In all the news of post-election turmoil in Iran, including speculation of election fraud on the part of the current government, one element seems to have received little mention: if Ahmadinejad did try to steal this election, he did a horrible job.
Any successful cheater knows that, to elude suspicion, the outcome of the cheating must be plausible. As a teacher of high school boys, I can tell you that my students are well aware of this. Sure, there's the occasional screw-up who copies whole passages from Wikipedia, but those are rare. My students know to add unique errors when copying their classmates' homework. They deliberately misspell words in plagiarized passages to avoid suspicion. The consistent C student is careful when cheating not to give himself an A+.
But it is apparently something that Ahmadinejad, for all his years of schooling, does not seem to grasp.
The startling thing about the results that have been leaked is their implausibility. Ahmadinejad claims to have won in nearly every province and demographic. He won in his rural strongholds and in urban areas. He picked up 63% of the total vote, including, according to a statistical analysis by Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com, apparently most of the vote that in 2005 went to the most liberal candidate, Mehdi Karroub. And, as has been widely reported, Ahmadinejad even won in Mousavi's home province!
The game of poker offers another analogy. If I decide to cheat at the game of poker I can use any number of skilled or unskilled techniques from bottom dealing to mechanical holdouts. But no matter what method I choose, I need to be sure that I am not too good. If I am a skilled enough cheat, I could make every hand a royal flush; but, since the odds of a royal flush are approximately 1 in 650,000, that would quickly become suspicious. Ideally I should make sure that my hand is just good enough to beat my opponent, but not good enough to arouse suspicion.
What Ahmadinejad's supporters have done is the equivalent of dealing themselves a royal flush or, among my students, cribbing to an A+ . It's overkill. It's suspicious. And it's really bad cheating.