Why the inelegant fraud in Iran’s election?
Iran’s manipulated vote totals in 2005 showed some finesse and subtlety, as we observed at the time. This year the fraud was clumsy. Why? Forbes:
The final election result — 85% voter turnout and Ahmadinejad victory with 62.63% of the total vote and a modest 33.75% of the vote to the closest contender Mir-Hossein Mousavi not to mention ridiculously low number of votes of Rezai and Karrubi — shows that the Iranian leadership not even bothered to produce elegant fraud.
Unlike earlier elections there is still no detailed data on breakup of the vote in the provinces, but allegations of lack of voting forms in constituencies supporting Ahmadinejad’s rivals, prohibitions against presence of representatives of the rivals at many voting stations, and election results from native villages and towns of Mousavi, Karrubi and Rezai most surprisingly showing more than 90% vote for Ahmadinejad, demonstrate rather clumsy rigging tactics.
The question is why all the clumsiness? Ahmadinejad could have easily advanced to the second round of election against Mousavi at which point the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij with some manipulation of the vote could have secured him a second-term victory without the easily detectable fraud.
Fair enough. But we think that the most plausible explanation for the clumsy fraud and the over-the-top endorsements by Khamenei is that Ahmadinejad was losing the election very badly — and the last thing the regime wanted to see in the run-up to the run-off was vast areas of the country painted green.
Imagine just how dangerous to the regime this sort of visible and pubic protest (in a very politically correct color in Iran) would have been if two thirds of the population started wearing green scarves or driving green cars as the election campaigns stretched into a second round. The regime’s decision to cook the books in the first round of the election — and brutally suppress whatever protest erupted — was a gamble. No one knows how it will turn out at this point for the oppressed people of Iran, but it certainly has opened the eyes of nearly everyone as to the true nature of this mad dictatorship.
Final thought: for a different take on events, see Rafsanjani’s Gambit Backfires in the Asia times.
June 16th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
Or they could just be a bunch of ignorant thugs that accidentally got it elegant the last time. People who go around announcing their intention to wipe peaceful nations off the map while expecting a mythical character to save them have a tendency to overplay their hand.