People Who Suck at Math (Ahem, Iran Election Riggers)

Two interesting stories surfaced this week about people who suck at math.

The first had to with an American Institutes for Research report that's created a new international grading index to compare state and national math scores with those of other countries. And guess what? The U.S. sucks at math, earning a C+ overall and coming in 12th in the world. Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and Japan scored the highest in that order. (Dude. Even Kazakhstan and Latvia punked us.)

But whatever, the U.S. lagging behind Asian countries in math is not really news, right?

The other story about people sucking at math that's a bit more surprising has to do with the Iran election. First came the report from British think tank, Chatham House, which showed that Ahmadinejad received 13 million more votes than he and other conservatives got in 2005, an unlikely occurrence considering his waning popularity. They also found that in two provinces, Mazandaran and Yazd, turnout was more than 100 percent.

Then Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco, two Ph.D. candidates in political science at Columbia, performed their own mathematical experiment, publishing their results in a Washington Post op/ed. Beber and Scacco looked at "digit frequencies" in the vote counts--when numbers recur at certain rates it suggests human tampering--to come up with a statistical probability that the election was fair.

And, according to their findings, the probability that the election was fair came out to .005 percent.

What does all this mean? The Iranian election riggers--Ahmadinejad & Co.--really really really suck at math. But perhaps what makes them even stupider is that they didn't have the good sense to outsource that numbers-tampering shit to people who don't suck at math. To people, say, in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, or Japan (duh!).

[AP: Analysis casts doubts on Ahmadinejad's victory]
[Washington Post: The Devil Is in the Digits]

Comments

[Squaker]

I can't wait for our next elections here in America
I'm sure the press will use all these new methods of detecting election fraud to expose the problems in our system
I'm also very pleased to see protesters covered in a positive light. I can't recall seeing that for any non-communist country ever

Will they criticize our incumbent officials for not allowing international election monitoring? Will they criticize the pre-screening of candidates for the official ballot and debates? Will they make a big fuss when some counties report higher number of votes than registered voters (yes that happens here as well)? Will they analyze the correlation between the exit polls and the claimed results?
In 2000 here at home, even if you believed the official vote counts that our "Supreme Court" certified to be valid, something called the "Electoral College" switched the winner based on a rounding error in the vote counting system. Our government freely admits Bush got less votes than Gore but still declared Bush the winner

Perhaps the Iranians will be the ones to teach us about democracy

[S1m0n]

It's an excellent idea, if the un-auditable Diebold (and other) voting meachines are still in use.

Otherwise, the gold standard is a judicial recount. The problem in Iran is that the election, (as designed by functionaries appointed by Ahmandinejad and overseen by other functionaries also appointed by Ahmadinejad) can't be audited, so vote counts can't be reproduced and verified.

[ekornew]

Here's a nice conceptual critique of that election analysis:

http://www.analyticpolitics.org/2009/06/devil-is-in-statistics.html

[samp426]

Has anyone thought about the fact that the Iranians who went to the streets after their election were more energized and outraged about a stolen election than we turned out to be after our own imbroglio in 2000. Hmmm.
What the hell does that mean?
Great post. Thanks.

[unitron]

Apparently they'd been stuffing the Interior Ministery with Ahmadinejad cronies for some time now in order to steal the election, but lost it so badly that they still went into panic mode and bungled the swindle.

[wereeverywhere]

Juan Cole would agree with your point, Uni_. The snippet below was linked from his site (http://www.juancole.com/):

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/25/world/middleeast/25tehran.html?em Mr. Ahmadinejad has filled crucial ministries and other top posts with close friends and allies who have spread ideological and operational support for him nationwide. These analysts estimate that he has replaced 10,000 government employees to cement his loyalists through the bureaucracies, so that his allies run the organizations responsible for both the contested election returns and the official organs that have endorsed them. “There is a whole political establishment that emerged with Ahmadinejad, which is now determined to hold on to power undemocratically,” said one American-based Iran analyst, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of his work in Iran. “Their ability to resist the outcome of the election means they have a broad base as a political establishment.