A report by a Michigan ProfessorWalter R. Mebane Jr, the election forensics expert who continues to wade through the official vote count from the Iranian elections, has his starkest conclusion yet: that there was "extensive ballot box stuffing on Ahmadinejad's behalf."
The title of the report is "Note on the presidential election in Iran", and you can find it in 27 pages here.
Mebane, a professor of political science and statistics at the University of Michigan, then goes further, suggesting that "[w]ithout the ballot-box stuffing fraud ... the election outcome should have been at least a runoff between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi." In his latest update on a report on the Iranian election, Mebane added, "There are suspicious elements here, but there's no solid evidence of fraud."
Mebane concludes that, "Tests such as those considered in this paper can, in general, only identify places where there may be problems with the votes. In some places, the suggestions may be extremely strong (e.g., for recent Russian elections, see Mebane and Kalinin 2009). In general, the tests’ best use is for screening election results, not confirming or refuting claims of fraud. A significant finding should prompt investigations using administrative records, witness testimony and other facts to try to determine what happened."
Mebane's most striking conclusion is: "The problem with the 2009 Iranian election is that the serious questions that have been raised are unlikely to receive satisfactory answers. Transparency is utterly lacking in this case. There is little reason to believe the official results announced in that election accurately reflect the intentions of the voters who went to the polls."
Find the original report@University of Michigan
