re: #175 Spare O’Lake

“Only 50 cities.”
This bunch of corrupt lying assholes wouldn’t know the truth if it bit them on the ass.

Yeah, only 50 cities, and apparently 2 entire provinces!

Nate Silver is pissed:

Worst. Damage Control. Ever.

I’ve generally tended to take the position that while the people running Iran are a bunch of reactionary thugs, they’re at least a fairly intelligent bunch of reactionary thugs.

After this revelation on Iranian Press TV, however, I’m not so certain:
(snip)

For all the complex series of statistics that have been run on Iran’s election, it’s the simplest that might prove to be the regime’s downfall. More people “voted” than were eligible to vote — in a lot of places. The interior ministry admits to 50 such instances out of the 300+ jurisdictions in which Iran tallied results. That is widespread, prime facie and admitted-to evidence of fraud, and I don’t see how the Guardian Council expects people to buy the argument that whatever caused the tub to overflow in those 50 cities was not also tainting the results throughout the rest of the country. The Chatham House report we linked to earlier today found that there were more “votes” than voters in two entire provinces.

fivethirtyeight.com