Iran's Election was Stolen

[hitogoroshi]

In other news: sky continues to be blue

[Alzar]

Re: Iran's Election was Stolen

When I first read this article it seemed like pseudo statistics...

[Stormy]

Re: Iran's Election was Stolen

I've been following this in the Star Tribune. Some crazy ****.

[The Toecutter]

Re: Iran's Election was Stolen

Ahh... just like America at times!

[Cutter De Blanc]

Re: Iran's Election was Stolen

Yay for Democracy!

*huggles his Obama teddy bear*

(Nasty, nasty third world countries....)

[Armored]

Re: Iran's Election was Stolen

This article is bull****.

[Czechs Mex]

Re: Iran's Election was Stolen

Why do you say that? Do you think the computation is wrong, or that the fact it would only happen in a fair election with 0.005 probability is still too likely to conclude anything?

I thought it was a pretty clever method. Although I didn't double check their math myself, I'm assuming for now that somebody did, seeing as it's in the Washington Post and was written by two PhD candidates at Columbia.

[Armored]

Re: Iran's Election was Stolen

Its bull**** because everything they are saying could be made up and I'd have no idea of telling!

[Czechs Mex]

Re: Iran's Election was Stolen

Well that doesn't necessarily make it untrue bull****, and it's not like they used magic come up with their results. For starters, here's a list of the vote counts they used:

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/98177.h...onid=351020101

If anyone wants to verify their results, knows matlab, and has some time to kill, I threw all this info into .mat file and will send it to you if you want to play with it.

Edit: In my opinion, the biggest weakness of their analysis is that even if the last couple digits are not from a uniform distribution, that doesn't necessarily mean the whole election was rigged in favor of Ahmadinejad. It only shows that the last couple digits were likely doctored in some way. Lazy vote counters just guessing at the last hundred votes could cause the same results.

Also, I guess it's not really clear whether they made their hypothesis before looking at the data, or if they just went fishing for unexpected results. I would hope the former for the results to be meaningful at all, but who knows.

Still, I love the approach they took. It reminds me of Freakonomics.

[orius]

Re: Iran's Election was Stolen

Couldn't happen to a nicer country. I've been reading the news over this with a great deal of evil glee and relish. Not the fact the apparent fraud involved in the "election", but rather all the fallout from it.