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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.
There are a lot of issues with the data. But even before one gets to the statistical anomalies one has the basic problem of time. Iran uses paper ballots. In the past elections it has taken at least three days for Iran to count the votes. In this case, if the results are to be believed it took a matter of hours. That's just not plausible. Even if there were zero apparent stat problems, this would still be a massive red flag.
This isn't electoral interference. It is an attempt to prevent censorship and aid people who are being oppressed and persecuted. This is exactly the sort of intervention that countries should be doing: helping allow more people to talk to each other. Democracy comes most easily not when imposed by a military invasion but when people are simply given the tools necessary to talk to each other and to those from other countries. Dictators always try to censor and control communications for a reason. I'm not that happy with how the Obama administration has done things (especially in regards to civil liberties issues) but this is precisely the correct reaction. Actions that undermine censorship are very rarely the wrong thing.
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.
Meh, The US State Department talking to a US company that provides a services that some Iranians use is hardly a particularly good example of external political influences in the middle east. If anything the big story would be if somebody actually managed to persuade Twitter to keep operating. :) But seriously, when you look at things like Operation Ajax, you can see that the US just trying to make sure Iranians have a convenient way to speak for themselves is extremely hands-off, and probably a very appropriate way to avoid having unclean hands in the situation. The previous administration would have loudly and openly run their mouth about the situation, and inadvertently marginalized the reformist element in Iran by trying to support it. Trying to make sure they can speak for themselves is probably about the best thing America can do right now.
Other interesting points: most people don't agree with Ahmadinejad's policies. Quote:
more than 70 percent of Iranians also expressed support for providing full access to weapons inspectors and a guarantee that Iran will not develop or possess nuclear weapons, in return for outside aid and investment
That warms my heart. I really don't want Iran to get nuclear weapons (for purely selfish, self-preservation reasons. Don't respond to this saying, 'it is their right' because I don't care). Apparently most people voted for Ahmadinejad not because they agree with his policies, but because they consider him to be a stronger negotiator, and more capable of getting favorable concessions from the US, China, and Russia.
If these results do turn out to be accurate, Obama should call and congratulate Ahmadinejad. After all, there are things we can agree on: we want Iran to be a strong, capable, functioning member of international society, not one that tries to destroy it (of course, our views on how they should reach that goal are different, but we can work on that).
Qxe4
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.
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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.
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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.
But they didn't just announce that. They even had a claimed final total shortly thereafter which Ayatollah Khamenei confirmed. That's not explainable by a "we have a representative sample".
The point is that enough of the people of Iran find the results incredible and are in general angry enough about their present conditions that they have lost faith in the current government and desire significant reforms. This won't go away, ever. Even if a complete do-over of the election is performed, the fact that peaceful assembly was denied and communications have been disrupted, among many other things, makes this a moot point.
Except that you have good transit systems and are counting around 30M fewer votes.
1) The counting and reporting is done right from the polling stations. Checks and rechecks, and additional audits might benefit from being able to move the ballots around efficiently, but the initial counting and reporting is very efficient.
2) The number of ballots being counted is completely irrelevant, and would make no difference in how long it takes. We allocate polling stations and staff them on a per capita basis. So if our population doubled it wouldn't take twice as long, we'd just have twice as many polling stations and staff.
(And it would cost twice as much, but there would be twice the population paying for it, so it all works out the same whether its 30M or 300M people.)
The only effort that goes up, is summarizing results, but:
a) that is largely done using computers
b) the amount of effort grows logarithmically so 300M ballots would only require a handful more staff than 30M ballots.
Really, people who think you can't run an efficient paper ballot system with a large population aren't really thinking.
Except that you have good transit systems and are counting around 30M fewer votes.
From what I understand, Iran has a good, or at least decent, transit system, (they aren't a third world country) and a decent communication grid.
Having 4x more votes means nothing. They could easily have 4x (or more) counters.
The US could hand count over 100m ballots in the same time frame, if you only had one election at a time, like Canada. Because you have a FREAKING CRAP TON of elections (President, Senate, House, State Senate, State House, DA, Judge, School Board, Official State Dog Walker) and often several referendums all at one time, hand counting becomes impractical. BTW, I am not bashing having so many elections, just pointing out that it is the major reason why hand counting is impractical in the US.
That's correct. But the opposition candidate, Mousavi, said that he received a phone call at 2am the evening of the election indicating that he had won. When the results were announced later, it was Ahmadinejad by a landslide.
Additionally, A'nejad officially had consistent support all across the country and all through demographics. He officially did equally well in cities vs. rural areas. Mousavi was heavily favored in cities. A'nejad officially did equally well among sexes, age groups, class levels, ethnic groups, everything. Mousavi was heavily favored among young students. It's too uniform to be plausible. For example, A'nejad even beat Mousavi in Mousavi's home Azeri province, Iranian Azerbaijan. That was compared to Obama losing the African-American vote to McCain, it's just very suspect and highly improbable.
In addition to that, the other 2 candidates each officially received less than 1% of the total. In the pre-election polls each of those candidates had much higher support.
CNN has done an absolutely terrible job at covering this, the line that CNN is reporting is essentially the government's spin being reported as truth. Fox seems to be the only US network with the balls to show much protest video. The BBC's coverage has been among the best outside of Arabic media, which is difficult to receive in a lot of places. The most up-to-date information about this can usually be found in whichever fark.com thread people are currently posting in, they've gone through 9 or 10 now with several thousand posts in each. Needless to say, any respect I had for CNN has essentially evaporated. Their international coverage used to be among the best in the US, now they might as well be the US-based Iranian spin machine.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Just to clarify, Iran is a mountainous and largely forested country inhabited neither by Arabs nor Arabic speakers.
It is explainable by a "this is a Theocracy and I am the High Priest."
I don't understand why people act as if they expect Iran to conduct an election like a Western democracy.
Where does the assumption come from that Iran, of all countries, is even capable of a "fair election"? I really don't see how you can be surprised about this outcome *at all*, and I also don't understand what anyone thinks can be "done about it", if Iran's own "government" does not take action.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Actually, from what I've heard the rioters aren't just for Mousavi anymore. Their list of demands includes revising the Iranian constitution to grant religious freedom (not so much that they love their minorities as that they've discovered that Muslim theocracy oppresses Muslims too), dissolving all "organs of repression", and release of all political prisoners. All sounds like big, good changes to me.
What's really stupid is when people assume that fudged election numbers are only off by a few percent, and that only a few key results are fudged. That's the way an idiot would do it, but anyone remotely intelligent (or remotely smart enough to hire someone who WAS intelligent) would tweak all the results. Especially in the case of electronic voting, where there's no physical record of the votes. Start with current polls, and just nudge the numbers to give small, statistically probable swings across the board.
If the election was properly rigged, you wouldn't be able to tell via this kind of statistical analysis.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
The Iranians apparently thought they deserved a fair election. This is not a tempest in a teapot, imagined up by the western world. Watch the videos, read the live feeds through twitter, listen to the chants of "Allaho Akbar" that shake the cities: it is very clear that Iran's leadership dramatically overstepped in this election.
It doesn't matter one single bit that the country is an effective dictatorship. The people were promised an election to choose their own president, and no sooner had they made their choice than the government yanked the promise away from them. It doesn't even matter if a fair counting of every vote cast does indicate a win for Ahmadinejad; the blatant fraud, police brutality, and the arresting of the opposition has ruined the people's trust in government. I truly hope that Iran doesn't descend into civil war.
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
It's amazing how easily people are manipulated by the media. I'm going to paste some accurate analysis from Stratfor about the reality of politics in Iran, and why as Westerners we are getting a distorted picture (above and beyond the fact that the CIA would like to see the government of Iran overthrown).
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Stratfor
WESTERN MISCONCEPTIONS MEET IRANIAN REALITY
By George Friedman
In 1979, when we were still young and starry-eyed, a revolution took place in Iran. When I asked experts what would happen, they divided into two camps.
The first group of Iran experts argued that the Shah of Iran would certainly survive, that the unrest was simply a cyclical event readily manageable by his security, and that the Iranian people were united behind the Iranian monarch's modernization program. These experts developed this view by talking to the same Iranian officials and businessmen they had been talking to for years -- Iranians who had grown wealthy and powerful under the shah and who spoke English, since Iran experts frequently didn't speak Farsi all that well.
The second group of Iran experts regarded the shah as a repressive brute, and saw the revolution as aimed at liberalizing the country. Their sources were the professionals and academics who supported the uprising -- Iranians who knew what former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini believed, but didn't think he had much popular support. They thought the revolution would result in an increase in human rights and liberty. The experts in this group spoke even less Farsi than the those in the first group.
Misreading Sentiment in Iran
Limited to information on Iran from English-speaking opponents of the regime, both groups of Iran experts got a very misleading vision of where the revolution was heading -- because the Iranian revolution was not brought about by the people who spoke English. It was made by merchants in city bazaars, by rural peasants, by the clergy -- people Americans didn't speak to because they couldn't. This demographic was unsure of the virtues of modernization and not at all clear on the virtues of liberalism. From the time they were born, its members knew the virtue of Islam, and that the Iranian state must be an Islamic state.
Americans and Europeans have been misreading Iran for 30 years. Even after the shah fell, the myth has survived that a mass movement of people exists demanding liberalization -- a movement that if encouraged by the West eventually would form a majority and rule the country. We call this outlook "iPod liberalism," the idea that anyone who listens to rock 'n' roll on an iPod, writes blogs and knows what it means to Twitter must be an enthusiastic supporter of Western liberalism. Even more significantly, this outlook fails to recognize that iPod owners represent a small minority in Iran -- a country that is poor, pious and content on the whole with the revolution forged 30 years ago.
There are undoubtedly people who want to liberalize the Iranian regime. They are to be found among the professional classes in Tehran, as well as among students. Many speak English, making them accessible to the touring journalists, diplomats and intelligence people who pass through. They are the ones who can speak to Westerners, and they are the ones willing to speak to Westerners. And these people give Westerners a wildly distorted view of Iran. They can create the impression that a fantastic liberalization is at hand -- but not when you realize that iPod-owning Anglophones are not exactly the majority in Iran.
Last Friday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected with about two-thirds of the vote. Supporters of his opponent, both inside and outside Iran, were stunned. A poll revealed that former Iranian Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi was beating Ahmadinejad. It is, of course, interesting to meditate on how you could conduct a poll in a country where phones are not universal, and making a call once you have found a phone can be a trial. A poll therefore would
This is a pretty bad post even by slashdot standards.
You start out by proclaiming "As a PoliSci student, I've spent a ton of time looking at election data for many countries", which as an argument to authority is trying to show how your opinion counts more than other posters (it does not).
This is then followed up by a false analogy "I'm pretty sure some people protested after Kerry lost the 2004 US election". The vast differences between these elections renders the analogy meaningless. Never the less you decide to throw in an ad hominem "and yeah, I know I'll get some conspiracy nut reply to that with an essay" just to reinforce it.
Time for some red herrings:
"Quebec, in particular, has a history of some pretty wild swings from one party to another."
"I've seen countless "rules" made in politics, only to be broken"
"I saw similar analysis "prove" Kerry really won in 2004, and that didn't really amount to anything."
All divert attention towards other barely related topics.
You end by stating that you are "only suggesting that I've not seen any "smoking gun" ", which places an unfair burden of proof upon the opposition. The incumbent (Ahmadinejad) controlled every step of the elections, the smoking gun you are looking for is just not possible with this level of control.
I apologise for pointing out the logical fallicies because usually posts like this annoy me in that they don't address (and therefore dismiss) the arguments but the post had too many problems to ignore.
Ignoring the post you replied to, are you sure that the election was "stolen". On the whole, the West would really, really have liked Mousavi to have won. They would really, really have liked his defeat to be the result of fraud. But truthfully, Ahmadinejad is very popular with the common Iranian. He provided insurance for millions of women who work at home. He has carried out a lot of things that have benefited the common Iranian. And when Iranians see the US invading neighbouring countries, threatening their own country both verbally in diplomatic channels and through sending armed forces scouting through their waters, someone who is perceived as standing up to the US is, rightly or wrongly, well thought of for that.
Mousavi is popular mainly with better off Iranians who believe they stand to benefit more from taking a more pacifying approach to the US (some would say submissive). It was, it now seems, wishful thinking that he would win and it seems that many commentators are now levelling the accusation of fraud because that suits the purposes of much of the West. But we see that the supporters of Mousavi taking to the streets aren't receiving popular support (and more blatantly, this is taking place only in the capital - the rest of the country seems content with the result which is also supports the election results) and in fact these supporters in many cases have initiated the violence. (The Independent paper in the UK gave a full page interview to one of Mousavi's supporters who, when you managed to overlook the bias, was praising her fellows for managing to have set a bus on fire and pretty much said that it didn't matter whether Ahmadinejad got more votes because he shouldn't be President and Mousavi should).
The behaviour of the Iranian police has been brutal (predictably) and Ahmadinejad remains horrible on certain human rights issues. But as far as I can see, it looks like he won (and earlier Western reports grudgingly admitted this before they realised they could get away with overt suggestions of fraud). And so it is essentially Mousavi's supporters who are a smaller faction trying to undermine democracy with violence. If they get anywhere (and whatever you think of the GP, covert Western support or promises of support for his followers is extremely plausible), then it would just push Iran back to a more totalitarian state because they certainly wont win whatever the West would like to pretend. They don't have the support of the common people and, quite frankly, they appear to have lost the election.
Mousavi - good or bad (and he's no angel, just more amenable to Western interests), you can't just allow democracy when it elects the people you want elected.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
You mean aside from the bizarre statistical anomalies? I'm starting to get a distinct "la la la I can't hear you"
You're absolutely correct, once I read "did not find significant indications of fraud" I cannot hear anyone talking about statistical anomalies. Well no, not absolutely correct, there's no "la la la" about it. It's just the same cold uncompromising "I can't hear you" a Judge will give if you attempt to submit irrelevant evidence.
You clearly either haven't read the stat breakdown on the official results, don't understand what they mean, or are a lvl 23 Erudite Troll.
Hey FU buddy, I'm at least a lvl 30! ;) You're probably correct about my lack of understanding, so maybe you can help me with this. Quoting from TFA:
... a statistically sharp approach to statistical testing--taking the multiple testing into account--fails to provide evidence against the hypothesis that the second digits are distributed according to Benford's Law. Tests based on the means of the second digits also fail to suggest any deviation from the second-digit Benford's Law distribution ...
I've taken on board the fact that hetrogeneity of the data might obscure local problems, but that's not really relevant since the onus of proof clearly lies with those alleging fraud anyway. I've also taken on board that the non-sharp approach (ie looking at one of the candidates results) might lead one to another conclusion. As to the other (non-significant) anomalities in his modified conclusion Mebane observes:
In general, combining the 2005 and 2009 data conveys the impression that a substantial core of the 2009 results reflected natural political processes. ... These natural aspects of the election results stand in contrast to the unusual pattern in which most of the notable discrepancies between the support Ahmadinejad actually received and the support the model predicts are negative. ... It appears that the specification using the two conditioning variables ... does not fully capture the baseline support for the candidates or the pattern of new mobilization. ... It is not possible given only the current data to say whether this reflects natural complexity in the political processes or artificial manipulations.
I admit I lack the confidence with stats (1978 was the last time I had to look at stats in any deeper way than merely applying tests of significance), to make a call on non-significant results. I get nervous when statisticians talk about "impressions" in place of "significance." Perhaps you can educate me here and convince me why I should draw conclusions based on non-significant results?
I'm not sure where you're coming from on this issue. ... What, in fact, is your deal?
I avidly opposed to theocracy as a form of government, a fortiori a nuclear armed theocracy. I am opposed to the Iranian regime even though I don't live there (some might point out it is none of my business). I don't consider A'jad to be entirely a sane man (though by the standards of his culture he may well be). I would dearly have loved to see him defeated (and he may still be, extra-democratically).
However I also endorse an evidence based view of reality, and I don't think it is valid to construe the world in a way which lacks evidence merely on the basis that I might like it to be that way. I believe that, unpalatable though we may find it, we might have to accept that a majority of Iranians disagree with us. Moreover, in the absence of clear evidence to the contrary (eyewitness, statistical, or whatever), I strongly believe the only (rebuttable) presumption we are entitled to draw (upon evidence-based criteria) is that the election result reflects the will of the majority of Iranian voters. To draw any other conclusion in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary is, IMHO, to fall victim to the trap of believing in one's own propaganda.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke