Iranian election fun

[xtramedium]

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/image...07500629-1.jpg The clampdown follows Monday's show of defiance by opposition supporters


Authorities in Iran have announced sweeping new restrictions on foreign media, effectively confining journalists to their offices. The move comes as the powerful Guardian Council says it is ready to recount some votes from Friday's disputed presidential poll.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner and thousands of his supporters are rallying in Tehran.
But his rival Mir Hossein Mousavi and other candidates are seeking a rerun.
The BBC's Jon Leyne in Tehran says they may not accept the recount offer.
Several people died in a huge pro-opposition rally on Monday and Mr Mousavi urged followers not to take part in another demonstration planned for Tuesday, amid fears of new violence.
"This headquarters calls on people to avoid the trap of planned clashes," a Mousavi spokesman told AFP news agency. See map of central Tehran

But there were reports of small groups of opposition supporters gathering nonetheless.
The opposition march had been due to take place in Tehran's Vali Asr Square at the same time as a demonstration there by supporters of Mr Ahmadinejad.
Thousands of the president's followers have converged there, some waving the national flag.
Media clampdown
The new restrictions on foreign media require journalists to obtain explicit permission before leaving the office to cover any story.
Journalists have also been banned from attending or reporting on any "unauthorised" demonstration - and it is unclear which if any of the protests are formally authorised.

[zerojunkie]

So someone ran the election results through Benford's Law. The math is way beyond me, but here's a description of it from Wikipedia.

Benford's law, also called the first-digit law, states that in lists of numbers from many (but not all) real-life sources of data, the leading digit is distributed in a specific, non-uniform way. According to this law, the first digit is 1 almost one third of the time, and larger digits occur as the leading digit with lower and lower frequency, to the point where 9 as a first digit occurs less than one time in twenty. This distribution of first digits arises logically whenever a set of values is distributed logarithmically. For reasons described below, real-world measurements are often distributed logarithmically (or equivalently, the logarithm of the measurements is distributed uniformly).

This counter-intuitive result has been found to apply to a wide variety of data sets, including electricity bills, street addresses, stock prices, population numbers, death rates, lengths of rivers, physical and mathematical constants, and processes described by power laws (which are very common in nature). The result holds regardless of the base in which the numbers are expressed, although the exact proportions change.

It is named after physicist Frank Benford, who stated it in 1938,[1] although it had been previously stated by Simon Newcomb in 1881.[2]

Here are the results. The candidates are referred to by the first letter's of their last name.

Conservatives

* Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran
* Mohsen Rezaee, former Commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard

Reformists

* Mehdi Karroubi, former Speaker of the Majlis
* Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the last Prime Minister of Iran (Campaign article)

Conclusion. The vote counts per voting area published on 2009-
06-14 by the Ministry of the Interior of the Islamic Republic of Iran for
the 2009 presidential election show a highly significant excess of the first
digit 7 for candidate K, compared to the expectations either from a uniform
Benford’s Law or from an empirically derived equivalent of Benford’s Law.
Given that the test was applied for all four candidates, for all nine possible
first digits, the null hypothesis that the first digit in the candidates’ absolute
numbers of votes are consistent with random selection from a uniform, base
10 logarithmic distribution modulo 1 is rejected at a significance of p ≤
0.0069, i.e. 1 − p ≥ 99.3%.

Less significant anomalies suggested by Benford’s Law can be interpreted
using an alternative hypothesis in which a few dozen vote counts for candidate A in the range 10,000–19,999 had an extra digit added, shifting them
to the 100,000–199,999 range, and/or a few dozen vote counts in the 20,000–
29,999 and 200,000–299,999 ranges were artificially added to these ranges.
Corrections for these would-be anomalies would amount to several million
votes.

The highly significant excess of 7’s for K and the speculative alternative
hypothesis could be checked by examining the credibility of the total
vote numbers (and likely voting patterns) for those particular voting
areas with these numerical characteristics. The voting areas’ names are
listed in the table published by the MOI (MOI Iran 2009a; MOI Iran 2009b;
MOI Iran 2009c).

A possible clue for further investigation is that all the candidates’ logarithmic
vote count distributions are highly skewed, especially R’s vote counts,
which are positively skewed by about 5.8 standard errors, except for M,
whose logarithmic vote counts are skewed (negatively) by less than one standard
error. Any demographic models of Iranian voting patterns will need to
either reproduce these statistical characteristics, or else make hypotheses
regarding systematic anomalies in the data.

[PETA]

fascinating what's going on... this may be the people throwing off the yolk we've been heaqring about for 20 years

creeping coup - haven't read the thread yet but... has anyone mentioned that the army has in recent years gotten over 200 former high ranking officers into the parliament?

The Supreme Guide may not be able to control as many necessary levers as he thinks

[Dionysos]

Originally Posted by St. Stalin the Apathetic

fascinating what's going on... this may be the people throwing off the yolk we've been heaqring about for 20 years

creeping coup - haven't read the thread yet but... has anyone mentioned that the army has in recent years gotten over 200 former high ranking officers into the parliament?

The Supreme Guide may not be able to control as many necessary levers as he thinks

Interesting bits from a journalist that's defying the crackdown:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2...17/2600571.htm

It was interesting that the special forces - who normally take the side of Ahmadinejad's Basij militia - were there with clubs and sticks in their camouflage trousers and their purity white shirts and on this occasion the Iranian military kept them away from Mousavi's men and women. In fact at one point, Mousavi's supporters were shouting 'thank you, thank you' to the soldiers. One woman went up to the special forces men, who normally are very brutal with Mr Mousavi's supporters, and said 'can you protect us from the Basij?' He said 'with God's help'. It was quite extraordinary because it looked as if the military authorities in Tehran have either taken a decision not to go on supporting the very brutal militia - which is always associated with the presidency here - or individual soldiers have made up their own mind that they're tired of being associated with the kind of brutality that left seven dead yesterday - buried, by the way secretly by the police - and indeed the seven or eight students who were killed on the university campus 24 hours earlier. Quite a lot of policeman are beginning to smile towards the demonstrators of Mr Mousavi, who are insisting there must be a new election because Mr Ahmadinejad wasn't really elected. Quite an extraordinary scene. There were a lot of stones thrown and quite a lot of bitter fighting, hand-to-hand but at the end of the day the special forces did keep them apart. I haven't ever seen the Iranian security authorities behaving fairly before and it's quite impressive.

[FarangBa]

Originally Posted by zerojunkie

He's impressed.

Hellz Yeah, You go Baghdad Bob... There is absolutely nothing wrong. There are NO infidels near Baghdad and the few infidels who are still alive... we have completely surrounded!

.. Huh? wait... what's that noise?

[FarangBa]

Originally Posted by gatecrasher

I just wonder how this is different from our 2000 election. Hopefully their supreme court doesn't halt the recount and make the decision themselves.

Wow, dude... your living in a fantasy world if you think this is even remotely the same as our election woes in 2000. Your comparing an entire government campaign against the will of the people of Iran (by a huge margin with 85% voter turnout) to hanging chads (by retarded elderly people who can't follow instructions) with less than a 1% margin between candidates.

You see, that's the problem with people in our country who really have NO CLUE how things really work anywhere else but here. They want to go and try to compare some friggin travesty in some remote part of the world with some mundane issue here in the states.

That does 2 things: 1) it shows how little respect you have for the humongous strides that have been taken in this country to right all wrongs (of which we are light years ahead of any other country on earth) and.
2) it shows how little respect you actually have for the actual condition of the indigenous people of these other countries.

Most of these people live in extreme poverty (the likes that do not exist anywhere within the borders of our country). They deal with death and destruction everyday. They live with the constant fear of being snatched up by their government (never to be seen again) for simply being accused of something against the state - or Islam by a neighbor who doesn't like them. They face being executed simply because they don't believe the exact same version of Islam as the Mullahs.

This would be like the Baptists being in charge of everything and everyone in the country and then continually executing thousands of Methodists.

We have absolutely nothing like that going on here at all... Ever!

So spare me the wacko comparisons of our poor little lives here in the states with the true terror, genocide, totalitarianism, (true) religious fanaticism, and downright murder that goes on every single day in these foreign countries.

[PETA]

Originally Posted by Dionysos

Interesting bits from a journalist that's defying the crackdown:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2...17/2600571.htm

[/i]

this could be really important stuff...

[xtramedium]

Originally Posted by st. Stalin the apathetic

this is really important stuff...

fixed!

[PETA]

Originally Posted by xtramedium

fixed!

you're jumping the gun... a few thousand dead Chinese in Tienamen can testify to the failures of their larger scale protests.

[xtramedium]

Originally Posted by St. Stalin the Apathetic

you're jumping the gun... a few thousand dead Chinese in Tienamen can testify to the failures of their larger scale protests.

Comparing apples to oranges my friend.... This thing in Iran is a big deal and not just for them but for us and other countries.

[PETA]

Originally Posted by xtramedium

Comparing apples to oranges my friend.... This thing in Iran is a big deal and not just for them but for us and other countries.

You can't be serious. Are you familiar with what happened in 1989?

Massive populist demonstrations against a despotic government half way around the world with small viewing portholes available to the greater world... the only difference is that the Supreme Guide hasn't started running them over with tanks.... yet.

This is remarkably similar and unless and until something more happens this is an opportunity for great things or an impending tragedy. Either way it is too soon to tell. You're letting your wishes for what could be cloud your vision as to what currently is.

[BradH]

The election is false simply based on the fact that those number of ballots could not have been counted in that period of time. A large number are hand written or some shit.

[matias pecile]

Originally Posted by xtramedium

Comparing apples to oranges my friend.... This thing in Iran is a big deal and not just for them but for us and other countries.

/sarahpalin + /facepalm + /ELNINO + "play her off keyboard cat"

[J. Fees]

Originally Posted by FarangBa

Wow, dude... your living in a fantasy world if you think this is even remotely the same as our election woes in 2000. Your comparing an entire government campaign against the will of the people of Iran (by a huge margin with 85% voter turnout) to hanging chads (by retarded elderly people who can't follow instructions) with less than a 1% margin between candidates.

You see, that's the problem with people in our country who really have NO CLUE how things really work anywhere else but here. They want to go and try to compare some friggin travesty in some remote part of the world with some mundane issue here in the states.

That does 2 things: 1) it shows how little respect you have for the humongous strides that have been taken in this country to right all wrongs (of which we are light years ahead of any other country on earth) and.
2) it shows how little respect you actually have for the actual condition of the indigenous people of these other countries.

Most of these people live in extreme poverty (the likes that do not exist anywhere within the borders of our country). They deal with death and destruction everyday. They live with the constant fear of being snatched up by their government (never to be seen again) for simply being accused of something against the state - or Islam by a neighbor who doesn't like them. They face being executed simply because they don't believe the exact same version of Islam as the Mullahs.

This would be like the Baptists being in charge of everything and everyone in the country and then continually executing thousands of Methodists.

We have absolutely nothing like that going on here at all... Ever!

So spare me the wacko comparisons of our poor little lives here in the states with the true terror, genocide, totalitarianism, (true) religious fanaticism, and downright murder that goes on every single day in these foreign countries.

so do you think that when the populace votes in a president, our electoral system should override what the people want? do you think that it was quizzical that jeb bush was the govenor in a state that his brother just happened to win by illegal means. I mean sure no one got killed and bush made it into office without some sort of military rule, but how can you say that we are so much better than them?

[PETA]

Originally Posted by J. Fees

so do you think that when the populace votes in a president, our electoral system should override what the people want? do you think that it was quizzical that jeb bush was the govenor in a state that his brother just happened to win by illegal means. I mean sure no one got killed and bush made it into office without some sort of military rule, but how can you say that we are so much better than them?

lol...

"we're no better than the Iranians"...

"Al Gore Won!!"

talk about a kool-aid drinker.. gtfo Feez that's just complete stupidity.