Former Cornell Professor Gets Respect

With the Iran turmoil all over the news, the media has been looking for evidence of some sort of voter fraud or misreporting of election results -- in effect, anything that will give the U.S. and other parties a reason why we shouldn't consider Ahmadinejad the rightful victor of the elections.

Nate Silver over on 528 has an interesting analysis of the Iran vote using Benford's Law. Like he did, I'll defer to the Wikipedia explanation:

Benford's law, also called the first-digit law, states that in lists of numbers from many (but not all) real-life sources of data, the leading digit is distributed in a specific, non-uniform way. According to this law, the first digit is 1 almost one third of the time, and larger digits occur as the leading digit with lower and lower frequency, to the point where 9 as a first digit occurs less than one time in twenty.

We've used Benford's a lot in statistics problems in high school and college; it's generally a very reliable way to see if records are accurate. Silver notes that the unusually high proportion of 7's in Ahmadinejad's vote totals in individual precincts points to possible evidence of tampering with the results.

Another expert voice to emerge as part of the debate has been Walter Mebane, a professor of political science and statistics at the University of Michigan. Here's an article on the well-trafficked site Pollster.com which extensively cites Mebane's recent papers about the Iran election.

If Mebane's name sounds familiar, it's because he was a tenure-track professor in the Government department at Cornell until he left in 2007 for Michigan. Mebane, who was educated at Harvard and Yale, seems well on his way to a great career in academia. His methods for detecting voter fraud kept Cornell's name in the news (at least among politicos) during previous elections cycles. His course on election forensics is something I, as a Government major, certainly would have taken. It's just too bad his office is no longer in White Hall.