Via “Mark Blumenthal”:http://www.pollster.com/blogs/mebane_moderately_strong_suppo.php , this short “research note”:http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wmebane/note18jun2009.pdf by Walter Mebane at University of Michigan which finds possible evidence of fraud from district level voting patterns in Iran. His conclusions:
bq. In general, combining the fi rst-stage 2005 and 2009 data conveys the impression that while natural political processes significantly contributed to the election outcome, outcomes in many towns were produced by very different processes. The natural processes in 2009 have Ahmadinejad tending to do best in towns where his support in 2005 was highest and tending to do worst in towns where turnout surged the most. But in more than half of the towns where comparisons to the first-stage 2005 results are feasible, Ahmadinejad’s vote counts are not at all or only poorly described by the naturalistic model. Much more often than not, these poorly modeled observations have vote counts for Ahmadinejad that are greater than the naturalistic model would imply. While it is not possible given only the current data to say for sure whether this reflects natural complexity in the political processes or arti ficial manipulations, the numerous outliers comport more with the idea that there was widespread fraud than with the idea that all the departures from the model are benign. Additional information of various kinds can help sort out the question. Remaining is the need to see data at lower levels of aggregation and in general more transparency about how the election was conducted.
Since my understanding of the the underlying statistical models here is at best scanty, I’ll limit my comments to saying that (a) Mebane is a political scientist with “well-published previous work on related topics”:http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=103904, and (b), that since the note is obviously composed using LaTeX, it must be right. Those better equipped to tackle these questions can find Mebane’s data “here”:http://www.umich.edu/~wmebane/Iran2009_18jun2009.zip.