Figuring out whether election results from Iran are fraudulent is simple, according to New York University political scientists Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco. In their June 20 Washington Post op-ed The Devil is in the Digits, they discuss the lack of randomness in the last digit of polling results from each province:
"...Last digits in a fair election don't tell us anything about the candidates, the make-up of the electorate or the context of the election. They are random noise in the sense that a fair vote count is as likely to end in 1 as it is to end in 2, 3, 4, or any other numeral. But that's exactly why they can serve as a litmus test for election fraud. For example, an election in which a majority of provincial vote counts ended in 5 would surely raise red flags...."
"...The numbers look suspicious. We find too many 7s and not enough 5s in the last digit. We expect each digit (0, 1, 2, and so on) to appear at the end of 10 percent of the vote counts. But in Iran's provincial results, the digit 7 appears 17 percent of the time, and only 4 percent of the results end in the number 5. Two such departures from the average -- a spike of 17 percent or more in one digit and a drop to 4 percent or less in another -- are extremely unlikely. Fewer than four in a hundred non-fraudulent elections would produce such numbers...."
From Bernd Beber website: Annotated Version of The Devil is in The Digits
From Alexandra Scacco website: Election Results Data Used in Analysis
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