Last year I recommended a donation strategy that nearly 400 of you followed to give nearly $45,000 to one side (and an unknown amount to the other side). Now that Al Franken is finally on his way to being Minnesota’s junior senator (by 312 votes, a 0.01% margin), was it a good strategy?
Entries from June 30th, 2009
Statistical analysis update from Mebane
June 22nd, 2009, 9:32am by Sam Wang
Here’s the latest update from Walter Mebane of U. Michigan. At this point he is quite confident that fraud occurred. He has kindly made data and R scripts available for the curious.
Tags: Politics
Voting early and often
June 22nd, 2009, 9:23am by Sam Wang
Iran’s Guardian Council has admitted that apparent turnout exceeded 100% in at least 50 cities. This confirms recent analysis at the University of St. Andrews as well as by David Shor.
Inflated voting is the crudest of fraud, cruder than anything implied by my previous post. At this point statistical analysis is interesting for filling in [...]
Tags: Politics
Analyzing Iran 2009: Part 2, The Official Returns
June 21st, 2009, 2:56am by Sam Wang
Current events have completely overwhelmed the relevance of any statistical analysis. But a critical look can still point us toward a better understanding of what happened on Election Day.
Analysis of fraud in Iran 2009 is an unfolding story. In this post I focus on Election Day returns themselves, which suggest: Votes may have been, in [...]
Tags: Politics
Iranian presidential debates
June 19th, 2009, 2:48pm by Sam Wang
On June 2-8, one-on-one debates were held between pairs of major candidates. As I posted earlier, these could have shifted opinion. One reader writes:
People watched all of the debates very carefully and the result was actually very bad for AhmadiNejad…[I] am saying that as an Iranian based on what I saw and heard from people [...]
Tags: Politics
Analyzing Iran 2009: Part 1, Pre-election polls
June 18th, 2009, 11:13pm by Sam Wang
Updated with a third possible reason for the discrepancy. -Sam
At a minimum, hundreds of statistically minded people are poring over Iranian election data (see my previous post and these posts). Sorry for my slow start…but let’s roll.
Three general categories of data are currently available for validating the Iranian election: (1) pre-election polls, (2) statistical methods [...]
Tags: Politics
Statistical evidence for Iranian election fraud?
June 18th, 2009, 8:56am by Sam Wang
In the wake of continuing turmoil over the disputed Iranian election, enough information is available to do some validation of the results. There are several types of information – examples can be seen here and here.
This type of data can be used to look for fraud. Crude fraud can be found by applying Benford’s law, [...]
Tags: Politics
