Jun 18 2009

Does U.S. Poll Rule Out Fraud In Iran?

Western media, along with thousands of Iranians protesting around the world, have formed a rough consensus over the six days since Iran’s Presidential Election that Ahmadinejad’s victory was the result of widespread fraud.

However, a recent Op-Ed in the Washington Post references a rare public opinion poll in suggesting that the election may indeed have been fair.

While there is not enough information to determine whether or not the election was rigged, this poll certainly doesn’t rule out the possibility. If only because the poll’s authors concluded prior to the election that the very same data predicted a relatively close vote.

Yet today, those same authors are claiming that their figures demonstrate the validity of Ahmadinejad’s landslide victory.



Real News Network – June 18, 2009

Does U.S. poll rule out fraud in Iran?

Authors of heavily-quoted poll changed their conclusion to support validity of Ahmadinejad landslide

5 comments

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    • Edger on June 18, 2009 at 17:25
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    doesn’t expect readers to actually READ their paper…

  2. like this twitter report:

    tehranelection:

    “My Father has a truck load of ballot boxes that were to be burned in the back of his truck.”

    “My uncle tells me that throughtout most cities Mahmoud Ahmadinejad people had ballot boxes burned. They were told to do their jobs and speak nothing.”

    (The link at this point goes to facebook login)

    Although this is just one unverified report, it does raise a question about how it would be possible to count ballots that may have been destroyed. In an election that was not monitored by trained independent international election monitors, there is no way to objectively determine whether all eligible voters got the opportunity to vote, whether all the marked ballots were secured, or whether all the secured ballots were counted and recorded accurately.  

    At this point, even a recount is not a real do-over of the election.  There is no way to prove beyond a doubt that ballots weren’t destroyed in the interim.  Only a new election, will all the abovementioned guidelines would answer the question of who really won the election.  As we here in America learned in 2000 and even 2004-yet we still haven’t taken all the measures to ensure that everyone’s vote will be counted, even with the last 8 nightmare years to remind us of the costs of election tampering.

  3. Walter R. Mebane Jr. who “is professor of political science and professor of statistics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, ” says  “something’s fishy”  Background on Mebane:  

    …Walter Mebane, the University of Michigan political science and statistics professor who specializes in statistical tools “for detecting anomalies and diagnosing fraud in election results”. He “”Previously he taught at Cornell University. He works on political methodology and American politics, especially elections

    about the results:

    …He has updated his assessment of the official vote return statistics for the Iran elections. Mebane now says he sees “moderately strong support for a diagnosis that the 2009 election was afflicted by significant fraud.”

    In his initial analysis, Mebane used town-level data from the second “run-off” stage of the 2005 Iranian elections to model expectations for the 2009 results. The technical difference in the update is that Mebane has incorporated town-level data from the first stage of the 2005 elections. In his revised analysis, Mebane is struck by “the large number of outliers”…

    But, when all is said and done, as I said in the comment upthread, there’s no way to prove any of this.  Because the ballots were not secured from the moment the voting began, even a total recount wouldn’t prove that all the ballots that were cast were being counted.

  4. Why don’t we ask these folks?

  5. https://www.docudharma.com/show…

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