Barber�n

Jos� Barber�n, which was my boss while working for the PRD during the 1994 elections died this morning. He studied the results of the 1988 and 1994 elections, and found plenty of evidence of the tampering of the electoral results.

His findings were documented in "Radiorgraf�a del Fraude". What nobody realized is that it was possible to plot the results from the elections. You would expect a regular population distribution, but instead the results for the election showed the PRI winning with abnormalities in the population graphics, they called this phenomenon the "crocodile's tail" because of the shape of the graph.

A typical graph would look like this (plotting the percentage with which a given party won per locality):

This is how the PRI won in several states:

What that means is that there were many places where the PRI won the election completely (100% votes of the votes) which is an anomality, particularly in Chiapas.

Sorry for the poor graphs ;-)

A quote I found online for the book:

"The statisticians found two telltale signs of massive tampering. In place of the single bell-shaped curve that would be expected to describe the distribution of votes obtained by each party, the PRI was found to have two such curves: one centered around a mean of 36 percent (its true national average), and the other peaking around an implausible 100 percent."

"A second diagnostic test revealed the provenance of these 'unanimous' results. Whereas totals for each of the opposition parties had last digits that occurred with roughly equal frequency, the last digit of PRI totals was 60 percent more likely to be a zero, indicating that the PRI had inflated its totals by simply adding zeros to its actual vote count."

Last year he begun leading the effort to make the Mexico City government move to Linux.

Many people in the Linux community in Mexico had been working with his teams bringing Linux to the administration.

We will miss him.