Walter Mebane has been analyzing data from the recent Iranian Presidential Election, and posting updates of his analysis here.

Chatham House has released a study of the Iranian election, “Preliminary Analysis of the Voting Figures in Iran’s 2009 Presidential Election.” Here is the study’s executive summary:

Working from the province by province breakdowns of the 2009 and 2005 results, released by the Iranian Ministry of Interior, and from the 2006 census as published by the official Statistical Centre of Iran, the following observations about the official data and the debates surrounding it can be made.
· In two conservative provinces, Mazandaran and Yazd, a turnout of more than 100% was recorded.
· At a provincial level, there is no correlation between the increased turnout and the swing to Ahmadinejad. This challenges the notion that Ahmadinejad’s victory was due to the massive participation of a previously silent conservative majority.
· In a third of all provinces, the official results would require that Ahmadinejad took not only all former conservative voters, all former centrist voters, and all new voters, but also up to 44% of former Reformist voters, despite a decade of conflict between these two groups.
· In 2005, as in 2001 and 1997, conservative candidates, and Ahmadinejad in particular, were markedly unpopular in rural areas. That the countryside always votes conservative is a myth. The claim
that this year Ahmadinejad swept the board in more rural provinces flies in the face of these trends.

Here’s a link to a CNN story that discusses this study, “Survey raises questions about Iran vote results.”

And there is a new story on CNN that states that a report was run on Iran’s state-run television station, “acknowledging that the number of ballots cast in dozens of cities exceeded the number of eligible voters there .. that excessive ballots were found in 50 cities.”

Got this in my email:

New JITP Annual Conference Web Site:

http://www.umass.edu/jitp/

Call for Papers

JITP-2010
“The Politics of Open Source”
May 6-7, 2010 – Amherst, Massachusetts

A two-day University of Massachusetts Amherst conference jointly hosted by the:
Department of Political Science
Science, Technology, and Society Initiative (STS)
Journal of Information Technology & Politics (JITP)
Qualitative Data Analysis Program (QDAP)
National Center for Digital Government (NCDG)

Approach
Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FOSS) has made significant advances, both technically and organizationally, since its emergence in the mid-1980s. Over the last decade, it has moved from a software development approach involving mostly volunteers to a more complex ecology where firms, nonprofit organizations, government agencies and volunteers may be involved. Moreover, the production paradigm continues to expand to other areas of digital content (e.g., Creative Commons, Wikipedia, Connexions, etc.). In this conference we use the phrase “open source” to capture this broader phenomenon. The Program Committee encourages disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of open source, broadly defined.

“Politics” in the conference title, can have many interpretations. Political issues closely tied to the free and open source software movement(s) include: national government policies related to the adoption of open source technologies or questions related to interoperability and open standards, software patents, vendor lock-in, and copyright. These are central themes we expect may be discussed in this forum. In this context, we welcome international submissions since differences in the political perspective appear in international contexts. However, topics related to how the concept of openness has led to various interpretations, adaptations, and applications of “open source” in other domains, and political issues that surround these broader innovations, are also welcome. Specific topics might include,
but are not limited to:

General topics related to the politics of open source
•How open source software or its principles are changing politics
•Emerging transparencies in software, systems and society
•Open source in the developing world and other international contexts
•The political economy of open source
•Digital divides and open source

Open source and the public sector
•Open source software and transparency in government
•Government policies toward open source and open standards
•Regulation and open source

Open source and democracy
•Open source and democratic engagement
•Open source voting systems
•Activism, political mobilization and open source

The expansion of open source into other domains
•Understanding how open source collaboration works and how it can be
extended into other areas of collective action
•Policy areas, such as the effects of free textbooks on education
policy or the politics of “One Laptop Per Child”
•The political implications of open source in other cultural domains

Keynote Speakers
We are pleased to confirm Clay Johnson (Sunlight Labs) as one of the daily keynote speakers for JITP-2010.

Paper Submissions
Authors are invited to prepare and submit a research paper, policy viewpoint, workbench note, or teaching innovation manuscript to JITP by January 10, 2010. A small number of papers will be accepted for presentation at the conference. Other paper authors will be invited to present a poster during the Thursday evening reception. All accepted authors will be asked to submit a “YouTube” version of their research findings. Accepted paper and poster authors will be invited to resubmit their papers to JITP after the conference with the goal of producing a special issue, or double issue, of JITP on the broad theme of “The Politics of Open Source.”

How to Submit
Everything you need to know about how to prepare and submit a strong JITP paper is documented at http://www.jitp.net/. Conference papers will be put through an expedited blind peer review process by the Program Committee, and authors will be notified about a decision by March 10, 2010.

Copyrights
Conference proceedings, including both paper manuscripts and poster summaries, will be made publicly available under a Creative Commons license. Authors who wish to contribute to the JITP special issue will be asked to sign the publisher’s copyright agreement when they resubmit their manuscript.

Best Paper and Poster Cash Prizes
The author (or authors) of the best research paper will receive a single $1,000 prize. The creator (or creators) of the best poster/research presentation will also receive a single prize of $1,000.

Program Committee
M.V. Lee Badgett, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Paul M.A. Baker, Georgia Institute of Technology
Deborah Bryant, Oregon State University Open Source Lab
Andrea Calderaro, European University Institute
Mark Cassell, Kent State University
Edward Cherlin, Earth Treasury
Gabriella Coleman, New York University
Doug Downham, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Robert English, Daystar Computing & University of Massachusetts Amherst
Joseph Feller, University College Cork
Jelena Karanovic, Rutgers University
Dave Karpf, University of Pennsylvania/Miller Center for Public Affairs
Andrea Kavanaugh, Virginia Tech
Jose Marichal, California Lutheran University
Jens Hardings Perl, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
Charlie Schweik, University of Massachusetts Amherst, co-chair
Stuart Shulman, University of Massachusetts Amherst, co-chair
Megan Squire, Elon University
Krishna Ravi Srinivas, Research Information System For Developing Nations
Louis Suarez-Potts, Sun Microsystems, Inc. & OpenOffice.org
Anas Tawileh, Cardiff University & Meedan.net

The Brennan Center has just released a report on voter registration practices in other nations, “Expanding Democracy: Voter Registration Around the World.” Here’s the report’s summary:

The United States is one of few democratic nations that place on individuals the entire burden of registering to vote on individual citizens. Today, one-quarter to one-third of all eligible Americans remain unregistered — and thus are unable to cast ballots that will count. Even Americans who are registered risk being blocked from casting a ballot because of problems with our voter registration system — unprocessed registrations, inaccurate purges of names from the voter rolls, and other administrative and human errors. The registration system is as much a problem for the dedicated civil servants who administer our elections as it is for voters. It is costly, inefficient, and insufficiently accurate.

Now, after a decade of controversy over election and voting problems, the United States is again considering poised to reforms to voter registration. For the first time, the Congress is considering voter registration modernization that would enlist empower state governments to assure that all eligible voters, and only eligible voters, are on the rolls. Such a step would add tens of millions to the rolls, and better ensure that the information on the rolls stays accurate and up-to-date. Yet one obvious question arises: Can this, in fact, be done? As this report demonstrates, the systems in a number of the world’s major democracies prove this can be done.

In fact, it has been — in several other major democracies. In every one of these countries, government itself assumes the responsibility of creating and keeping voter rolls, rather than relying on citizens to register themselves and navigate a clunky, outdated, and often inaccurate system.

Of greatest relevance, Canada shares our decentralized federal system. There, provinces create and maintain their own voter rolls, and a federal election authority builds a separate voter roll for use in federal elections that is based in significant part on the provincial rolls and in part on other government lists. When an individual turns eighteen, or becomes a citizen, he or she is added to the rolls. A voter who moves remains on the rolls. The system works efficiently (and with no allegations of fraud). An overwhelming Nninety-three percent of eligible citizens are registered to vote, compared to 68% of Americans who were registered to vote as of the last Census report.

The experience of these other democracies suggests building a modern voter registration system is a surprisingly straightforward task. In recent years, several democracies have moved to take advantage of new technologiesy to help build more complete and accurate voter lists. Their experiences are encouraging. These restructured systems reduce administrative costs and improve the accuracy of voter rolls.

This report is a multi-nation examination of the details of voter registration systems. It examines the way sixteen other countries create and keep voter lists. Many of the nations studied are similar to ours in diverse populations, cultural values, and government structures. Their experiences show the clear benefits to voters, overall taxpayer savings, and best practices that can be employed in the United States as Congress drafts reform legislation(and some pitfalls) of concerted reform.

The protests over the disputed Iranian election continue, and are perhaps growing, according to many stories out in the media this morning. I thought that this photograph, from the LA Times story “Hundreds of thousands in Iran protest vote result” summarizes the situation pretty well.

I’ve been digging around most of the afternoon, along the lines of Paul’s recent post, to see what the allegations are, what data exists, and how these allegations might be studied using the sorts of statistical tools that have been discussed in recent research on election anomalies. (At this point, other than what Paul has already referenced, the best I’ve found is a story in Wired.) I’ve not been able to find, yet, any official election results reported, with the sort of fine-grained data that is typically used in this type of work (for example, in the paper on Venezuela that Ordeshook, Levin, Cohn and I are presenting at EVT/WOTE this summer). If anyone knows where to get such data, I’d appreciate the lead.

But this does point back to something that many who have been studying election administration have been saying for years — more and better data is vital for understanding election performance, in the U.S. and abroad.

UPDATE: Ines sent me a link to this spreadsheet with the data by province. The source is The Guardian.

See the BBC report.

The reported outcome has sparked protests in Iran, according to this story in the LA Times.

One of the interesting stories of the Iranian election regards voting by expatriates, in particular those in the US. There apparently were 41 polling sites set up around the US, according to this AP story in the SJMN. One of these polling sites was at an airport hotel near Los Angeles International airport.

There have been a flurry of news reports on huge turnout in Iran’s presidential election. The BBC is reporting that polling has been extended for two extra hours, “Huge Turnout in Iran Presidential Poll.”

NPR is reporting that there have been some claims of irregularities:

There were no immediate reports of unrest, though Mousavi’s campaign lodged a protest not long after the polls opened, charging that election monitors had been blocked from taking up their posts at some voting stations. There also were reports that Tehran’s cell-phone text messaging system was experiencing technical problems. The Mousavi camp has used text messages as a means to send campaign information quickly to large numbers of people.

A top Mousavi aide, Ali Reza Beheshti, also said some polling stations in Iran’s northwestern and southern provinces ran out of ballots, claiming it was a “deliberate attempt by the government to keep people from voting.”

This is an interesting VTP working paper for those who study voter participation, by Jonathan N. Katz and Gabriel Katz: “Correcting for Survey Misreports using Auxiliary Information with an Application to Estimating Turnout.” Here is their abstract:

Misreporting is a problem that plagues researchers that use survey data. In this paper, we give conditions under which misreporting will lead to incorrect inferences. We then develop a model that corrects for misreporting using some auxiliary information, usually from an earlier or pilot validation study. This correction is implemented via Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, which allows us to correct for other problems in surveys, such as non-response. This correction will allow researchers to continue to use the non-validated data to make inferences. The model, while fully general, is developed in the context of estimating models of turnout from the American National Elections Studies (ANES) data.

For those interested in the quantitative analysis of voter turnout, this should be of great interest.