Nate Silver chimes in on the Iranian elections, sort of.

[homasse]

Statistical Report Purporting to Show Rigged Iranian Election Is FlawedLike most Americans, there are few things I would like to see more than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's hateful President, to be voted out of office. Elections in thuggish, authoritarian states like Iran need be treated with the utmost skepticism and scrutiny. I can't say I have any

Comments

Nate Silver chimes in, doesn't really say anything

[yirimyah]

Re: Nate Silver chimes in, doesn't really say anything

[leprofessional]

Agreed... I think most of the /evidence/ people are talking about are the actual voter breakdowns in regions where the contenders were supposed to do strongly. I mean Karoubi had like 17.24% of the vote in the last general election and now they expect us to believe out of 32 million votes he got 300,000? Not to begin on Mousavi's stronghold in Azarbaijan, which is supposed to have had totally voted for Ahmadinejad.

[hinoema]

Ugh. I usually like Nate's speculations, but comparing a temporal graph with a random factor (alphabetical) graph is inaccurate at best.

[schmiss]

ita. The comments from his regular readers took him to the woodshed pretty succinctly.

[villainism]

"took him to the woodshed" is SUCH a great phrase.

[screamingintune]

His edit (and the fact that he also changed the title of the article) seems to indicate that he feels like he's pretty out of his depth on this one, and probably doesn't feel all that qualified to analyze this. He did link to Juan Cole, indicating he felt that Cole understood the situation much better.

But putting the states in alphabetical order is bizarre to say the least.

2 Questions I'm pondering

[leprofessional]

Re rigging of election

1- Does anyone know any info about terror free tomorrow (the organization) what their political leanings are? In a document they released polling Iranians they said a large majority were going to vote for Ahmadinjad.

2- Does anyone have any good analysis as to motives in possibly rigging an election when the candidates could have been not approved? (albeit with some difficulty, but much less so than rigging an entire election) From Juan Cole, to Andrew Sullivan to Masoud Behnoud and other Iranian analysts the starting point seems to be that the election is rigged without any analysis of the circumstances prior.

I think given the anomalies, there is for sure something wrong with the election... but I don't think it's as simple as "o hai goiz, let's make up numbahs" unless someone made a really really really stupid call. Am I giving them too much credit?

Re: 2 Questions I'm pondering

[leprofessional]

http://livestation.com/channels/3

AN's live press conference on AlJazeera, the reporters are kissing his ass... he says that the "disturbances" are being caused by sore grapes and foreign nations.

Re: 2 Questions I'm pondering

[cindel]

Did you hear what he said? He avoid the questions from CNN about the reformers being arrested and the people are being fined for violating traffic rules. WTF?!

Re: 2 Questions I'm pondering

[leprofessional]

tbh I LOLed.

My new quote de jour.

[shizumaslover]

Posted by Darius in the comments at the source:

I'm sitting in my grandparents' house in Tehran right now and I'm hearing mini-explosions, there's helicopters flying around, it smells like smoke, and it took fifteen minutes for this website to load because they've slowed down the internet so much here. On top of that they've basically blocked parts of Iran from the international phone network so I can't even call my mother. 80% of the Iranian people did not enthusiastically turn out in order to re-elect someone who has ruined this country both economically and culturally. The Iranian people know that this election was rigged. How could it have been possible for Mousavi to lose Tabriz when he is from Iranian Azerbaijan and Ahmadinejad has abysmal approval ratings amongst Turkic speaking Iranians? On top of that, I voted in this sham election. Do you know that all votes in Iran are cast on paper and that paper needs to be counted by HAND because you have to write in the code and name of the candidate you are voting for? Mousavi only

[hinoema]

God, that's so tragic. I hope something can be done by and for these people.

[leelakin]

Holy shit. @_@ It's awesome that he managed to get a comment out.