Iran: Faulty Election Data

[caduceus111]

Iran’s Interior Ministry has declared President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner of yesterday’s election. This has been rejected by all the three opponents of Mr. Ahmadinejad, Messrs Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mahdi Karroubi, and Mohsen Rezaaee.

The best evidence for the validity of the arguments of the three opponents of the President for rejecting the results declared by the Interior Ministry is the data the Ministry itself has issued. In the chart below, compiled based on the data released by the Ministry and announced by Iran’s national television, a perfect linear relation between the votes received by the President and Mir Hossein Mousavi has been maintained, and the President’s vote is always half of the President’s. The vertical axis (y) shows Mr. Mousavi’s votes, and the horizontal (x) the President’s. R^2 shows the correlation coefficient: the closer it is to 1.0, the more perfect is the fit, and it is 0.9995, as close to 1.0 as possible for any type of data.

Statistically and mathematically, it is impossible to maintain such perfect linear relations between the votes of any two candidates in any election — and at all stages of vote counting. This is particularly true about Iran, a large country with a variety of ethnic groups who usually vote for a candidate who is ethnically one of their own. For example, in the present elections, Mr. Mousavi is an Azeri and speaks Turkish. The Azeries make up 1/4 of all the eligible voters in Iran and in his trips to Azerbaijan province, where most of the Azeri population lives, Mr. Mousavi had been greeted by huge rallies in support of his campaign. Likewise, Mr. Karroubi, the other reformist candidate, is a Lor. But according to the data released by Iran’s Interior Ministry, in both cases, Mr. Ahmadinejad has far outdone both candidates in their own provinces of birth and among their own ethnic populations.




http://tehranbureau.com/2009/06/13/faulty-election-data/

[bicentennial_baby]

1. The R^2 alone...

Errr, yeah, no.

[BlooInBloo]

2. Nate Silver, statistician, disagrees...

But there is disagreement with his disagreement, claiming that Nate's results depend heavily on how he selected the progression of votes.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/06/statistical-evidence-does-not-prove.html

[2 Much Tribulation]

3. Nate Silver knows a lot, but not a lot about election fraud specifically, IMHO. nt

[BlooInBloo]

4. (shrug) We'll see who's right about that particular detail in the fullness of time...

The overall theft, evidence adduced by Cole and others, has not been impugned, however.

[Odin2005]

5. That is so obviously election rigging and I'm by a long shot no statistician.

That kind of linearity in something as complex as an election involving millions of voters is simply impossible.

A bit off-topic, but I noticed that the person who made the chart uses a different Romanization of the names of the candidates than I usually see.