Evidence That Iran's Election Was Rigged

[MikeWB]

Another proof point.

The Devil Is in the Digits
By Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco
Saturday, June 20, 2009 12:02 AM

Since the declaration of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's landslide victory in Iran's presidential election, accusations of fraud have swelled. Against expectations from pollsters and pundits alike, Ahmadinejad did surprisingly well in urban areas, including Tehran -- where he is thought to be highly unpopular -- and even Tabriz, the capital city of opposition candidate Mir Hussein Mousavi's native East Azarbaijan province.

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. Eyebrows have been raised further by the relative consistency in Ahmadinejad's vote share across Iran's provinces, in spite of wide provincial variation in past elections.

These pieces of the story point in the direction of fraud, to be sure. They have led experts to speculate that the election results released by Iran's Ministry of the Interior had been altered behind closed doors. But we don't have to rely on suggestive evidence alone. We can use statistics more systematically to show that this is likely what happened. Here's how.

We'll concentrate on vote counts -- the number of votes received by different candidates in different provinces -- and in particular the last and second-to-last digits of these numbers. For example, if a candidate received 14,579 votes in a province (Mr. Karroubi's actual vote count in Isfahan), we'll focus on digits 7 and 9.

This may seem strange, because these digits usually don't change who wins. In fact, last digits in a fair election don't tell us anything about the candidates, the make-up of the electorate or the context of the election. They are random noise in the sense that a fair vote count is as likely to end in 1 as it is to end in 2, 3, 4, or any other numeral. But that's exactly why they can serve as a litmus test for election fraud. For example, an election in which a majority of provincial vote counts ended in 5 would surely raise red flags.

Why would fraudulent numbers look any different? The reason is that humans are bad at making up numbers. Cognitive psychologists have found that study participants in lab experiments asked to write sequences of random digits will tend to select some digits more frequently than others.

So what can we make of Iran's election results? We used the results released by the Ministry of the Interior and published on the web site of Press TV, a news channel funded by Iran's government. The ministry provided data for 29 provinces, and we examined the number of votes each of the four main candidates -- Ahmadinejad, Mousavi, Karroubi and Mohsen Rezai -- is reported to have received in each of the provinces -- a total of 116 numbers.

The numbers look suspicious. We find too many 7s and not enough 5s in the last digit. We expect each digit (0, 1, 2, and so on) to appear at the end of 10 percent of the vote counts. But in Iran's provincial results, the digit 7 appears 17 percent of the time, and only 4 percent of the results end in the number 5. Two such departures from the average -- a spike of 17 percent or more in one digit and a drop to 4 percent or less in another -- are extremely unlikely. Fewer than four in a hundred non-fraudulent elections would produce such numbers.

As a point of comparison, we can analyze the state-by-state vote counts for John McCain and Barack Obama in last year's U.S. presidential election. The frequencies of last digits in these election returns never rise above 14 percent or fall below 6 percent, a pattern we would expect to see in seventy out of a hundred fair elections.

But that's not all. Psychologists have also found that humans have trouble generating non-adjacent digits (such as 64 or 17, as opposed to 23) as frequently as one would expect in a sequence of random numbers. To check for deviations of this type, we examined the pairs of last and second-to-last digits in Iran's vote counts. On average, if the results had not been manipulated, 70 percent of these pairs should consist of distinct, non-adjacent digits.

Not so in the data from Iran: Only 62 percent of the pairs contain non-adjacent digits. This may not sound so different from 70 percent, but the probability that a fair election would produce a difference this large is less than 4.2 percent. And while our first test -- variation in last-digit frequencies -- suggests that Rezai's vote counts are the most irregular, the lack of non-adjacent digits is most striking in the results reported for Ahmadinejad.

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.

Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco, Ph.D. candidates in political science at Columbia University, will be assistant professors in New York University's Wilf Family Department of Politics this fall.

[joeblow]

Even most of the Zionist media has admitted that President Dr. Ahmadinejad clearly won.

This, like the rest of your recent Iranian threads, are total bullshit.

[svk]

Another proof point.
The Devil Is in the Digits
By Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco
Saturday, June 20, 2009 12:02 AM

Since the declaration of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's landslide victory in Iran's presidential election, accusations of fraud have swelled. Against expectations from pollsters and pundits alike, Ahmadinejad did surprisingly well in urban areas, including Tehran -- where he is thought to be highly unpopular -- and even Tabriz, the capital city of opposition candidate Mir Hussein Mousavi's native East Azarbaijan province.

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. Eyebrows have been raised further by the relative consistency in Ahmadinejad's vote share across Iran's provinces, in spite of wide provincial variation in past elections.

These pieces of the story point in the direction of fraud, to be sure. They have led experts to speculate that the election results released by Iran's Ministry of the Interior had been altered behind closed doors. But we don't have to rely on suggestive evidence alone. We can use statistics more systematically to show that this is likely what happened. Here's how.

We'll concentrate on vote counts -- the number of votes received by different candidates in different provinces -- and in particular the last and second-to-last digits of these numbers. For example, if a candidate received 14,579 votes in a province (Mr. Karroubi's actual vote count in Isfahan), we'll focus on digits 7 and 9.

This may seem strange, because these digits usually don't change who wins. In fact, last digits in a fair election don't tell us anything about the candidates, the make-up of the electorate or the context of the election. They are random noise in the sense that a fair vote count is as likely to end in 1 as it is to end in 2, 3, 4, or any other numeral. But that's exactly why they can serve as a litmus test for election fraud. For example, an election in which a majority of provincial vote counts ended in 5 would surely raise red flags.

Why would fraudulent numbers look any different? The reason is that humans are bad at making up numbers. Cognitive psychologists have found that study participants in lab experiments asked to write sequences of random digits will tend to select some digits more frequently than others.

So what can we make of Iran's election results? We used the results released by the Ministry of the Interior and published on the web site of Press TV, a news channel funded by Iran's government. The ministry provided data for 29 provinces, and we examined the number of votes each of the four main candidates -- Ahmadinejad, Mousavi, Karroubi and Mohsen Rezai -- is reported to have received in each of the provinces -- a total of 116 numbers.

The numbers look suspicious. We find too many 7s and not enough 5s in the last digit. We expect each digit (0, 1, 2, and so on) to appear at the end of 10 percent of the vote counts. But in Iran's provincial results, the digit 7 appears 17 percent of the time, and only 4 percent of the results end in the number 5. Two such departures from the average -- a spike of 17 percent or more in one digit and a drop to 4 percent or less in another -- are extremely unlikely. Fewer than four in a hundred non-fraudulent elections would produce such numbers.

As a point of comparison, we can analyze the state-by-state vote counts for John McCain and Barack Obama in last year's U.S. presidential election. The frequencies of last digits in these election returns never rise above 14 percent or fall below 6 percent, a pattern we would expect to see in seventy out of a hundred fair elections.

But that's not all. Psychologists have also found that humans have trouble generating non-adjacent digits (such as 64 or 17, as opposed to 23) as frequently as one would expect in a sequence of random numbers. To check for deviations of this type, we examined the pairs of last and second-to-last digits in Iran's vote counts. On average, if the results had not been manipulated, 70 percent of these pairs should consist of distinct, non-adjacent digits.

Not so in the data from Iran: Only 62 percent of the pairs contain non-adjacent digits. This may not sound so different from 70 percent, but the probability that a fair election would produce a difference this large is less than 4.2 percent. And while our first test -- variation in last-digit frequencies -- suggests that Rezai's vote counts are the most irregular, the lack of non-adjacent digits is most striking in the results reported for Ahmadinejad.

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.

Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco, Ph.D. candidates in political science at Columbia University, will be assistant professors in New York University's Wilf Family Department of Politics this fall.

Maybe they studied how we do our elections in the U.S.  When did the U.S. start keeping a close eye on elections in other countries?  Most of our leaders would be hard pressed to tell you who the leaders are in other countries.  In fact they would have a hard time pointing on a map just where those countries are.  In fact once they get their puppets in charge they make it a point to not inform the people what is going on in those countries because it gets real nasty when our friends are in charge.  


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[MikeWB]

Even most of the Zionist media has admitted that President Dr. Ahmadinejad clearly won.

This, like the rest of your recent Iranian threads, are total bullshit.

You can stop towing the dictatorship line Jowblow. I bet you've never even lived in Iran and yet you seem to know that all these people rising up and demanding freedom are somehow zionist controlled. Why don't you go to Iran and live there and then tell us first hand how it is to live (if you manage to post here through their firewalls).  :lol:

Your threads are laughable on this topic. Don't be the Iraqi information minster.


"Everything is cool, there are no protesters on streets. Protesters are terrorists paid for by the Zionist regime. All terrorists and protestors are Jews disguising themselves as Iranians. We are not killing our own people."

Laughable!

[MikeWB]

Maybe they studied how we do our elections in the U.S.  When did the U.S. start keeping a close eye on elections in other countries?  Most of our leaders would be hard pressed to tell you who the leaders are in other countries.  In fact they would have a hard time pointing on a map just where those countries are.  In fact once they get their puppets in charge they make it a point to not inform the people what is going on in those countries because it gets real nasty when our friends are in charge.  

They did a piss-poor job with this rigging. Anyone with some math skills can find out that the results are faked. Anyway, that's a false dilemma that you're pushing here.

[svk]

They did a piss-poor job with this rigging. Anyone with some math skills can find out that the results are faked. Anyway, that's a false dilemma that you're pushing here.

So what?  

And under what authority does the U.S. make it their business?  Better yet what the hell does the average U.S. citizen care what goes on in Iran?  In fact the whole mess started in Iran when we went over there and overthrew their government and put that puppet the Shaw in power.  Maybe its best to let them deal with their own internal affairs just like the U.S. would not like Iran coming over to the U.S. and interfering with our internal affairs.

In fact I think the U.S. should worry more about dual citizen foreign agents messing up the U.S. before we stick our nose into places we don't have any business in.  

Like that dual citizen Rabbi Dov Zakheim.  He loses 2.3 trillion right before 911 and then in 2004 loses anothe 1 trillion.  Where did that money go?  Why was no one sent to prison?  Do you know what the U.S. could do with 3.3 trillion?  


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[joeblow]

You can stop towing the dictatorship line Jowblow. I bet you've never even lived in Iran and yet you seem to know that all these people rising up and demanding freedom are somehow zionist controlled. Why don't you go to Iran and live there and then tell us first hand how it is to live (if you manage to post here through their firewalls).  :lol:

Your threads are laughable on this topic. Don't be the Iraqi information minster.


"Everything is cool, there are no protesters on streets. Protesters are terrorists paid for by the Zionist regime. All terrorists and protestors are Jews disguising themselves as Iranians. We are not killing our own people."

Laughable!

I was just there for a few months a couple of years ago and, unlike you, I speak the language. I found a job at Ahvaz university, met a great woman, and was about to marry and settle there.

My threads are laughable because I do not repeat the utter crapola from the patriotard that you are repeating here (very unfortunate for TiU's reputation).

So, tell me where I am making up stuff?

1. The large protests are localized in Tehran.
2. Most of the "democratic" protesters are upper-class snobs who would love to impose a Neo-Con/IMF society on Iranians.
3. Mousavi is extrememly friendly with the grand-daddy of the Neo-Cons, Ledeen.
4. The US government with Israeli operatives is publicly is using Twitter to coordinate the riots.

No, let me guess, you will make another nonsense thread.
4.

[Rory27]

"I was just there for a few months a couple of years ago and, unlike you, I speak the language. I found a job at Ahvaz university, met a great woman, and was about to marry and settle there."

So,what your saying is...you went on a holiday,met a nice girl...than...what?...your visa was off by 5min so you had to bolt!?... :mrgreen: ...*sigh*

[Christopher Marlowe]

"More than thirty pre-election polls were conducted in Iran since President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his main opponent, former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, announced their candidacies in early March 2009.  The polls varied widely between the two opponents, but if one were to average their results, Ahmadinejad would still come out on top. However, some of the organizations sponsoring these polls, such as Iranian Labor News Agency and Tabnak, admit openly that they have been allies of Mousavi, the opposition, or the so-called reform movement. Their numbers were clearly tilted towards Mousavi and gave him an unrealistic advantage of over 30 per cent in some polls. If such biased polls were excluded, Ahmadinejad's average over Mousavi would widen to about 21 points.

"On the other hand, there was only one poll carried out by a western news organization. It was jointly commissioned by the BBC and ABC News, and conducted by an independent entity called the Center for Public Opinion (CPO) of the New America Foundation. The CPO has a reputation of conducting accurate opinion polls, not only in Iran, but across the Muslim world since 2005. The poll, conducted a few weeks before the elections, predicted an 89 percent turnout rate. Further, it showed that Ahmadinejad had a nationwide advantage of two to one over Mousavi.

How did this survey compare to the actual results? And what are the possibilities of wide scale election fraud?

According to official results, there were 46.2 million registered voters in Iran. The turnout was massive, as predicted by the CPO. Almost 39.2 million Iranians participated in the elections for a turn out rate of 85 percent, in which about 38.8 million ballots were deemed valid (about 400,000 ballots were left blank). Officially, President Ahmadinejad received 24.5 million votes to Mousavi's 13.2 million votes, or 62.6 per cent to 33.8 per cent of the total votes, respectively. In fact, this result mirrored the 2005 elections when Ahmadinejad received 61.7 per cent to former President Hashemi Rafsanjani's 35.9 per cent in the runoff elections. Two other minor candidates, Mehdi Karroubi and Mohsen Rezaee, received the rest of the votes in this election.

Shortly after the official results were announced Mousavi's supporters and Western political pundits cried foul and accused the government of election fraud. The accusations centered around four themes. First, although voting had been extended several hours due to the heavy turnout, it was alleged that the elections were called too quickly from the time the polls were closed, with more than 39 million ballots to count.

Second, these critics insinuated that election monitors were biased or that, in some instances, the opposition did not have its own monitors present during the count. Third, they pointed out that it was absurd to think that Mousavi, who descended from the Azerbaijan region in northwest Iran, was defeated handily in his own hometown. Fourth, the Mousavi camp charged that in some polling stations, ballots ran out and people were turned away without voting.

"The next day, Mosuavi and the two other defeated candidates lodged 646 complaints to the Guardian Council, the entity charged with overseeing the integrity of the elections. The Council promised to conduct full investigations of all the complaints. By the following morning, a copy of a letter by a low-level employee in the Interior Ministry sent to Supreme Guide Ali Khamanei, was widely circulating around the world. (Western politicians and media outlets like to call him "Supreme Leader" but no such title exists in Iran.)

"The letter stated that Mousavi had won the elections, and that Ahmadinejad had actually come in third. It also promised that the elections were being fixed in favor of Ahmadinejad per Khamanei's orders. It is safe to assume that the letter was a forgery since an unidentified low-level employee would not be the one addressing Ayatollah Khamanaei. Robert Fisk of The Independent reached the same conclusion by casting grave doubts that Ahmadinejad would score third – garnering less than 6 million votes in such an important election- as alleged in the forged letter.

"There were a total of 45,713 ballot boxes that were set up in cities, towns and villages across Iran. With 39.2 million ballots cast, there were less than 860 ballots per box. Unlike other countries where voters can cast their ballots on several candidates and issues in a single election, Iranian voters had only one choice to consider: their presidential candidate. Why would it take more than an hour or two to count 860 ballots per poll?  After the count, the results were then reported electronically to the Ministry of the Interior in Tehran."

From: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php? ... &aid=14052

[scorpio]

How is that evidence? Just because two Ph.d candidates say so?? I am not convinced!!  :roll: Do you know what Ph.d stands for?: Piled Higher and Deeper.  :lol: I grew up in academia, both of my parents have Ph.d's. - It doesn't mean a thing. I just means that that you can regurgitate information that is fed to you. If this is such a real event why is the zio media fixated on it?? Why are they pushing it soooo hard?  CNN and BBC is reporting on it nearly 24/7. Read my post entitled 'Major Psi Op...' Get ready for a Jewish orchestrated war with Iran!!