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In 2009, the Iranian people went to the polls to elect a president. The incumbent president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, officially received almost two-thirds of the votes cast. Reformist Mir-Hossein Mousavi was a distant second.
Almost immediately, protests broke out across Iran declaring the results of the vote fraudulent. However, the evidence for that fraud rested more on the presence of the protests than on concrete conclusions.
In 2009, the field of electoral forensics was not well-known, and its toolset was limited. In the intervening seven years, advances have been made in better understanding the relationships (or lack thereof) in a fair election.
This research revisits the results of the Iranian 2009 presidential election, testing the outcomes using several methods. These methods include the generalized Benford test, a test for differential invalidation, and a pair of geographic tests.
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