We have all heard by now of the allegations of massive fraud in the counting and reporting of the recent election results in Iran.
There is telltale “suggestive evidence” that tends to confirm such allegations:
* The unrealistically high votes for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in urban areas, including Tehran and Tabriz where he is not very popular.
* The surprisingly poor performance by opposition candidates in their own home cities and provinces.
* The “eyebrow-raising” consistency, according to the Washington Post, “in Ahmadinejad’s vote share across Iran’s provinces, in spite of wide provincial variation in past elections.”
But, is there any statistical evidence to corroborate these suggestions?
And, is the Iranian regime really that stupid as to believe that its massive fraud would go unnoticed and unchallenged?
The Washington Post’s answer to the first question is “Yes.”
My own answer to the second question is also “Yes.”
My answer is totally speculative and perhaps flippant.
However, The Washington Post’s answer, as posed today in an eye-opening article by Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco, Ph.D. candidates in political science at Columbia University, is based on data, statistics, probabilities, and even psychology.
In “The Devil Is in the Digits,” they agree that the suggestive evidence does point “in the direction of fraud, to be sure,” and that such evidence has “led experts to speculate that the election results released by Iran’s Ministry of the Interior had been altered behind closed doors.” But, more important, that “we don’t have to rely on suggestive evidence alone. We can use statistics more systematically to show that this is likely what happened.”
And they certainly do, using cognitive psychology, statistics and, specifically “frequencies of last digits” and “the lack of non-adjacent digits” in the vote counts, to support their conclusion that:
Each of these two tests provides strong evidence that the numbers released by Iran’s Ministry of the Interior were manipulated. But taken together, they leave very little room for reasonable doubt. The probability that a fair election would produce both too few non-adjacent digits and the suspicious deviations in last-digit frequencies described earlier is less than .005. In other words, a bet that the numbers are clean is a one in two-hundred long shot.
Whether you are statistics or numbers-inclined, or not, read the persuasive analysis provided by these two bright Ph.D. candidates, who will be assistant professors in New York University’s Wilf Family Department of Politics this fall.
Upon reading, and whether or not you agree with my answer on the Iranian regime’s naiveté, I believe you’ll agree that there is at least some statistical evidence to corroborate the strong suggestion of election fraud in Iran.
Image Courtesy realestateofftheleash.com
