Iranian twitter activity similar to what we did in House last year when Republicans were shut down in the House.

In honour of his remarkable ability to compare important, world-changing events with his mundane daily activities in the most clueless way possible, a meme was born:

Benford’s Law is good at detecting financial fraud because financial calculations have patterns that cause steady average grow: most importantly, multiplying quantities and prices. Since most electoral systems divide voters into equal-sized voting areas, the votes in each area don’t grow at a steady rate. So instead electoral analysts skip the first digit and apply Benford’s Law to the later digits in results.

This analysis assumes that votes for each candidate will grow at a steady rate. In other words, if you combine two voting areas, the results for each candidate should, on average, double. But representational democracies allocate representatives based on the regions precisely because that assumption is wrong.

Other election analysis assume that voters, when averaged together, act completely randomly. If that assumption is correct, I’m not sure why fraudulent elections are a bad thing.

Statistical analysis to detect election fraud is a very new field. Much of the work is being done in the US, which means researchers have certain biases:

• they don’t understand the boundaries of the places they’re analyzing
• they have incentives to find fraud in the elections of America’s enemies
• they have disincentives to find fraud in the elections of Western democracies (in particular it is taboo to analyze the 2000 Presidential election)
• they assume divisive bipartisan politics

I’d love to see a paper where someone analyzes a real election known to be fraudulent rather than a simulation or at least applies a method to a large, broad sample of elections.

* I generated these using a uniform distribution from 0 to 200.

Since professional journalists have been unable to report from Iran, Twitter has been the medium of choice for citizen-journalists. The problem is that Twitter is not good at filtering out noise. So much of the news is apparently distorted, either for entertainment purposes or outright psychological warfare.

I have no problem that my favourite coffee shop and my favourite theatre troupe get the voter turn-out wrong: they just heard it from the media. And I understand why the media gets it wrong:

1. it involves numbers, which journalists are notoriously bad at
2. it’s a better story if you report it as under 50%

BC has one of the most accurate voters lists in the world, so the difference between eligible and registered voters is small. Our list is accurate because BC is one of the most developed places in the world: with land titles and integrated databases all over the place. And yet, BC registers plenty of people in conjunction with voting and our polling places occasionally run out of ballots (there are contingency plans).

How good do you think Iran’s voters list is? There are a lot of issues with the Iranian election, but saying it’s illegitimate because their voters list sucks is going too far. Besides, what are the chances the media got those numbers right when they can’t even read an Elections BC news release?

Here’s the NYT’s liveblog for today’s events there. If the election is nullified and re-done they should push for better oversight.

Nothing disinfects like sunlight.