Ahmadinejad wins re-election

Merko said:
I don't claim clear knowledge either. And if there were credible reports that Mousavi's observers were disallowed from most polling places, I'd be the first one to suspect fraud. So far, I haven't seen that though.
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I haven't really seen clear reports of much, to be honest. Articles are detail poor and vague. Does anyone even really know what exactly happened to Mousavi? Ahmadinejad appears to have confirmed that Mousavi... violated "traffic rules", maybe.

I don't suspect fraud; I just wouldn't be surprised if it occured, and I don't expect that Ahmadinejad would even try construct elaborate hoaxes to hide it.
 
FireGarden said:
Are the votes hand-counted or machine-counted? If the latter, then it might be a matter of the machines counting 90% of Karoubi votes as Ahmadinejad votes.*.
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I read somewhere (no link preserved) they have paper ballots, and do counting by hand (machine counting doesn't make much sense with paper ballots and only one item on the ballot).

How do you rig paper ballots other than ballot stuffing? Do they admit observers during the counting?

Merko said:
Btw, Nate Silver did a feature echoing my sentiment that post-hoc analysis can always reveal 'strange' results.
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That's a nice example indeed of how not to do a statistical analysis :).

If the numbers are simply fake, there's another nice analysis: look at the distribution of the leftmost digits of all the number of voters in the various precinct. You should get a logarithmic distribution.

Merko said:
I read that now, and I think that on the face of it, he outlines a somewhat plausible scenario. The main catch, I think, is that if they decided to alter the result centrally, they'd have to somehow silence all those reporting the results, as they would of course notice that the official results don't match what they actually reported. Now, Iran has a feared secret police, but would they really be able to do that, without preparation? I'd expect at least someone to be able to get the message out.
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The scenario seems indeed a bit implausible to concoct on the fly.

Merko said:
Also, I'm not convinced that Cole has his facts straight. He claims that Rezai "seems not to have been at all popular". But looking at a compilation of polls, again by Nate Silver, he seems to have been consistently polling ahead of or equally with Karoubi.
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I also don't quite get it when Cole says in point 5 that Ahmadinejad's numbers were "fairly standard" across the country, but in point 2 that he polled "over 50%" in Tehran - that still seems like quite a fluctuation.

But there really is a big discrepancy between the outcome and the polls that gives credence to fraud. As to the mood in Azerbaijan, this Time article says:
Under Ahmadinejad's government, there has been greater repression of political and media activity among the minorities, a fact the state justifies by citing U.S. government efforts to undermine the Islamic Republic by funding opposition activities among minorities in the border regions.
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so that would suggest that Ahmadinejad would be not popular there, and they'd rather support Moussavi or one of the other candidates.

ETA: is there a site of the election bureau or something that has detailed results of the election?
 
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In general, I think that wholesale elections fraud is hard to get away with. We saw an attempt in Zimbabwe last year. That one didn't stand much chance to go unrevealed. Most cheating is at the margins: voter intimidation, ballot stuffing, etc. To get away with that, your candidate has to be fairly popular in the first place, though.

Given this caveat, I tried to construct a scenario for how the Iranian government (or the Guardian Council) could put Ahmadinejad at 63% even though he was not the most popular candidate. This is what I ended up with:

First, we have to ask why the mullas approved Mousavi in the first place, if they didn't intend to let him win. The 'moderate' candidates have won before: Khatami and Rafsanjani. Likewise, high profile candidates have been disqualified many times. Since I don't find a last minute fraud plausible, my best explanation would be that they for some reason had second thoughts about Mousavi, and that they were alarmed by a late poll that apparently put Mousavi ahead.

The second question is how they did it. Ballot stuffing would be an obvious means. But although the turnout was high (85%) there was an 80% turnout in 1997 when Khatami beat a conservative candidate. Adding 5-10% would not be enough to secure an Ahmadinejad win.

For this reason, the mullas might have been forced to conclude that they had to remove or change some votes as well. How would they do that? Well, it is striking that two candidates who got around 10% in many polls only had about 1-2% in the final election. There may be explanations for that (it may be accepted wisdom in Iran to change your vote to one of the two dominating candidates, for example), there's another possibility. The mullas may have concluded that Mousavi was by far the candidate in the spotlight. His campaign was much better organized than that of the other two, he had many more observers. So they may have decided that it was much safer to steal votes from Karrubi and Rezai and change those to Ahmadinejad votes, in order to reach the needed 51%.

So far everything looks sort of plausible. Then comes the really hard part: how do you do this? Presumably they would order local elections officials to deliver the results they wanted. Trusted men would be dispatched. Officials would be 'convinced', with as much persuation as was necessary, to comply with the order. In the end, it would turn out that the operation was more efficient than was actually required and they reached 63%.


So, I think this is a more plausible scenario than that sketched by Juan Cole. Plausible, at least, in the sense that it would not necessarily have been revealed at this point. But I would not really expect them to keep the lid perfectly closed on such a big operation. I would expect some information to seep out pretty soon, within a week or two at least. There's just too many people involved in the conspiracy.
 
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Wasn't there someone in this forum who was claiming, about a year ago, that Iran was more democratic than the USA? I could swear someone was spouting that line.
 
All I can say about this is that we certainly live in interesting times and that I wish I'd gone downtown to protest with the Iranian-Americans today. That and...

Skeptic said:
{snip crankiness}Guess again, suckers!
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Skeptic, there are many times I want to support some of your crankier and crank comments, but it's crap like I snipped that makes me hold my tongue. I don't live in Israel in 2009, but I did live in Iran in the early 70s and am friends with a number of Iranian ex-pats so I have a perspective different from those who view Iran through the prism of Amadinijad's ravings and the regional political machinations of the Supreme Council.

The people, especially the educated middle-class don't want their vision, they don't want their isolation and pariah status. They want reproachment and they want it now. Will it happen now? Probably not, but us "useful idiots" can hope.

I'll take hope over your sour pessimism any day.
 
Pardalis said:
Everything the fear mongering kooks (the Naomi Wolf, Craig Palast, Naomi Klein, etc.) propagated that would happen in the US happened in Iran.
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Yes, but when it happens in Iran, suddenly it isn't that bad, and doesn't really prove Iran is a dictatorship.

One wonders why they were so afraid about stolen elections happening in the USA, in that case.
 
firecoins said:
Netenyahu is behind Armadejian's victory. Its always the Jews. ;)
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Too late. Someone in this thread already suggested the "real reason" for these perfectly legitimate election results is the Iranians rallying around Ahmadenijad out of fear of Netanyahu...

...see? "Root causism" is very easy. First fire the arrow, then put a bull's eye around it.
 
When you see what's going on -- the outrage about Bush winning in 2004 and 2000, compared with the apathy (or even defense) of the Iranian mullahs stealing of sham "elections" -- it is clear that the useful idiots' definition of "dictatorship" is really "somebody I don't like was elected president of the USA".
 
ddt said:
I read somewhere (no link preserved) they have paper ballots, and do counting by hand (machine counting doesn't make much sense with paper ballots and only one item on the ballot).
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But some of the counts were done very quickly. Some people say too quickly, but I don't have numbers.

How do you rig paper ballots other than ballot stuffing? Do they admit observers during the counting?
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I found an interview with Ibrahim Yazdi, "a leading Iranian dissident and Iran's foreign minister in the early days of Islamic republic."
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/dreyfuss/443348

Okay, he might have an axe to grind. And I don't where he gets HIS infomation from, seeing as he is an ex-minister.

They did not permit the candidates to supervise the election or the counting of the ballots at the polling places. The minister of the interior announced that he would oversee the final count in his office, at the ministry, with only two aides present.

In previous elections, they announced the results in each district, so people could follow up and make a judgment about the validity of the figures. In 2005, there were problems: in one district there were about 100,000 eligible voters, and they announced a total vote of 150,000. This time they didn't even release information about each particular district.

In all, there were about 45,000 polling places. There were 14,000 mobile ones, that can move from place to place. Many of us protested that. Originally, these mobile polling places were supposed to be used in hospitals and so on. This time, they were used in police stations, army bases, and various military compounds. When it comes to the military compounds and so on, if even 500 extra votes were put into each of the 14,000 boxes, that is seven million votes.

Mousavi and Karroubi had earlier established a joint committee to protect the peoples' votes. Many young people volunteered to work on that committee. But the authorities didn't let it happen. Last night [that is, election night] the security forces closed down that committee. There is no way, independent of the government and the Guardian Council, to verify the results.
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How much of that can be backed up by more independent sources? Maybe one of his sources is Mousavi:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/06/13/2597503.htm

He said many people did not get the chance to vote, because polling stations shut and ballot papers ran out.

They also claim their scrutineers were banned from mobile polling booths.
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Again, they don't specifically say "All mobile polling booths".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/12/iran-elections-mousavi1

There is also a lot of concern among Mousavi supporters about the polling centres in Iran's embassy in the United Arab Emirates (home to half a million Iranians), where there are no reformist representatives to monitor voting.

The interior ministry had also increased the numbers of mobile voting booths – which collect votes from small villages, hospitals and other hard-to-reach places – to 14,000, 10 times more than in the last elections.

Many analysts fear the lack of monitoring of mobile polls might also lead to widespread vote-rigging.
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That seems a little less ambiguous. Does "Lack of monitoring" mean "partial monitoring"?


Merko said:
Also, I'm not convinced that Cole has his facts straight. He claims that Rezai "seems not to have been at all popular". But looking at a compilation of polls, again by Nate Silver, he seems to have been consistently polling ahead of or equally with Karoubi.
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That's surprising. Thanks.
 
Skeptic said:
When you see what's going on -- the outrage about Bush winning in 2004 and 2000, compared with the apathy (or even defense) of the Iranian mullahs stealing of sham "elections" -- it is clear that the useful idiots' definition of "dictatorship" is really "somebody I don't like was elected president of the USA".
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I'm sorry, did you overlook my useful idiot response to you or did you choose not to reply to it since it didn't validate your useful idiot Leftist meme that predicates almost every post you make on this forum?
 
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei orders inquiry into vote-rigging claims in Iranian poll

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jun/15/iran-opposition-rally-banned-mousavi

Today's news represents a surprising turnaround for Khamenei, who had previously welcomed the results. "Issues must be pursued through a legal channel," state TV quoted Khamenei as saying. The supreme leader said he had "insisted that the guardian council carefully probe this letter".
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It could be a delaying tactic. Or perhaps Ahmedinejad and the Revolutionary Guard have gone rogue? The term "coup d'etat" keeps cropping up.

It seems to me that the mullahs would have been more subtle than this. Ahmedinejad is the sort of idiot who thinks the more votes he claims the sounder his "victory" appears. He's not terribly clever, after all.
 
Considering the margin of victory, nearly 2:1 in his favor, I would find it extremely unlikely that there wasn't any vote fraud. It was said that high turnout would bring trouble for him, and the turnout was a record 85%. That alone is probable cause to determine vote fraud, especially since there wasn't any independent monitors.

A 55-45 result might have been legitimate, 66-33 wasn't.

McHrozni
 
I liked Time's analysis. I think there are lots of questions, but the biggest to me is that the results were so uniform across the nation. Especially, given turnout was so high and the Ahmadinejad victory so lopsided.

That's the sort of thing that happens when the word gets out "We want Ahmadinejad to win 2:1", but nobody is really coordinating the details. So if you're a ward leader who has to answer to the Guardian Council (and they all do), you don't want to be the only guy who reports results with Mousavi winning. So each ward leader, without better guidance, rigs the vote in his ward so it's 2:1 in favor of Ahmadinejad, figuring that other ward leaders are getting more detailed instructions on how to rig things. But nobody did. So you end up with a 2:1 victory for Ahmadinejad, but the numbers all look fishy.

This also explains the other weird anomalies. Why is the "error rate" so low? Well, if you have to get to a 2:1 victory for Ahmadinejad over Mousavi, and Mousavi actually beat Ahmadinejad in your ward, there's only so much leeway you have in disallowing Mousavi votes. So you stuff the ballot box for Ahmadinejad. But since you're only looking at the two main candidates, your ballot box stuffing ends up diluting third-party votes (and "error" is a form of third-party vote for this purpose). With more guidance, the election ward would have been told to keep the error rate consistent with the prior election, and would have made sure local candidates (like Karoubi) get at least a similar absolute number of votes (even if his percentage decreased). That didn't happen.

The lack of central control over the voting is also apparent from the premature announcements. Mousavi was calling the election in his favor. He probably didn't know whether he won or not, but he wouldn't have done this if he didn't think it was at least close. But it forced the Interior Ministry to panic. The Guardian Council was planning a 2:1 victory, but it must have been obvious early on that they would need to "massage" the numbers a lot more than they anticipated. But the ward leaders were already sending in the required 2:1 victory for Ahamdinejad. So they were really stuck.

Of course, this may all be innocent, but it's looking less and less likely. The true irony? it's entirely possible Ahmadinejad would have won legitimately, but the Guardian Council decided they needed a landslide. Much like how Nixon could have beat McGovern without Watergate, this could be a case of the winner not trusting his votes. Or it could be that Mousavi won. or that we're all making a hug ado over nothing. I guess we need to wait and see.
 
I think the actions of Ahmandinejas since the election pretty much prove that even if won the election fairly, the guy is a brutal thug. A lot of Dictators got into power legally.
 
MattusMaximus said:
Not according to thousands upon thousands of people who are violently protesting in the streets of Tehran...

Two recent headlines:

Election battles turn into street fights in Iran

and

US rejects victory claim by Iran's Ahmadinejad

And check out some of the photos of the unrest - wow! :eye-poppi

I'm thinking the same thing as Cleon: could we be seeing the beginning of a revolution in Iran?
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A revolution can't happen without funding from the Iranian aristocracy or other wealthy cohorts that might have an investment in eliminating the current president. The middle to upper-middle class can't achieve it otherwise.
 
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