Here's another interesting piece from fivethirtyeight.com, this time about the Iranian election results and Benford's law. Benford's law talks about numerical distribution in the real world and shows that the number 1 starts a number (any number) 30% of the time instead of 1/9th (no 0) that you might think. Interesting stuff.

It's not clear to me whether the voting units that Iran's Interior Ministry reported on behave more like towns, in which case we might expect the voting distinctions to obey Benford's Law, or more like precincts, in which case we probably wouldn't. The way the units are described to me in the spreadsheet I'm working from are "city/county", which implies that sufficiently large cities are treated as their own units, whereas smaller ones -- it looks to me like perhaps those that have fewer than about 15,000 people -- have their results aggregated at some level resembling American counties. If there are these sorts of artificial constraints placed on the size of the reporting units, we might expect some anomalies from a Benford's Law perspective.