Iran: Survey Raises Election Questions

The first media accounts to present a factual basis for questioning the validity of the Iran elections was published today by CNN and the BBC, based on a Chatham House examination of official statistics.
Iran: Survey Raises Election Questions
June 21, 2009 | 1654 GMT

An examination conducted by a U.K. think-tank uncovered irregularities in the contested Iranian election, and raised “serious doubts” about President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s victory, CNN reported June 21. The examination conducted by the Chatham House of official statistics obtained from the Iranian Interior Ministry showed that the number of votes cast exceeded the number of eligible voters in two provinces, and that Ahmadinejad’s sweep of rural provinces also contradicts previous election trends.

This is the CNN report:
Survey raises questions about Iran vote results
Sunday, June 21

LONDON, England (CNN) -- A survey of Iran's election results raises "serious questions" about the victory that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is said to have won and uncovers irregularities in the official results, a British think tank said Sunday.

Iranian expatriates protest the June 12 presidential election results on Sunday in Berlin, Germany.
Official statistics obtained from Iran's Ministry of the Interior show the votes cast exceeded the number of eligible voters in two provinces, said Chatham House, a London-based institute that analyzes international affairs.

Claims that Ahmadinejad, the conservative incumbent, swept the board in rural provinces also flies in the face of previous results, said Chatham House, which conducted the survey with the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Release of the survey results comes on the heels of violent demonstrations that followed Iran's disputed June 12 presidential election.

Anti-government demonstrators have protested the results in street rallies and marches, defying warnings from Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, not to engage in such action.

Iran's foreign minister Sunday disputed allegations of ballot irregularities.

For the survey published Sunday, researchers worked from the province-by-province breakdowns of the 2009 and 2005 results, released by the Iranian Ministry of Interior, and from the 2006 census as published by the official Statistical Center of Iran, Chatham House said.
The survey made four main observations:

# In two conservative provinces, Mazandaran and Yazd, a turnout of more than 100 percent was recorded.
# At a provincial level, there is no correlation between the increased turnout and the swing to Ahmadinejad. This challenges the notion that his announced victory was due to the massive participation of a previously silent conservative majority.
# In a third of all provinces, the official results would require that Ahmadinejad had received not only all former conservative voters, all former centrist voters and all new voters but also up to 44 percent of former reformist voters -- despite a decade of conflict between these two groups.
# In the 2005 election, as in the elections of 2001 and 1997, conservative candidates -- and Ahmadinejad in particular -- were markedly unpopular in rural areas. That makes it "highly implausible" that the countryside swung substantially toward Ahmadinejad.

"The analysis shows that the scale of the swing to Ahmadinejad would have had to have been extraordinary to achieve the stated result," said professor Ali Ansari, a co-author of the survey who is director of the Institute for Iranian Studies at St. Andrews.

Data from the June 12 election suggests a sudden shift in political support toward Ahmadinejad in rural areas, which had not previously supported him or any other conservative, the survey said.

At the same time, the official data suggests the vote for challenger Mehdi Karrubi -- who was extremely popular in the rural, ethnic minority areas in 2005 -- has collapsed entirely, even in his home province of Lorestan, the survey said.

In that province, his vote went from 55.5 percent in 2005 to 4.6 percent in the most recent vote, the survey found. At the same time, Ahmadinejad won 50.9 percent of the vote in this election, including the votes of nearly half (47.5 percent) of those who voted for reformist candidates in 2005, the survey found.

Such an outcome is "highly implausible," the survey said.

The Iranian government has said Ahmadinejad won the election by a huge margin. Ahmadinejad's main challenger, Mir Hossein Moussavi, and his supporters have contested the results.
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"In a country where allegations of 'tombstone voting' -- the practice of using the identity documents of the deceased to cast additional ballots -- are both long-standing and widespread, this result is troubling but perhaps not unexpected," the Chatham House survey said.

"This problem did not start with Ahmadinejad," the report added. "According to official statistics gathered by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance in Stockholm, there were 12.9 percent more registered voters at the time of Mohammed Khatami's 2001 victory than there were citizens of voting age." ========================
#

Another account, apparently based in part on the Chatham House surveiy, was published today in the BBC News online site:
#
Suspicions Behind Iran Poll Doubts

By Catherine Miller
BBC News

When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the landslide victor in Iran's presidential election - less than 24 hours after polls closed - the shock on the streets of Tehran was palpable.

Mr Ahmadinejad had won 63% of the vote, his challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, 34%.

"I thought at least 80-90% of Tehrani voters were in favour of Mousavi, I can't really believe it," said one man.

Disbelief quickly turned to anger and hundreds of thousands of Mr Mousavi's supporters came out in protest.

But Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, the final authority on all constitutional matters, has stood by the result, saying the Islamic Republic "would not betray the vote of the people".

Mobile polling stations

Opposition concerns about the running of the election emerged early in the process.

Monitors from their campaign teams, who by law are allowed to oversee every polling station, were issued with invalid ID cards or refused entry.

And there was a 10-fold increase in the number of mobile polling stations - ballot boxes transported from place to place by agents of the interior ministry, which is run by a close ally of Mr Ahmadinejad.

"One third of the ballot boxes were mobile," says Mehdi Khalaji, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

"They were out of the control of the local authorities and the representatives of the candidates, and nobody knows what they have done to them".

Polling day saw a record turnout and Iranians queued for hours to cast their ballot in an election which all agreed was critical to the future direction of their country.

"Early on polling day, the SMS network was shut down, that made me worried about what was going to happen," says Tehran journalist Ali Pahlavan.

With little access to the state-controlled broadcast media, Mr Mousavi's largely young, technically savvy supporters use text messages to campaign.

"Then the interior ministry [where results from polling stations around the country are collated] started kicking out its own employees so that just a skeleton personnel and the top officials were left," says Mr Pahlavan.

Quick results

Despite the high turnout, the count was remarkably quick, and the results unusually consistent, with none of the typical variations between different regions and cities.
“ This is something more than a manipulated election, this is a coup ”
Mehdi Khalaji

"Iran is a huge country, nearly four times the size of France and they began announcing the results within four hours, in past elections it's taken 24. It just seems to me the fix was in," says Juan Cole, Professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of Michigan.

Others point to particular results which appear unlikely.

For example, in Mr Mousavi's home province of East Azerbaijan, which is known to have fierce regional and ethnic loyalties to the reformist candidate, he polled far worse than expected.

And the liberal cleric Mehdi Karroubi polled 5% in Lorestan, despite having won 55% there in the first round of voting in 2005 when he also stood as a candidate.

"In some provinces like Khoresan or Mazandaran the number of people who voted exceeded the number of eligible voters in those provinces," points out Mr Khalaji.

"If they wanted to do a manipulation as they have done before, they could have done it in a more elegant and delicate way.

"This is something more than a manipulated election, this is a coup".

Irregularities

But others say there is no proof of a large scale plot by the establishment.

"The opposition has not provided any hard evidence yet that the elections were rigged," says Arshin Adib Moghaddem of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

"If there had been a strategic plan to hijack the elections, I wonder why people like Mohsen Rezai the head of the Expediency Council, who was also one of the presidential candidates, did not know about it. It is highly unlikely".

But with their monitors excluded from the voting and counting process it is difficult for the opposition to come up with such hard evidence.

The Guardian Council, the country's highest supervisory committee is investigating 646 complaints of misconduct.

"It's an admission there were irregularities," says Prof Cole.

"But the problem is, the Guardian Council is headed by a cleric, who is a far-right hardliner and known big supporter of Mr Ahmadinejad," he adds.

"So asking that body to review the ballot is like putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop."

Loss of faith

No-one may ever know exactly what happened on the night of Iran's elections, or who the rightful winner is.

Even critics of the process say it is possible Mr Ahmadinejad won.

An independent poll taken in May by the US organisation Terror Free Tomorrow found 34% of those surveyed would vote for Mr Ahmadinejad, with 14% for Mr Mousavi and 27% undecided.

But the opposition believes this crisis has now gone beyond the question of who the true victor is.

Iran's particular brand of religious democracy has always promised a balance between clerical leadership and the will of the people.

Now many people's faith in that system has been lost. It may take more than a recount of the votes to restore it.