On the other hand, two years ago, people were not satisfied with reformers (Khatami was the president those years and people were angry about some of his actions) Hence, when Hashemi Rafsanjani (a reformist) was against Ahmadinejaad, people did not tend to vote, and another important fact is that Hashemi was not popular in Iran and a lot of people vote for Ahmadinejaad because they hated Hashemi!

Mohammad (4:05 am), That appears to be a good survey; its numbers for issues such as nuclear weapons and Hamas/Hezbollah are illuminating for U.S. readers. Its bar graphs have errors so they should be ignored.

But for our purposes here there is a problem. It reports many undecided voters in the presidential race. In US polling, undecideds tend to vote against the incumbent (Ahmadinejad in this case). Combined with the survey it would suggest a fairly close race. But this is not guaranteed.

In regard to turnout, I note that only about 21m voted in 2005. What was the general feeling that year?

http://www.terrorfreetomorrow.org/upimagestft/TFT%20Iran%20Survey%20Report%200609.pdf

secondly, it’s very important to notice that most polling expect 28m to 35m of people to vote in recent election. However, around 40m vote in this election which, in my viewpoint, was a strong reason why people vote for mousavi (It’s clear that when we want a reformer, we vote more). I cannot believe that 26 percent more than 2005 election vote, because they want Ahmadinejaad.

If I can ask a dumber statistical question, how would one construct confidence intervals using MAD-SEM assuming normally distributed data?

I’d assume that a 95% confidence interval would be 1.96*σ~1.96*(1.48*MAD), but it’s early in this time zone, and the intervals seem too wide to pass a sanity test.