Comments on FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: Statistical Tests and Election Fraud

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2009-10-27T04:06:23.411-04:00

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There were 38 million votes and 45,000 polling sta...

2009-07-01T16:41:16.570-04:00

There were 38 million votes and 45,000 polling stations. If you divide these numbers by each other you get on average 844 votes per station. Counting 844 votes does not take that long. After each ballot box was counted, its total was entered in a web site. The ministry of interior reported the aggregate total counts via its website as these numbers came in from across Iran. What was announced hours after the polls closed was a partial count, as the boxes were being counted and reported one by one. The reporting is similar to how the election results in the state are reported on via media. It actually took until the next day for the final count and the release of the official results.

The New York Times and other media also told us that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and we believed them. Whenever the mass media is drumming to a uniform beat, you may want to ask yourself, why?

shoe08: First, not all the signs were in English,...

2009-06-30T07:33:29.587-04:00

shoe08:

First, not all the signs were in English, I saw about half of them in Farsi.
Second, those signs that used English did so because English is, by default, the universal language of this world. If you want to communicate on a world stage, English is the most widely translated language of all; even if a person does not read or speak it, somebody they know is likely to do so.

Academic papers are written almost entirely in English; contracts are in English; most novels and reference books are in English; most movies and entertainment are in English.

The objective of protesting is to gain attention, and Iranians are not primitives. They want the world to film their protest to bring pressure at the top; they don't want to be seen as a cute parade of cry babies. That is why the signs were in English, to appeal to the widest possible audience.

Second, Democracy requires transparency, and these people would not be protesting if they didn't think the election was a fraud. Democracy does not mean accepting whatever the government tells you at face value.

They aren't protesting because they failed to win, they are protesting because they are certain they were ripped off and the election was rigged. There is a difference, and if we didn't protest that here in the USA, we would end up exactly as them, slaves before a theocratic master.

I hope they revolt.

@ Chitragupta .. BTW, if you look up yahoo, the e...

2009-06-30T01:31:52.314-04:00

@ Chitragupta ..

BTW, if you look up yahoo, the election results came out in 12 hours, not 3. India counted 700 million votes in 24-36 hours, so 40 million votes in 12 hours is trivial.

NY Times,June13,2009:

"Both Sides Claim Victory in Presidential Election in Iran

By ROBERT F. WORTH and NAZILA FATHI

TEHRAN — Iran’s state-run news agency said Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won Iran’s presidential election in a landslide just two hours after the polls closed Friday night. But his main rival, Mir Hussein Moussavi, announced defiantly that he had won and charged that there had been voting “irregularities.”
“I am the absolute winner of the election by a very large margin,” Mr. Moussavi said during a news conference with reporters just after 11 p.m. Friday, adding: “It is our duty to defend people’s votes. There is no turning back.”

The conflicting claims, coming after an extraordinary campaign that saw vast street demonstrations and vitriolic televised debates, seemed to undermine the public legitimacy of the vote and to threaten unrest.

In recent days, Mr. Moussavi’s supporters were predicting a wide victory, citing voter surveys. And Mr. Ahmadinejad, the hard-line incumbent, had appeared on the defensive, hurling extraordinary accusations at some of the Islamic republic’s founding figures.

An hour after Mr. Moussavi declared victory, the state news agency reported that Mr. Ahmadinejad had won the election with 69 percent and that Mr. Moussavi had 28 percent. As the election commission announced new totals early Saturday morning, the numbers changed slightly, but the wide lead by Mr. Ahmadinejad did not."

Responding to some questions that have been raised...

2009-06-30T00:20:08.335-04:00

Responding to some questions that have been raised...

1. Some claimed that Ahmadinejad could not have won the Azerbaijain province, because Mouserai was Azerbaijan, and ethnic minority in Iran. fact, Ahmad speaks fluent Azeri and visited the provence, and got the bridge built, which previous administartions had failed to do. he won, because the people there believe in him, not because of his ethnicity.

2. The gas subsidy was breaking the budget in Iran. Ahmad wanted to end it except for transportation of goods and fishing. richy rich was outraged that the gov would no longer subsidze their driving habits. The urban, and suburban poor and rural voters back his "populist" economics. He has just announced a gradual removal of the gas subsidies.

3. The votes are counted at the poling places. There are over 45,000, with between 500-800 votes. They are recorded eloctronically and the results are quickly sent to the election council. It doesn't take very long to count 800 votes, when only voting for president is on the ballot.

4. There are 14 officials present, and all the candidates are welcome to have representatives present. One of the complaints about voter fraud went like this: Ballots could have been stuffed into the box before our representatives arrived. it turns out that Mousavis reps did deliberately show up late at many of the polls.

5. The fact that there are those who do not support Ahmad is not proof of a stolen election. It is proof that people do have the right to speak out about who they support.

6. No one should be surprised that there are "cracks" in the power or ruling structure in Iran. We have the very same cracks here in the good old USA. It is normal to have power strugles, and divisions. What is not normal is to claim one supports a democratic process, and then takes to the streets to try and upset the election that way.

7. One would have to be totally brainwashed to believe that only 2 years ago we allocated $400 million for covert black ops to destabilize Iran, and that our opperatives decided to go on vacation for the Iran election, and therefore had nothing to do with the demonstrations and acusations of voter fraud.

8. I still have not has a single reasonable response to why all the signs were in English? Hello?

9. It is well known and often seen tactic of the CIA to conduct media swarming, and the Iran election is a perfect example of that tactic. The moment the media swarms like that, alarm bells should go off.

10 Open minds want to know. Even in Iran there are open minds. people do want to know what actually happened, and do want to investigate. asking for an investigation is not the equivilent of condemning the election. it is the proper way to go about things. The idea that Iranians are all of one mind is silly at best.

The ballot box by ballot box results are available...

2009-06-29T22:59:32.231-04:00

The ballot box by ballot box results are available via the ministry of interior website at moi.ir http://moi.ir in Persian or can be downloaded as English csv files from Prof. Mebanes site at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wmebane/
Everyone reading this can play with these and see what they can find.

Mousavi had some 40,000 observers covering 90% of 45,000 polling stations. I want to know what they saw, what counts they have, and compare that with the official numbers. Mousavi did not show up at the Guardian Council's hearing since he does not believe that they are impartial. He has also not published a detailed explanation of how the fraud took place. His 40,000 observers can draw a detailed picture of what they believe happened. So far the government has gone to excruciating detail showing why fraud didn't happen. It would have been nice if Mousavi's camp would do the same.

BTW, if you look up yahoo, the election results ca...

2009-06-29T16:56:20.930-04:00

BTW, if you look up yahoo, the election results came out in 12 hours, not 3. India counted 700 million votes in 24-36 hours, so 40 million votes in 12 hours is trivial.

If they post all the precinct totals so that a. al...

2009-06-29T16:54:10.649-04:00

If they post all the precinct totals so that
a. all observers can certify and
b. we can add up for ourselves

that should do it for fraud, right?

The might be a nice tie in somewhere here with wha...

2009-06-29T15:29:33.801-04:00

The might be a nice tie in somewhere here with what happened in Honduras. And to analyze returns of Venezelua's recent referendum.

The President who could not run for re-election tries to do a referendum on getting rid the constitution. Which is a classic way to pretend to have democracy and then rig the results.

The referendum to not sanction by the legislature.

The supreme court rules that it is not constitutional.

The President says he's going to do it any way and orders the army to distribute ballots. The Army says no (following the court and the legislature.) The President fires the head of the army for not following his orders.

The alleged "coup" happens.

Now in the US what would happen is the President trying to do what the Honduran President did would be impeached. But many South American constitutions do have impeachment provisions but have clauses that require the army to uphold and protect the Constitution by a "removing" the would be tyrant/dictator.

I don't know the Honduran Constitution, but maybe the State Department jumped the gun - or least didn't play this as cautious wait and see as the have in Iran.

What accounts for the difference.

After all, the military in Honduras didn't declare martial law like in Poland (1981). Instead the leader of the Legislature (Legitimate civilian control) took the oath to serve out only the remainder of the term, much in the same way that a VP in the US would if there was impeachment and conviction of President.

@ Chitragupta They add up the figures from a numb...

2009-06-29T13:34:18.371-04:00

@ Chitragupta

They add up the figures from a number of ballot boxes, and then send them to Interior. In this election, the numbers were also sent directly to Interior from the individual polling places, in the presence of the 14-18 witnesses at the ballot box.

And who controls the central tabulation and reporting at Interior? That's where the rigging occurs,if only to reduce the number of conspirators to the absolute minimum.(The playbook of Robert Mugabe.)

Reese Erlich writes: http://www.commondreams.org/...

2009-06-29T13:33:05.413-04:00

Reese Erlich writes:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/06/28-10

One excerpt:

On the day of the 2009 election, election officials illegally barred many opposition observers from the polls. The opposition had planned to use text messaging to communicate local vote tallies to a central location. The government shut down SMS messaging! So the vote count was entirely dependent on a government tally by officials sympathetic to the incumbent.

I heard many anecdotal accounts of voting boxes arriving pre-stuffed and of more ballots being printed than are accounted for in the official registration numbers. It seems unlikely that the Iranian government will allow meaningful appeals or investigations into the various allegations about vote rigging.

A study by two professors at Chatham House and the Institute of Iranian Studies at University of St. Andrews, Scotland, took a close look at the official election results and found some major discrepancies. For Ahmadinejad to have sustained his massive victory in one third of Iran's provinces, he would have had to carry all his supporters, all new voters, all voters previously voting centrist and about 44% of previous reformist voters.

well there are some obvious proof for this, in pro...

2009-06-29T11:23:13.755-04:00

well there are some obvious proof for this, in province lorestan, people have voted in 100-packets, i mean all the votes are multipliers of 100!
in pldokhtar city, we have negative bad votes, i mean those not counted.
if u add it up to the correct votes, u get the total votes that is less than correct votes! thats obviously an excel job!

Oops. I'm obviously behind the times! The statisti...

2009-06-29T10:02:09.128-04:00

Oops. I'm obviously behind the times! The statistical explanation I was looking for was beautifully done here on 6/18:
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/06/karroubis-unlucky-7s.html

Thanks, everyone & 538 for the great discussion.

Chitragupta: All of that makes little difference ...

2009-06-29T09:19:37.040-04:00

Chitragupta:

All of that makes little difference if the ballot boxes are not actually totaled. We know the election was called and certified within hours, and by other accounts, insiders were informed of the results within ONE hour of the polls closing.

I believe, along with some Iranian citizen tweeters, that it is logistically impossible to accurately total and certify this many ballot box totals from across the country.

So who cares if the ballot box total was witnessed, if the addition of ballot box totals was not? What we are likely to see is a show, the government will find a dozen people (or actors) to say "I was as surprised by Ahmadinejad's win as anybody, but I witnessed the total at my ballot box with my own eyes and it is beyond doubt."

Just like the ham-handed actor "confessions" of being influenced by the BBC or VOA to commit immoral acts or looting.

Any comments? Martin Weisbrot writes: http://www....

2009-06-29T07:57:33.680-04:00

Any comments?

Martin Weisbrot writes:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/06/28-3

... After searching through thousands of news articles without finding any substantive information on the electoral process, I contacted Seyed Mohammad Marandi, who heads the North American Studies department at the University of Teheran. He described the electoral procedures to me, and together we interviewed, by phone, Sayed Moujtaba Davoodi, a poll worker who participated in the June 12 election in region 13 (of 22 regions) in Tehran. Mr. Daboodi has worked in elections for the past 16 years. The following is from their description of the procedures.

According to their account, there are 14 people working at each polling place, in addition to an observer representing each candidate. Most polling places are schools or mosques; if the polling place is a school then the team of 14 people would include teachers. There are 2-4 representatives of the Guardian Council, and 2 from the local police. After the last votes are cast, the ballots are counted in the presence of the 14 people plus the candidates' representatives. All of them sign five documents that contain the vote totals. One of the documents goes into the ballot box; one stays with the leader of the local election team; and the others go to other levels of the electoral administration, including the Guardian Council and the Interior.

The vote totals are then sent to a local center that also has representatives of the Guardian Council, Interior, and the candidates. They add up the figures from a number of ballot boxes, and then send them to Interior. In this election, the numbers were also sent directly to Interior from the individual polling places, in the presence of the 14-18 witnesses at the ballot box.

Each voter presents identification, and his or her name and information is entered into a computer, and also recorded in writing. The voter's thumbprint is also put on the stub of the ballot. The voter's identification is stamped to prevent multiple voting at different voting places, and there is also a computer and written record of everyone who voted at each polling place.

If this information is near accurate, it would appear that large scale fraud is extremely difficult, if not impossible, without creating an extensive trail of evidence. Indeed, if this election was stolen, there must be tens of thousands of witnesses -- or perhaps hundreds of thousands - to the theft. Yet there are no media accounts of interviews with such witnesses.

Is it possible that, in most of the country, the procedures outlined above - followed in previous elections - were abruptly abandoned, with ballot boxes whisked away before anyone could count them at the precinct level? Again, many of the more than 700,000 people involved in the electoral process would have been witnesses to such a large-scale event. Given the courage that hundreds of thousands of people have demonstrated in taking to the streets, we would expect at least some to come forward with information on what happened.

Rostam Pourzal, an Iranian-American human rights campaigner, told me that it is common knowledge in Iran that these are the election procedures and that they were generally followed in this election. Professor Marandi concurred, and added: "There's just no way that any large-scale or systematic fraud could have taken place."

The government has agreed to post the individual ballot box totals on the web. This would provide another opportunity for any of the hundreds of thousands of witnesses to the precinct-level vote count to say that they witnessed a different count, if any did so."

The only thing that really matters in Iran is that...

2009-06-29T00:26:53.923-04:00

The only thing that really matters in Iran is that the supreme Khamenei is commander in chief of the Revolutionary Guards, who enjoy an SS-like prominence in both the security apparatus and the econonomy.

And in A-jad, Khamenei has found a kindred spirit who's both eager and capable of gradually evolving Persia into an Islamist equivalent of North Korea.

Rafsanjani? He hasn't figured it out yet, but under the diabolical partnership of K & A, Raf-jan is well on his way to becoming Hindenburg.

Nate, now can you do the same thing on the "Leaked...

2009-06-28T20:47:01.591-04:00

Nate, now can you do the same thing on the "Leaked List of 104" that's making the rounds? Already in this Rotoworld.com thread (which may vanish), people are saying that there are statistically too many "big names" on the list. Then again, maybe the improvements brought by steroids or the covered tests in 2003 being oriented toward bigger names could account for this?

Typo? -- "Striking patterns found in such a compar...

2009-06-28T18:29:28.775-04:00

Typo? -- "Striking patterns found in such a comparison do not prove fraud"

Opus 132: let NYT write whatever they want. the fa...

2009-06-28T17:15:14.237-04:00

Opus 132:
let NYT write whatever they want. the fact remains that each station has at least one locally trusted person that has to close the empty box, voting, counting, and has to sign the final results. These people are mostly teachers or civil servants known to the neighborhood. that all of them are ahmadinejad's men only shows that after two weeks the blind people here have not been able to find a single decent clue.

Besides, mousavi had observers in 90% of the stations. The fact that he is, now, after the election, complaining that 10% of his observers were rejected based on various reasons by the ministry of the interior speaks volumes i think. these people have signed the final results at each station.

oh, and it is the first time in iran that the results are published by box (station), not just district.

and finally, i think it was a desperate attempt to topple the regime, and not successful.

oh, and for god's sake people, don't say this "turnout of more than 100%":
this is not new, it happens in every election in iran. the reason is:
-the districts are sometimes different for census and for election.
-the election is always held in a weekend and cities along the coast of caspian sea usually have higher than 100% turnout.
-The population of non-local students and soldiers is not counted when they come up with the eligible numbers.

now when you look at the names of cities with high turnout, it makes perfect sense.

Nick Agree on the hate comment. This thread seems...

2009-06-28T17:05:43.952-04:00

Nick

Agree on the hate comment. This thread seems hate-free however. Has it been moderated or did we just get lucky? BTW I love disagreement, not hate.

wv cultsf--a genre I often appreciate

Nate, Nate. Please moderate. So much hate. Poisons...

2009-06-28T13:20:54.123-04:00

Nate, Nate.
Please moderate.
So much hate.
Poisons 538.
Thanks mate.

Here's a new paper submitted to the Annals of Appl...

2009-06-28T11:46:07.101-04:00

Here's a new paper submitted to the Annals of Applied Statistics by Boudewijn Roukema analyzing the outcomes of the Iran election using Benford's Law: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0906/0906.2789v1.pdf Fascinating to me, but I would love to hear a real statistician's take on the analysis here.

PS: @Tony C. Your discussion of the moral obligations of statisticians is inspiring to me as an academic in a completely different field. Thanks!

Only a really sloppy fraud, such as in Iran, is ea...

2009-06-28T11:18:19.550-04:00

Only a really sloppy fraud, such as in Iran, is easily detectible statistically. As others have pointed out, much of the evidence is solve-by-inspection kind of stuff.

I think we all agree that sanctity of the ballot box is the key to fair elections. That includes more tan just counting the ballots, it includes assuring that people are eligible to vote and only vote once. In the US, that is where the greatest fraud potential lies, and it's a balancing effort to assure that eligible voters votes are not diluted by fraudulent votes.

I have been reading everything I could about the I...

2009-06-28T10:47:17.118-04:00

I have been reading everything I could about the Iranian elections and I am still SOO confused.
Nate, please help to enlighten as you are such an election expert....
It was reported that the major candidates each had election observers in the polling stations - even though Moussavi states that there were intimidations in some cases. Nobody ever reported whether there were any observers present for the actual vote counting which would be absolutely most important thing to rule out the possibility that phantom numbers were made up by the interior ministry. Curious enough, this was not one of Moussavi's complaints to the election commission - implying that his observers did observe most of the vote counting (?). Some people - and not only the Iranian hardliners are pointing out that it would be pretty darn difficult to develop a vote rigging scheme by the means of adding 11 million fraudulent ballots to the polling stations throughout the country - a major operation that would leave many witnesses to potentially spill the beans. If these results were fraudulent, it could only have been done by completely fabricating vote counts and this implies the absence of any observers during the counting process. It will be interesting to see if the actual ballots or the just the counts per ballot box will be made available by the interior ministry - the actual ballots supposedly have a fingerprint for identification purposes and thus seem hard to forge...
Everybody with more background knowledge about the counting process in Iran, please post here to enlighten me and everybody else....

Thanks so much!

Two hours after the balloting ended Mousavi declar...

2009-06-28T09:34:25.341-04:00

Two hours after the balloting ended Mousavi declared victory. This caused the Supreme Leader and Little Hitler to announce the results (which they already knew) a day earlier.

Mousavi says his camp made it announcement because Mousavi had been called by someone in one of the ministries and was told to get ready to be announced as the victor.

Sounds like the games being played here are not merely Little Hitler's and his patrons. However, Iran has been changed by all of this. The people born after 1979 are now assuming positions of control and questioning the 14th century theocracy imposed on them without the consent of the governed.

Things will change. There will continue to be pressure from the outside. But the change will occur on the inside first.