Andrew Gelman passes along a good catch from Anatoly Vorobey, who shows that Syria’s election results were fraudulent:
They are too accurate. There’s 11,634,412 valid ballots, and Assad won with 10,319,723 votes at 88.7%. That’s not 88.7%, that’s 88.699996%. Or in other words, that’s 88.7% of 11,634,412, which is 10,319,723.444, rounded to a whole person. All the other percentages in the results are the same way, so given the magnitude of the numbers, it’s evident someone took the total number, used a calculator and rounded. This was first noticed, to my knowledge, by a Russian blogger Roman Tumaykin. The reason he looked at the vote counts in the first place was that a few weeks ago there was an identical case with a sham referendum in a Ukrainian province of Lugansk, controlled by separatists. The vote counts there were also all “correct” up to a rounding to a person.
The Dish 