Iranian Election Rigged/Stolen?

That is what most of the foreign affairs sources that I respect most are saying. Juan Cole of Informed Comment lists the incriminating factors.

1. It is claimed that Ahmadinejad won the city of Tabriz with 57%. His main opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, is an Azeri from Azerbaijan province, of which Tabriz is the capital...So for an Azeri urban center to go so heavily for Ahmadinejad just makes no sense. In past elections, Azeris voted disproportionately for even minor presidential candidates who hailed from that province.

2. Ahmadinejad is claimed to have taken Tehran by over 50%. Again, he is not popular in the cities, even, as he claims, in the poor neighborhoods, in part because his policies have produced high inflation and high unemployment. That he should have won Tehran is so unlikely as to raise real questions about these numbers.

3. It is claimed that cleric Mehdi Karoubi, the other reformist candidate, received 320,000 votes, and that he did poorly in Iran's western provinces, even losing in Luristan. He is a Lur and is popular in the west, including in Kurdistan. Karoubi received 17 percent of the vote in the first round of presidential elections in 2005. While it is possible that his support has substantially declined since then, it is hard to believe that he would get less than one percent of the vote.

4. Mohsen Rezaie, who polled very badly and seems not to have been at all popular, is alleged to have received 670,000 votes, twice as much as Karoubi.

5. Ahmadinejad's numbers were fairly standard across Iran's provinces. In past elections there have been substantial ethnic and provincial variations.

6. The Electoral Commission is supposed to wait three days before certifying the results of the election, at which point they are to inform Khamenei of the results, and he signs off on the process. The three-day delay is intended to allow charges of irregularities to be adjudicated. In this case, Khamenei immediately approved the alleged results.

I am aware of the difficulties of catching history on the run. Some explanation may emerge for Ahmadinejad's upset that does not involve fraud...But just as a first reaction, this post-election situation looks to me like a crime scene.

Cole thinks that Khamenei and the other ruling clerics were so confident of an Ahmadinejad win that they had no contingency plan. When the early numbers started coming in in favor of Mousavi, the order went out to falsify the vote in whatever way necessary for their man to win.

Kevin Drum of Mother Jones wonders why the vote-rigging was so obvious.

One of the topics of conversation was: when autocracies decide to do something like this, why do they do it so clumsily? Why not give Ahmadinejad 52.7% of the vote, which would be at least within the realm of reason? Or force a runoff and let Ahmadinejad win a week from now? Why perpetrate such an obvious fraud?

Steve Clemons of The Washington Note agrees and thinks there will be profound consequences in Iran due to a loss of confidence in the legitimacy of their government.

I believe that Ahmadinejad in the end probably would have won this race or had it rigged so that he would, but the level of electoral rigging seems so astounding that Iran's citizens are not just going to let this go.

Today's reports of escalating protests and violence seem to bear this out.

--Ballard Burgher