Elections in Iran

[ciphergoth]

Can't tear my eyes away from the situation in Iran. Please link me to any articles that provide evidence on whether the official results are legit or anything else you think is a must-read on this situation.

Comments

[werenerd.livejournal.com]

My general feeling is that the "election fraud" charge is a well prepared anti-Iranian push by Western media. Here's an assessment by 2 former US State Department officials that sums up how I see it.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0609/23745.html

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I'd be interested to know what you think of Nate Silver's analysis, which doesn't prove but strongly suggests fraud:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/

Also I'm curious to know why this election sparked rioting and leaks of rival vote figures from the Interior Ministry, while Ahmedinejad's previous victory wasn't marked in this way.

[lizw.livejournal.com]

There were smaller-scale riots after the last two Iranian elections. The explanation I've been reading today is that on those occasions the main rival to the official winner did not come out in support of the rioters, as Moussavi appears to have done this time. Twitter may also be helping - you can reach more people more quickly that way, and be found more easily by sympathisers you don't know personally, than you can with SMS or blogs.

As for the leaks, one of the things Moussavi was praised for during his term as prime minister was his reform of corruption and incompetence in the civil service, which has apparently since returned in epic proportions, so I wouldn't be surprised if there are some civil servants who don't like that state of affairs and are hoping he'll do the same thing again if he becomes president.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

It sounds as if you don't think we can be all that confident that there was fraud - surprising given the reporting so far. Of course an election is supposed to do better than that and actually bring about confidence that there was *not* fraud.

[djm4]

The reporting so far doesn't really lead me to be confident about anything concerning the election results. What's emerging for me is a clear pattern of people assuming that the result they're predicting from small sample sizes is the result throughout Iran. And an awful lot of people outside Iran wanting the result to be wrong, so leaping on any evidence of fraud as obviously correct, while dismissing any suggestion that the elections were fair as propaganda by Ahmedinejad.

Oh, and Nate Silver's: 'Firstly, some 27.4 percent of Iranians told TFT they were undecided. By comparison, a month before the U.S. presidential election, about 5-9 percent of respondents generally claimed to be undecided. Perhaps it is folly to try and extrapolate the Western experience to Iran -- but for 27 percent of the voters to claim to be undecided one month before a high-profile, high-turnout election strikes me as unlikely.' looks highly suspect to me. 27% of voters declaring to be undecided wouldn't be unusual in a UK election, depending on how the question was asked. And I'm not sure about his US figures - this site suggests 18% less than two months before the US election - if he's correct, then over half of undecided US voters made up their minds in about two weeks.

[djm4]

And an awful lot of people outside Iran wanting the result to be wrong, so leaping on any evidence of fraud as obviously correct, while dismissing any suggestion that the elections were fair as propaganda by Ahmedinejad.

Just to be clear, I think you're going out of your way to avoid doing that.

[lizw.livejournal.com]

I'm holding back on the issue of whether there was fraud because I don't feel I know enough about Iranian politics to have confidence in any of the available informants. The only source I know personally - not a supporter of either of the main candidates - is not currently in Iran, but doubts the accuracy of many of the stories coming from there right now, both on Twitter and on mainstream news.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

I'm curious to know why this election sparked rioting and leaks of rival vote figures from the Interior Ministry, while Ahmedinejad's previous victory wasn't marked in this way.

Well, the obvious reason to me is that there were unprecedented near-riots on the streets, and in-fighting amongst the powerful, in the run-up to this election, which there weren't last time round to anything like the same degree.

Which by no means rules out electoral fraud, but I really don't think this particular evidence points to fraud as the only - or even a likely - explanation.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

What about the bizarre results in Lorestan?

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Sure, looks a bit odd at first glance. But on the other hand I know next to nothing about the local politics there - and certainly not enough to know how likely or not it is for the local candidate to poll 55% in 2005 and 5% in 2009. (If indeed those are the official numbers.) Maybe there was some local issue that blew his popularity, maybe he fixed the vote last time around, maybe voters in that province are quicker to change allegiance than in Western democracies, maybe the vote-counting system is a total shambles because there's no real incentive to make it work properly, maybe the security forces ran a tighter ship for supervising the ballot this time, maybe the count was entirely made up.

What I don't understand about this preoccupation with the validity of the election is that it seems to rest on an implicit assumption that the electoral process was ever going to be a free and fair one in Western terms. It couldn't be, and it wasn't. Fussing over details to prove or otherwise whether the votes were counted properly seems a bit ... unnecessary, when the candidate list is so carefully vetted, and the ballot itself is required to be an open process.

Is Ahmadinejad a pukka democratically-elected Head of Government? Of course not. He wasn't before this election, and he isn't now. We really don't need to get in to the nitty-gritty stuff (which we are desperately ill-equipped to do) - to know that with a very high degree of confidence.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

an implicit assumption that the electoral process was ever going to be a free and fair one in Western terms

I'm not sure that's true. For my own part I appreciate that Iran isn't a democracy and never has been. But their system has some very small and limited means for the expression of the will of the people, and I thought the outcome was going to be a small improvement in the direction they were heading. If this election, in addition to being rigged from the outset by the candidate vetting process, was stolen in favour of the more conservative candidate, it suggests instead that the people with the most power are making a determined turn for the worse.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Iran isn't a democracy and never has been

That's a bit harsh - by then-current standards it wasn't doing terribly badly as a secular constitutional monarchy under the Mossadegh regime :-)

(But I see your point.)