Stealing the Iranian Election

Iran’s Interior Ministry has declared President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner of yesterday’s election. This has been rejected by all the three opponents of Mr. Ahmadinejad, Messrs Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mahdi Karroubi, and Mohsen Rezaaee.

The second day of protests have flared up in Iran in retaliation against the re-election of incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It is now an accepted fact that the Iranian election results have been rigged against the opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi.

“When the leader did not respond to Rafsanjani’s protest letter,” said another man standing by, “I knew the game was over. We should have never voted in the first place.” He was referring to Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the head of Iran’s Expediency Council, who had written a letter to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei last week, sharply criticizing Ahmadinejad’s accusations against him and his family in a TV debate, and asking that the leader ensure fair elections.

“This is a mammoth battle between the two Islamic Republic dinosaurs,” said Reza, a 28-year old accountant, watching the protests from inside a flower shop.

Ahmadinejad’s supposed “landslide victory” is being called a hoax by simple extrapolation of the election data by Tehran Bureau:

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. This is particularly true about Iran, a large country with a variety of ethnic groups who usually vote for a candidate who is ethnically one of their own. For example, in the present elections, Mr. Mousavi is an Azeri and speaks Turkish. The Azeries make up 1/4 of all the eligible voters in Iran and in his trips to Azerbaijan province, where most of the Azeri population lives, Mr. Mousavi had been greeted by huge rallies in support of his campaign. Likewise, Mr. Karroubi, the other reformist candidate, is a Lor. But according to the data released by Iran’s Interior Ministry, in both cases, Mr. Ahmadinejad has far outdone both candidates in their own provinces of birth and among their own ethnic populations.

Juan Cole’s comment points out logical irregularities and political manoeuvring.

But just as a first reaction, this post-election situation looks to me like a crime scene. And here is how I would reconstruct the crime.

As the real numbers started coming into the Interior Ministry late on Friday, it became clear that Mousavi was winning. Mousavi’s spokesman abroad, filmmaker Mohsen Makhbalbaf, alleges that the ministry even contacted Mousavi’s camp and said it would begin preparing the population for this victory.

The ministry must have informed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who has had a feud with Mousavi for over 30 years, who found this outcome unsupportable. And, apparently, he and other top leaders had been so confident of an Ahmadinejad win that they had made no contingency plans for what to do if he looked as though he would lose.

Henry Newman has a superb article in the Guardian on the crisis. His conclusion is particularly pertinent.

Out on the streets, Iranians have bravely defended their rights to participate in their politics, demanding back their “stolen” votes. While I have deep concerns for their safety and fear the violence of the revolutionary state, I applaud their courage and determination to stand up for their democratic rights and to command their own destiny.

Predictably Press TV, the Iranian regime’s English language propaganda mouthpiece has zero-coverage on the popular protests and the crisis unfolding in Iran.