Faulty [Iranian] Election Results...

[targetpractice]

Iran’s Interior Ministry has declared President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner of yesterday’s election. This has been rejected by all the three opponents of Mr. Ahmadinejad, Messrs Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mahdi Karroubi, and Mohsen Rezaaee.

The best evidence for the validity of the arguments of the three opponents of the President for rejecting the results declared by the Interior Ministry is the data the Ministry itself has issued. In the chart below, compiled based on the data released by the Ministry and announced by Iran’s national television, a perfect linear relation between the votes received by the President and Mir Hossein Mousavi has been maintained, and the President’s vote is always half of the President’s. The vertical axis (y) shows Mr. Mousavi’s votes, and the horizontal (x) the President’s. R^2 shows the correlation coefficient: the closer it is to 1.0, the more perfect is the fit, and it is 0.9995, as close to 1.0 as possible for any type of data.

Statistically and mathematically, it is impossible to maintain such perfect linear relations between the votes of any two candidates in any election — and at all stages of vote counting. <snip>

More from TehranBureau...

[GoesTo11]

1. Idiotic mathematical analysis

The percentage for Mousawi increased substantially as new results came in. Of course when you show an increasing total of any two things, you would expect a high R-squared. Don't know if there was fraud, but this isn't evidence of it. Hear that Andrew Sullivan?

Tally A M Change A Change M New M votes/New A votes
Initial 7027919 2955131 7027919 2955131 0.420484499
1 10230478 4628912 3202559 1673781 0.522638615
2 14011664 6575844 3781186 1946932 0.514899822
3 15913256 7526117 1901592 950273 0.499724967
4 16974382 8124690 1061126 598573 0.564092294
5 18302924 8929232 1328542 804542 0.605582661