
The Devil Is in the Digits: Evidence That Iran's Election Was Rigged - noheartanthony
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/20/AR2009062000004.html
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jgrahamc
For a counterpoint: [http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/06/last-digits-analysis-of-
uk-a...](http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/06/last-digits-analysis-of-uk-and-
iranian.html)

Use more detailed results from the Iranian election and you don't see this
effect.

~~~
cousin_it
Thanks, that comment looks much less fishy than the original article. I wonder
whether the Washington Post authors tried to run their test on past known
rigged and non-rigged elections. If not, that would be a good idea.

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Tichy
Why does it look less fishy - because it contains charts? Or strange words
like "chi-squared" that signify a high level of competence?

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DavidSJ
There are a number of causes for caution here, such as the possibility of
publication bias. There could be 100 other statistical tests that the election
passes, but who would publish those boring results?

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.

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mbreese
This is actually pretty poor statistics. They are basing their entire argument
on ~100 provincial results. The deviations they are talking about with this
few number of samples isn't likely to be significant.

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mattmanser
I thought that too until I re-read the article and started trying to do the
math myself.

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.

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praptak
"The probability that a fair election would produce [these number distribution
disparities] is less than .005."

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.

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otto
_The probability that a fair election would produce [these number distribution
disparities] is less than .005._

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.

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alyssumclimbs
I wonder if the first digits comform to Benford's Law. Basically, the first
digits of the vote counts should be 1, 2, 3 much more often than they should
be 7, 8, 9

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benfords_law>

~~~
brown9-2
Fivethirtyeight.com took a look at this, and found some oddities:
[http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/06/karroubis-
unlucky-7s....](http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/06/karroubis-
unlucky-7s.html)

~~~
bcl
I think this article from 538 does a much better job covering the subject than
the original one, who's methodology is questionable.

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riffic
At this point it doesn't matter if it was rigged or not. The regime has voided
the social contract with the people of Iran and is therefore illegitimate.

~~~
cousin_it
The question whether the election was rigged matters for the same reason that
the question of Iraq's WMDs mattered: this information is influencing Western
public opinion and government decisions right now. Also, going "it doesn't
matter 'cause you're bad anyway" whenever someone calls attention to the
substance of your accusations strikes me as a bad faith tactic.

~~~
dant
I don't think the argument is that "you're bad anyway". Regardless of who you
are, how you got into that situation and whether the protesters have a point,
with a protest movement that big and motivated your options are same: crush
the protests, re-run the election or form a unity government. If you choose to
crush the protest then you give up the "government by consent of the people"
type contract that you have with society. I think it's that fact that will
drive western opinion more than the actual legitimacy of the result.

~~~
cousin_it
At this point I can't sincerely pick any side as the good guys. On one hand,
I'm already sick of cookie-cutter "color revolutions" where "nonviolent"
protestors oh-so-conveniently invite the support of Western nuclear
superpowers to topple regimes unfavorable to the latter. On the other hand,
I'm already sick of the only offered alternative, the emerging "multipolar
world" fraternity of Ahmadinejad, Putin, Chavez et al.

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.

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dant
So what's your point? That the people who want a say in how they're governed
shouldn't express a view because the people who don't like to have a say are
sick of hearing it?

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cousin_it
I assume you're referring to the second sentence of my comment.

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".

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ajuc
So protest is right if people go to kill their government by themselves?

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.

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WilliamLP
This article is pure shit. Anyone with a reasonable math education should know
why, and should know about data mining. That you can get away with such things
in major newspapers is simply shameful.

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DannoHung
Uh, forgive me if this doesn't make any sense, but why would the numbers of
the actual votes be generated fradulently?

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?

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chairface
Well, the thing about percentages in an election is that a lot of them don't
_have_ last digits. Further, if the percentages came out to nice numbers like
57% and 65%, we wouldn't even be having this discussion - it would be really,
really obvious.

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caffeine
The statistics is completely wrong - and the conclusion is (probably)
completely right...

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gojomo
I hate to be a credentialist, but I would have more confidence in this
analysis if it came from statisticians rather than political scientists.

