Last week I wrote about the Iranian election and about tests that could tell you if it was fixed. Unfortunately, nobody had yet conducted such a test. Well, now someone has.
To remind you: the problem with fixing elections is that people are too good at it. Instead of the randomness of real data, you get patterns. People can’t help it. We are pattern-seeking and pattern- making animals and we create them even when trying not to.
So you should be able to conduct a test to see if the data is as messy as you would expect real results to be, or whether there are consistencies that you would expect only if someone had been fixing things. Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco first looked at the prevalence of certain digits in the announced results. They found too many 7s and not enough 5s. They concluded that fewer than 4 in every 100 non-fraudulent results would have this feature (two different departures from the expected digit pattern).
Then they looked at adjacent numbers. When people make up numbers they are more likely to make up 23 than, say, 28 or 43 than 47. Looking at the last two digits of the results, you would expect only 30 per cent of the pairs to be adjacent numbers. In Iran they found 38 per cent. This would happen in a fair election only 4.2 per cent of the time. The chance that the election in Iran was fair? On this evidence alone, less than 0.5 per cent.
THIS ATTACK AGAINST THE PEOPLE OF IRAN MUST NOT STAND: THE WEST SHOULD ENFORCE A TOTAL AIR & SEA AND CURRENCY BLOCKADE AGAINST IRAN.
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