In response to allegations of voting fraud, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei remarked on Monday, “There is 11 million votes difference, how one can rig 11 million votes?” Answer: Quite easily in the Islamic “Republic” of Iran.
The interaction between the elected and unelected portions of Iran’s government is dizzying. There is some voting to be sure, but this is hardly sufficient for any kind of “popular mandate.”
National elections in Iran are administered by the highly partisan Guardian Council. The council is chock full of Ahmadinejad sympathizers (some of whom campaigned for him), and is ultimately answerable to Iran’s unelected Supreme Leader. Six members of the Council are appointed directly by the Supreme Leader. The other six are appointed by the head of the judiciary.
While this would suggest the possibility of balance in the council’s membership, the opposite is true. The head of the judiciary is appointed by (yep, you guessed it) the Supreme Leader. The Guardian Council is thus nothing other than the Supreme Leader’s rubber stamp, and his sympathies lie with Ahmadinejad.
The opposition’s accusations of fraud were not a knee-jerk reaction to the election results, either. Rumors of potential fraud were circulating well before election day.
Three days prior, the Chairman of the Assembly of Experts and former President, H. Rafsanjani wrote an extraordinary open letter to Iran’s Supreme Leader, in which he harshly criticized the tactics and policies of Ahmadinejad. He warned that Ahmadinejad’s supporters would go to any lengths-including cheating and fraud-to win the upcoming election, and implored Khamenei to preserve the legitimacy of the Republic by ensuring their integrity.
In the United States, votes are monitored and voting totals are reported by officials at every level of government. In Iran, the opposition’s request to have monitors at polling stations was denied.
Statistician Nate Silver has remarked this is not the case in Iran: “All votes are counted and reported by the Interior Ministry… Nor does the fraud alleged involve any sort of physical process (e.g. stuffing ballot boxes). It is simply a matter of changing numbers on a spreadsheet. Under these conditions, it is essentially no more difficult to steal a thousand votes than one, a million than a thousand, or 11 million than one million.”
There are reports from sources at the interior ministry that precisely something to this effect occurred — fake voting statistics were generated centrally and distributed to Iran’s 366 reporting units in order to produce the semblance of a plausible outcome. But “plausible” is not a word that jumps to mind when the election results are considered across various demographic cross-sections.
For example, Ahmadinejad was victorious in Moussavi’s hometown of Tabriz with 57% of the vote. Kareem Sadjadpour, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, likened Moussavi losing Tabriz to Obama losing the African American vote.
Only two hours after the polls had closed the state-run news agency was already claiming that Ahmadinejad had won. This is remarkable given the antiquated use of a paper ballot system.
The premature statement also contradicts established procedure. The Electoral Commission is supposed to wait three days before certifying the results of the election.
Voting statistics from 2005 don’t accord with the recent election results. In the first round of the 2005 election, Ahmadinejad earned approximetely 19 percent of the vote. In contrast, he purportedly won 63 percent of the vote on June 12th. Such a surge in popularity is very unlikely, and particularly difficult to explain alongside the respective voter turnout figures.
In 2005, among Iran’s 46 million eligible voters, roughly 60 percent voted, whereas a record breaking 85 percent turned out on June 12th. The difference can be primarily attributed to greater participation among Iran’s youth-approximately 70 percent of the population is 30 years or younger-who abstained en masse in the 2005 election. It is thus baffling to witness a first-round landslide in favor of Ahmadinejad when the principal difference between the elections of 2005 and 2009 is greater turnout from the (typically pro-reform) youth.
Iran’s leaders have a lot of work to do. Convincing the world that this is a valid result will be hard enough. Convincing the world that the country is really a republic will be even harder.
Reza Mahmoodshahi is a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University
