on Earth does it prove fraud simply because some people had expected other results.

And this one takes the cake:

"It's not just Mousavi losing his home province that seems off. He's ethnic Azerbaijani, as are the overwhelming people in his home province.

This is not like Al Gore losing his state; it's like McCain beating Obama in the black vote."

There were polls that indicated not just a big Ahmadinejad victory overall, but that Azeris clearly favoured Ahmadinejad as well. See this
for instance.

This should not be so strange. First of all, what "whguy98989" said. Second, Azeris are not dumb robots who only vote on ethnicity, rather than trying to find out the best candidate.

(Btw, Press TV has published the official results as well, but Luristan was still missing last I checked, for some reason)

I forgot this one: -85% turnout in Iran is extrem...

2009-06-16T04:24:15.109-04:00

I forgot this one:

-85% turnout in Iran is extremely high. This is the second highest turnout in the history of Iranian politics. Usually, when so many people vote, it means they are very dissatisfied with the current president. The incumbent simply couldn't have been so popular.

Obvious problems with the election returns: -The ...

2009-06-16T04:18:44.479-04:00

Obvious problems with the election returns:

-The results maintained a constant ratio (almost two to one) of Ahmadinejad/Mousavi votes throughout the 13 waves (Nate's previous post).

-Ethnic support is totally absent which is very strange compared to previous elections (this post). Karroubi didn't receive any support from his hometown Luristan. Neither did Mousavi from Azerbaijan, or Rezaee from Khouzestan.

-Karroubi has an impossible number of votes: he's got 300,000 from all over the country. This is less than the number of invalid votes, significantly less than the number of his newspaper issues everyday, much less than the number of the members of his political party (E'temad e Melli) and 1/20 of his votes in the 2005 election.

-Rezaee's votes decreased in the eleventh wave and wasn't compensated for in the twelfth wave either.

-There is a slightly higher than 100% turnout in the province of Yazd!! There were 609341 voting-age people in Yazd and according to the official results 609856 votes were counted!

-The valid and invalid votes do not sum up to the total!

-There is little correlation between the number of invalid votes and the total number of votes in each city/county.

-The invalid votes are overwhelmingly from pro-Mousavi areas.

-Unlike all previous elections, they didn't announce the returns by province. The detailed statistics (above) was published only two days after the aggregate results were published four hours after the polls closed.

-Unlike all previous elections, they didn't report the number of invalid votes along with the counted votes. Invalid votes appeared after people repeatedly asked about them.

-Unlike all previous elections the Supreme Leader did not wait for the results to be investigated and confirmed and for the 3-day period legally provided for addressing any objections to pass. He endorsed the results RIGHT AWAY.

Besides:
-Riot police appeared on the streets BEFORE there were any riots!

-Text messaging and other means of communication went down with no reason.

-The number of Basijis and guards enormously increased within two days.

-People are dying and being hit on the streets.

@ Matt (by the way, I'm almost sure you're Iranian...

2009-06-16T03:30:27.679-04:00

@ Matt (by the way, I'm almost sure you're Iranian, please be honest (unlike your president ELECT) and reveal your real name).

Although you're right about the fact that there is a tendency in the Iranian population to re-elect the current president that by no means suffices to explain the blatant irregularities. I'll post a list of obvious irregularities later.

As for the quick announcement of the results, your point is a red-herring. They didn't "guess" based on 30% of the returns. The ANNOUNCED 100% of the returns within 4 hours. How could you cound hand-written votes so quickly? That's the point.

IMPORTANT PLEASE READ: Guys: In order for these ...

2009-06-16T01:13:32.464-04:00

IMPORTANT PLEASE READ:

Guys:

In order for these results to be correctly compared, they must be compared to an election when one of the candidates were an incumbent.

Historically there has never been a president in iran that did not get re-elected. and with his subsidies to poor many of the irregularities could be explained.

The big question of whether the time the votes werer counted is also explainable. As I have heard, with only 30 percent of the votes counted, Iran's officials projected the winner. This is quite common all over the world. Apparently when the polls closed, Mousavi claimed victory, prompting the officials to quickly wrap things up and correct the statement mousavi made. So they quickly announced based on only 30 percent. But all the previous polls taken by american polsters also predicted a landslide vicotry similar to the figures Iran actually got.

Gentlemen, the results seem ligitimate. Keep in mind that in just a couple of months iran will be inovolved in its most important negotiation in its history with the west. They west knows that negotiating with a very popular negotiator who has 63% of votes will be tough. This seems like a strategy to divide the Iranian people just prior these negotiation to weaken Iran's hand. Everytime Iran gets strong, they have to create a mess for us. Dont let outside forces pull another 1953.

Thank You

@champion: "Well, they told us Obama won Pennsylva...

2009-06-15T23:51:38.989-04:00

@champion:
"Well, they told us Obama won Pennsylvania like 15 minutes after the polls closed and he only won the state by 5 percentage points, so I do not think that counts as fraud."

Other people have commented as to how early "calls" are made in U. S. elections. No one else has addressed the other howler in your post: Obama won PA by 11 points (not 5).

Hi Nate, You should compare the second round of 20...

2009-06-15T20:45:22.344-04:00

Hi Nate,
You should compare the second round of 2005 with the first round of the current election. The overall ratio results are quite close, and they both pitted Ahmadinejad vs. a neo-liberal reformist.

Masoud

Hi everyone. Interesting work again, Nate. So, I ...

2009-06-15T20:40:25.683-04:00

Hi everyone. Interesting work again, Nate.

So, I guess you guys are looking for an Iranian who could answer some questions. Here is one! I did NOT vote in this election, I do NOT live in Iran since 5 months, and I'm not a particularly enthusiastic of any political position. So, I consider myself an unbiased observer. (However, at the moment, all pieces of evidence taken into consideration, I am convinced that the election is stolen.)

As for the data Nate provided. As PetPeterP said above, the official results were published by the Iranian Interior Ministry two days after the election. Here is the link to the Ministry's website again:

http://www.moi.ir/Portal/Home/ShowPage.aspx?Object=News&ID=e3dffc8f-9d5a-4a54-bbcd-74ce90361c62&LayoutID=b05ef124-0db1-4d33-b0b6-90f50139044b&CategoryID=832a711b-95fe-4505-8aa3-38f5e17309c9

I know you guys might not be able to read Farsi, but don't get confused, just click on the two links (a PDF and a XLS file). Here is the link to the translation of the results again:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=raU4EOsYbOx7WusgF018Xig&hl=en

Here is the link to the 2005 election results:

http://www.electoralgeography.com/new/en/countries/i/iran/2005-president-elections-iran.html

You can see that one of the most obvious voting patterns were support for the hometown guy, or ethnic allegiance more generally.

So, here are some of my observations: At the night after the elections, most of us didn't sleep to find out about the returns. They were supposed to be announced by 4:00 am. However, the first wave was announced much sooner, before the midnight I guess. We all thought that they're reporting the votes from small cities and rural areas where the polls close much earlier and require much less time to count. When the first few waves showed a great success for Ahmadinejad we made sure that these results do belong to those areas because we expected Ahmadinejad to be more popular in small cities and Mousavi more popular in urban areas and big cities. So, Mousavi's supporters all thought: "just a little patience, Mousavi's gonna catch up". However, more and more waves were to tell us that Ahmadinejad's votes are constantly increasing and with the same pace. It looked like every time he gets twice as much votes as Mousavi. Fitting the results to a graph, we saw that the ratio is constant. The graph we expected should have sloped down once they start to count the votes from Tehran and other big cities. This never happened until the end.

Indeed, this is just one of many pieces of evidence.

@ Richard and Karin: The results you're talking about are some yet unverified numbers that came out the day after, and were said to be the real results. They, too, seem hard to believe because Ahmadinejad's votes seem a little bit too few.

Correction: I wanted to get the numbers right in ...

2009-06-15T19:16:36.851-04:00

Correction: I wanted to get the numbers right in the previous post just above.

366 cities reporting with 4 candidates plus invalids for each -> 366 x (4+1)=1830 data points analyzed (not cities).

Of those, roughly 20% chance the ending digit will appear more than 215 or less than 151 times (not 157).

So, not really strong evidence by itself the numbers got tampered.

>>>>Giovanni D said... I took a look at the s...

2009-06-15T18:35:16.331-04:00

>>>>Giovanni D said...

I took a look at the spreadsheet another commenter linked to with the city reports and checked the frequency of all the last digits. In the Vietnam war, they faked body counts and this was statistically noticeable. Here are the counts:

Last Count Normal Cummulative Distribution
0 215 99.04%
1 189 66.98%
2 185 55.82%
3 191 72.10%
4 183 50.00%
5 170 17.05%
6 169 15.26%
7 173 23.20%
8 174 25.49%
9 181 44.18%

0 is the most popular last digit, and it is more than 2 standard deviations above the mean. It is less than 1% likely this would naturally happen.

Response: But you have 10 digits, 0-9 that each could go to elevated 215 count, plus you'd be suspicious for the opposite - less than 157 count for any of the 10 digits. If I add them all up, first order says roughly 20% chance this digit anomaly will happen in a 1825 city election. 20% chance doesn't seem far fetched.

-phatesse

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2009-06-15T17:05:45.207-04:00

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2009-06-15T15:06:58.632-04:00

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The President may well have won, but certainly not...

2009-06-15T14:25:14.692-04:00

The President may well have won, but certainly not by the reported landslide. Arguing that he won by that margin would be like saying Obama lost the black vote 2 to 1. It's nonsense.
And there are widespread reports of major electoral fraud, including destroying ballot boxes full of votes. I doubt very much that they even did a full count. Why bother? You have decided the winner and the margin, what does it matter what the real number is? I don't think we'll ever know what the numbers really were.
The level of violence and suppression of free speech during and following the election is pretty damning. Jamming television signals, cell reception, and internet access? A coup by any other name still reeks of abuse.

whguy98989 - Your analysis is nonsense. The vot...

2009-06-15T13:40:08.473-04:00

whguy98989 - Your analysis is nonsense. The vote was released far quicker than it could actually be counted. There is a thread on bigsoccer.com where they talk about the Iranian elections. The Iranians posting there, describe a multi-tiered count and compilation process starting with Form 22 counts at each ballot box, and regional Form 28 counts. This process is described on this thread in the post #208 (be aware that the poster Iranian Monitor is an apologist for Amadinejad). If anyone wants to understand a lot of voter trends in Iran, read the thread down through the posts by Mani, particularly post #230 and the ones that he writes shortly after.

http://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1047315&page=23

Regarding the vote count in Tehran, the official vote results show Mousavi barely winning. There was a rally of about 40k for Ahmadinejad, mostly bussed in, and predominantly males. Today, the Mousavi rally attracted many more people, clearly from Tehran itself. Check out this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ey9Kgf-cB40

@Opus 132: Thanks, but unless the news agency anno...

2009-06-15T13:39:41.201-04:00

@Opus 132: Thanks, but unless the news agency announced the vote totals at that time, I don't think it settles the issue. In the United States we would probably be shocked if an election (putatively) decided by almost 30 points weren't "called" within two hours of the close of polls. Apparently the average polling place had something like 900 votes cast; it doesn't have to take very long to count 900 votes.

I'm not saying anything about the accuracy of the count, just seeking to establish some facts about how quickly it was reported.