That’s the latest question some are asking, and one that an Iranian student anonymously addresses in a New York Times op-ed.

The Tehran Bureau published a statistical analysis showing a perfect linear relation between the votes for Ahmadinejad and the votes for Mousavi: The Bureau called it evidence for fraud and said, “Statistically and mathematically, it is impossible to maintain such perfect linear relations between the votes of any two candidates in any election — and at all stages of vote counting.”

But analyst Nate Silver says he doesn’t find this particular piece of evidence compelling. If you analyze the data for the 2008 election in six waves, like the Tehran Bureau did, you see a similar linear result.

A Washington-based poll predicted Ahmadinejad’s victory, perhaps a sign that the election was valid, but Silver says that the polling predicted intimidation — not necessarily a victory for Ahmadinejad — and notes the high number of people who were undecided or refused to disclose their vote.

The student addresses the poll and says that it was outdated, and that people’s opinions changed after they saw unscripted debates between the candidates. Other arguments assume that people in a certain area or class will vote a certain way. These arguments are based on an “outdated understanding of Iran” and make false assumptions about religion and class, he says.

Silver, again, makes an excellent point. It’s not necessarily about the statistical evidence and the votes themselves:

This story really isn’t about the way that the votes were counted. It’s about whether Iran is capable at this point of having an election in which the democratic will of its electorate is properly reflected. If Ahmadinejad hired a bunch of thugs to hold every Iranian at gunpoint while they were casting their ballots, it would not have been difficult for him to get 63 percent of the vote — indeed, he’d probably have wound up with very close to 100 percent. This would be an election — and there would be no need at all to tamper with the results. But it wouldn’t be an expression of democracy. We need to separate out those two concepts. Ahmadinejad, as far as we know, did not go so far as to hold anyone at gunpoint. But the tentacles of fear in Iran run deep.