Statistical Suspicions In Iran's Election

hoytak writes "An expert in electoral fraud, professor Walter Melbane, has released a detailed analysis (PDF) of available data in Iran's controversial election (summary here). While he did not find significant indications of fraud, he does note that all the deviations from the predicted model are in Ahmadinejad's favor: 'In general, combining the 2005 and 2009 data conveys the impression that a substantial core of the 2009 results reflected natural political process... [These] stand in contrast to the unusual pattern in which all of the notable discrepancies between the support Ahmadinejad actually received and the support the model predicts are always negative. This pattern needs to be explained before one can have confidence that natural election processes were not supplemented with artificial manipulations.'" In related news, EsonLinji notes reports in the Seattle PI and other sources that the US State Department has asked Twitter to delay system maintenance to prevent cutting off Iranians who have been relying on the service during the post-election crisis. And if you would like to help ease the communication crunch, reader RCulpepper tips a blog post detailing how to set up a proxy server for users with Iranian IP addresses.

Comments

Re:Come on, It's Iran already

[Anonymous Coward]

While he did not find significant indications of fraud

QED. The null hypothesis was not rejected, therefore your study determined nothing. Speculation is not science.

Re:Statistical nothing

[Knara]

AFAIK the official line was that the boxes were sealed and were brought to a central location for counting.

This was after the elections observers from the opposition parties were kicked out of the polling places, of course.

ProxyBox Virtual Appliance

[0100010001010011]

Mirror 1
Mirror 2

Proxies:
Squid installed and listening on ports: 7, 13, 53, 993, 995, 3128
Polipo installed and listening on port: 8123. Polipo is routed through Tor.
Tor: port 9050 (a socks5 proxy)
Ziproxy: Port 8080 (good for low bandwidth connections. It recompress images & text.
Socat: Must be run manually, but listens on port 443 and routes through Squid.

SSH enabled, listening on ports 22,80,2222,22222
2 Users: root:#iran and iran:election. If you enable ssh to the world, change the root password (passwd). This should enable ssh tunneling.
-
I created this for people on Fark who were having problems with squid. Everyone here shouldn't have a problem. It's a bare bones (netinst) debian install with all the above installed and setup.

I did NOT put ACLs in because there are reports here: http://iran.sharearchy.com/ that the ACL list is actually blocking some people in Iran.

And could one of the mods please change to the coral cache of Austin's website? He's already getting DDoS'd by Iran all this morning. Slashdot isn't going to help anything.

If any /.ers would like to help make it smaller, better, faster (VPN?), jjarvis98 at gmail.com

And you're free to inspect it to make sure I'm not trying to r00t you.

Re:This reads like electoral interference to me

[shawnap]

Also, if the protesters have to rely on Twitter uptime ... They're pretty much screwed.

Does Twitter need to introduce the "Fail Camel" to not alienate the Iranian population?

Just to clarify, Iran is a mountainous and largely forested country inhabited neither by Arabs nor Arabic speakers.