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

[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.)