On June 12, 2009, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the Iranian presidential election with 24,527,516 votes, or 62.63% of the popular vote.
Or did he?

People all over the globe have doubted the legitimacy of the results. Since the election, there have been massive protests, both in Iran and abroad. It is certainly alarming that in an election which seems to have been won so easily, people would come out to protest in record numbers.

During his prior term, Ahmadinejad shocked many with certain statements he made. Ahmadinejad was asked why Iran has committed “execution on Iranian citizens who are homosexuals”, to which he responded, “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country… In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon. I don’t know who’s told you that we have it”. Regardless of anyone’s views on same-sex marriage or gay rights, it is ridiculous to say that homosexuals do not exist in any given area of the world.

In analyzing data from the election, Walter Mebane of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, found strong evidence that ballot boxes were stuffed with additional votes for Ahmadinejad. Henry Brady, a political scientist at UC Berkeley, has said that this data “is highly, highly, highly suggestive that something odd was going on. Someone who really knows the geopolitical makeup of Iran might be able to take this analysis further. I hope the CIA has someone doing that.”

Mebane has studied election results from other countries as well, including the US, Russia, and Mexico. In elections which use write-in ballots, there are usually a certain number that are thrown out due to illegibility. Generally, those who commit voter fraud forget to add in these null votes. Interestingly, those cities in Iran with fewer invalid votes than usual had a higher percentage of the votes for Ahmadinejad.

Mebane also examined the data using a statistical tool known as Benford’s Law. He discovered that the votes for Ahmadinejad and two minor candidates did not obey this law well, which elicits further suspicions.

In six separate official announcements for results of the election throughout the day, proportions of votes for each candidate stayed constant. When plotting votes for Ahmadinejad and Mousavi, one finds that the points make up an almost perfectly straight line. The correlation constant is .998, with 1.0 being a perfect correlation. This graph adds to other suspicious characteristics of the election.

The election reportedly had 85% turnout throughout Iran, a record amount. Additionally, according to the opposition, at least 30 towns had voter turnout of more than 100%. A centrist website (Ayandeh), which was neutral throughout the campaign, reported that 26 provinces throughout the country had voter turnouts that were unheard of in democratic elections, with some exceeding the amount of registered voters for those areas. Ayandeh reported that over two hundred polling stations had voter participation rates of 95% or more, a seemingly impossible feat when taking illness, death, or vacationing voters into account. Abbas Abdi, one of those who took over the US embassy in Tehran in 1979, said that some polling stations had run out of ballots by 10:30am –even though it is a general practice to give each station more ballots than the number of people registered there.

Popularity: 6%