Here, check this out: (repost, sorry)

There’s been some discussion here about the difficulty of knowing the exact numbers for the Iranian election and the exact extent of the fraud.

Two grad students at Columbia have looked at the officially released numbers, and while they can’t tell how much fraud there was or what the margin is, they can use truths about mathematical probability and human psychology (in the way we process/think of numbers) to determine that some of the numbers reported were invented by humans:

Why would fraudulent numbers look any different? The reason is that humans are bad at making up numbers. Cognitive psychologists have found that study participants in lab experiments asked to write sequences of random digits will tend to select some digits more frequently than others.

So what can we make of Iran’s election results? We used the results released by the Ministry of the Interior and published on the web site of Press TV, a news channel funded by Iran’s government. (snip)

The numbers look suspicious.

It’s very interesting, and insofar as their analysis relies on universal truths about probability and the way human psychology handles numbers, these methods can be applied to any election where there is a suspicion of fraud or tampering.

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Combined with the latest news, I’d say it’s looking likely that someone did sit down with the spreadsheet and change the numbers.

washingtonpost.com