Vote rigging in Iranian election?

The election results were available in a very short time after polls closed, and it asserted that a sizable plurality was maintained by Ahme all the way through the election. "Somebody peeked?" SOmebody was merely collecting the ballots and not even tabulating them. (Thats my guess). Id at least have waited a few days, and made it closer with AHme getting only,say, 48% so thered have to be a runnoff which then the pro-ahme govt could show that there was a real election and they would be able topresent this with a strait face.

I think the juy rigging was so amateur that they forgot the appearance of fraud was all over the place.

There have been allegations that early returns showed a certain amount of votes for Moussavi, but that subsequent returns showed a much, much lower number of votes for Moussavi in those same districts. Really, this is something about which we will likely never know the truth. I suspect that there were no outside observers of the process.

You are right, in my opinion, that it would have been easy to give any voting irregularities the semblance of veracity. So, why make it "appear" as though there was voting irregularity? Well, in my opinion, that was the intent. Stir the pot, so to speak, so the country can divert the masses' attention away from other things. What things? Only hindsight will be 20-20 vision.

I just can't figure out how there could be fraud on such a massive scale without someone figuring out how they did it. Conspiracies (to commit voter fraud, and in general) are very hard to keep secret because the more people that are involved in them they less secret they are.

Maybe there was no fraud. Maybe the kook really won?

I think there was fraud, and that it was as simple as reporting false returns. After all, if the Guardian Council is complicit, who is to challenge them?

Things have gotten to the point where, even if he really did win, how would they
prove it? There were no independent observers and those who believe there
was fraud are not likely to accept the evidence of the very people they believe
were guilty of it.

So if the whole voting process is inherently flawed because there is no functional ability to verify the results, then the basic issue here goes much deeper than the election results.

I guess the Iranian people were hoping that a favorable outcome in the election would forestall their need to take action against the power structure of the country, but since the election failed to produce the preferred candidate, they are now forced to resist the power structure directly. Is that's what's happening?

I have wrestled with this one for a while now. I am wary of Western media engaging in wishful thinking and ascribing the results to fraud just based on the desire to believe a more compelling narrative than the alternative.

Here are things that make it questionable to me:

1) Text-messaging and certain internet sites did become unavailable right near the election. This may well have been due to load issues, but the availability wasn't just down hours but it was a "we don't know when we'll have text messaging back up" kind of thing that seemed a bit more suspicious. That isn't typically how text-messaging downtime happens. It usually gets very slow, and it usually rebounds when the flood subsides a bit. And that internet censorship became a bit tighter around the same time makes me suspect whether load was the only factor.

2) Iran has paper-only ballots and the results of a "record turnout" came out very quickly for a manual count. They also came out right after the challenger claimed victory himself, almost as if in response. I find it unlikely, but not impossible, that 40 million votes were counted that quickly (2 hours after polls closed).

3) But more than anything else, the voting data was odd. Mousavi lost in his home town, Mousavi lost in cities where the media has reported he is popular. Karoubi's reported total is much much lower than his previous results would indicate. To put it very simply, Ahmadinejad won every region, age group, and pretty much every demographic at about the same rate. This is the most compelling case for irregularity in the voting. But there is also independent data


Now for the counter-claim. I really want to believe that the people of Iran want to ditch this clown, but that might be wishful thinking. Political scientists in Iran have attributed this turmoil to Ahmadinejad having more support among rural and uneducated people. He is a stereotypical populist and the claim goes that the highly educated metropolitan folk who don't support him are vastly outnumbered by the lower income folk who do.

In fact an independent poll from 3 weeks before the election showed even stronger support for Ahmadinejad than the election results, which would be consistent with Mousavi's late challenge.

The pdf link to the poll is dead now, but here's a cached version (won't last long unless the pdf comes back) and an article about it.

From the article:



I'm concerned with the evidence of irregularity, and without independent monitors Iran has a legitimacy question with or without the fraud, but we in the West have to stop seeing what we want to see so easily.

In Lebanon we applaud the rejection of Hezbollah as a legitimate expression of the Lebanese and ignore that in their voting system Christian votes are worth about 1.5 Muslim votes. We don't challenge the legitimacy there because we like the results, and I am concerned that in Iran we are quick to challenge the legitimacy of the results just because we too favor something more sane than Ahmadinejad being the will of the people. But if they wanted legitimacy they should have independent observers, so that alone allows them to conduct fraud very easily.

I think we should reject any non-observed election out-of-hand. The results are an ipse dixit that beg to be challenged. We should reject the results whether or not fraud occurred just because they aren't independently verified. These elections did not meet the bare minimum needs for legitimacy in its process, and the results are predictably controversial.

Perhaps. Remember all the hooplah leading up to the election, when the crowds in the street supporting opposition candidates were massive and the campaigning process was lively as it had never been before. We are reaching a stage in which most Persians don't recall, or don't care about the 1979 revolution, and when they will have a put up or shut up attitude about whatever historical fairy tale they're being told.

It may run something like this: You say you achieved your glorious revolution to end tyranny, so let's see the proof, let's see a fair and open election. It may well be that the people in the street expected an outcome such as this, and have been prepared from the outset to challenge it in the streets. After all, several political parties are outlawed altogether, and even the candidates who ran were all vetted by the Guardian Council. Moussavi is different from Amehdinejad in a matter of degree, and not profoundly--and i have no doubt those in the streets today knew that to begin with.

In some respects, i've wondered since before the election if there weren't street protests in search of an excuse.

It seems like this "Guardian Council" is still basically in control of everything. If there is no independent way to verify an election, then those that control the verification are simply your rulers.

On a bit of a side note, how are elections in the US verified? Our own elections certainly aren't neat and clean either. Are US elections vetted by international sources?

This seems to be kinda the bottom line... if the election process used is not independently verifiable, then it's not really an election at all.

The Guardian Council rules Iran in much the same way that a privy council or a star chamber would rule a country in the days when Kings exercised genuine power. In this case, the Supreme Leader holds the place of the monarch. Half of the twelve members of the Council are appointed directly by the Supreme Leader, and the other half are elected by the Majlis from a short list of sitting judges or members of the law faculty of Persian universities. Judges don't get appointed to the bench without the imprimatur of the Council. Law in an Islamic university is a matter of researching the historical records of hadith (sayings or actions of the Prophet and his Companions, and in the case of the Shi'ites, also of Ali and Fatima) and making inferential arguments from the Quran--so professors of law in a Persian university are already subject to the approval of the Mullahs--to that extent, the other six members of the Guardian Council have already been approved by the Council at one remove, and by the Supreme Leader at one more remove. There was never any doubt in the mind of any Persian who's in the driver's seat, which is why i suspect that protesters have gone through a ritual, and fully expected to be in the streets in earnest after the results of the election were announced.

In the United States, each county has a board of elections office. When i used to manage small businesses in Ohio, i'd get necessary tax information (such as the school district) by calling the board of elections and providing an address. Up to a certain level, the employees of a board of elections are civil service, and professionally "neutral," but at a certain higher level, they are elected or appointed and are clearly identified with a political party. I know of a woman who worked for a state board of elections who refused to continue to serve, even though the continued employment was offered in the full knowledge that she was an active member of the opposition party--because the new Governor was sufficiently odious to her that she had no desire to be even remotely associated with him. State secretaries of state are usually responsible for the functions of state boards of election.

However, her case points out how reliably impartial many observers, including the active members of political parties, consider election workers to be. She was offered continued employment because despite her known political sympathies, she was considered a paragon of neutrality, and highly knowledgeable about election processes. When elections take place, there are never enough full-time employees of boards of election to accomplish the process, and they rely upon volunteers (which is why one often sees elderly people at the polls). Many of those volunteers actually, directly assist the board of elections employees, and the voters--while quite a few act as passive election observers, and, as such, represent the political parties involved in the election.

They function well, too. The Florida election of 2000 was quickly identified as a cluster-**ck because volunteer observers saw the irregularities and heard voter complaints. Katherine Harris, the Republican Secreatry of State, had publicly told Governor Jeb Bush that she would "deliver" the state for his brother. Literally tens of thousands of voters (mostly black or Latino) had been struck from the rolls, and it became apparent within a few hours of the polls open. Unfortunately, the reason did not emerge until after the United States Supreme Court had overruled the Florida Supreme Court and ended the recount (the recount was being conducted because of the "hanging-chad" issue and because volunteer observers had filed formal complaints about absentee ballots). It transpired that Harris had hired a private corporation to review the voter registration rolls, and had struck people off on the recommendation of that corporation's investigators. Subsequent investigation by journalists revealed that voters who were struck off simply had the same name as some felons, or the same birth date, and that more than one, in some cases dozens of people, were struck off because they had the same name as a single felon (if your name is Charles Johnson, you certainly are not unique--i don't know what the names were, that is just thrown out there). Volunteer observers can't prevent the travesty of something like that from affecting the election they are observing, but they can bring it to light, and one hopes prevent a recurrence. Katherine Harris got her pay-back, though, and quickly. She held a seat in the House of Representatives for four years from 2003 until she was replaced in the 2006 election. Another Republican ran for her district, and was sent to the House in 2007. Harris became involved in a very nasty Senate race, when even Republicans wouldn't support her.

That is not germane to the issue of honesty in elections. I'd say the United States is probably not much different than most nations in the methods of election observation--the problems arise from the manner of voting. Many other nations continue to use paper ballots, and with good reason. Part of our problem is the mania of the news media to have instant results. Screw the news media, they should be exluded, and only allowed to report their exit polling data. Some people say they shouldn't even be allowed to do that, but i'm no so sure myself. We also have the problem that we vote on weekdays. This assures that many people find it difficult, even nearly impossible, to vote. No matter how early the polls open, or how late they stay open, some people are going to have a hard time getting to the polls, especially if they ordinarily have a long commute. I think we should have Sunday elections, as is done in many European countries.

There's a lot of minute detail which can be discussed with regard to American elections, but that's not the subject of the thread, so i'll comment no further. Many countries, other than Iran and the United States, would resent outside observers.