The last two numbers in a candidates vote count can show fraud...

[roseBudd]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/20/AR2009062000004.html?nav=hcmodule

"We'll concentrate on vote counts -- the number of votes received by different candidates in different provinces -- and in particular the last and second-to-last digits of these numbers. For example, if a candidate received 14,579 votes in a province (Mr. Karroubi's actual vote count in Isfahan), we'll focus on digits 7 and 9. ...

Why would fraudulent numbers look any different? The reason is that humans are bad at making up numbers. Cognitive psychologists have found that study participants in lab experiments asked to write sequences of random digits will tend to select some digits more frequently than others.

So what can we make of Iran's election results? We used the results released by the Ministry of the Interior and published on the web site of Press TV, a news channel funded by Iran's government. The ministry provided data for 29 provinces, and we examined the number of votes each of the four main candidates -- Ahmadinejad, Mousavi, Karroubi and Mohsen Rezai -- is reported to have received in each of the provinces -- a total of 116 numbers.

The numbers look suspicious. We find too many 7s and not enough 5s in the last digit. We expect each digit (0, 1, 2, and so on) to appear at the end of 10 percent of the vote counts. But in Iran's provincial results, the digit 7 appears 17 percent of the time, and only 4 percent of the results end in the number 5. Two such departures from the average -- a spike of 17 percent or more in one digit and a drop to 4 percent or less in another -- are extremely unlikely. Fewer than four in a hundred non-fraudulent elections would produce such numbers."

Hmm, can't help wondering about specific Ohio counties vote tallles in 2004.

[Ohio Joe]

1. I don't think this would apply to Ohio

As best I understand it (someone correct me if I am wrong), Ohio was stolen electronically by vote flipping, not by someone just making up numbers of votes.

[roseBudd]

2. But there were some counties with suspiciously high turn out if my memory serves.

[Bucky]

3. The authors seem to assume the method of cheating was just making up numbers & writing them down.

I would think that the cheating would be a little more subtle and diffused that just some guy sitting in a room and saying "6000 votes here... 9739 votes there..." Statistical clustering could easily account for these results. Any body of numbers is statistically likely to demonstrate statistical improbabilities.