By now it's pretty clear the regime in Tehran rigged yesterday's election. Cenk Uygur has a pretty decent rant about it on the rec list and Andrew Sullivan published a very interesting graph showing the statistical improbability of the official results.
But how did they pull it off? What's the process in Iran for voting and -- especially -- for counting the votes?
Well, last Wednesday Mehdi Khalaji, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (a pro-Israel think tank) published a description of Iranian election procedures. Based on what he says, this thing was cooked from the beginning.
Details on the flip...
Now, I have to start by questioning my own source. The Washington Institute is clearly part of the Israel lobby in DC, and has links to a number of prominent neo-con politicians. For example, Henry Kissinger, Edward Luttwak, Martin Peretz, Richard Perle, James Woolsey, and Mort Zuckerman all serve on the board of directors (along with others like Warren Christopher, Lawrence Eagleburger, and George Schultz). Israel's current government clearly wants to shift the focus of discussion of the Middle East to Iran's repressive government, hoping to avoid thereby any real progress in negotiations with the Palestinians towards the creation of an independent Palestinian state (maybe Netanyahu will surprise us tomorrow, but I doubt it).
Khalaji himself has further links to hawkish foreign policy circles. Trained as a theologian in Qom, Iran, he relocated in 2000 to France, where he has worked as a journalist for the BBC and for the USIA's Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. On the other hand, Khalaji appears to know what he's talking about, and if he's correct about how elections are conducted in the Islamic Republic it's easy to see how a fraud was carried out.
The thing that most surprised me about Iranian voting procedures is that there is apparently no such thing as voting registration. According to Khalaji:
a person's voting eligibility is determined by a "birth certificate" (BC). (Although Iran has recently introduced national identification cards, these are not used for voting.) The BC, issued by the National Organization for Civil Registration, looks like a passport, with pages that can be stamped. Voters can go to any of the more than 60,000 voting stations across the country or around the world, including those in thirty-five U.S. cities. Since there is no requirement to vote near one's residence, voter turnout at a particular voting station, or even in a city, can theoretically exceed the estimated number of eligible voters in that locality. When a person receives a ballot, the BC is recorded and stamped, but there appears to be no verification, either during the voting or after, of the documentation.
Khalaji reports that state organisms have been known in the past to collect Birth Certificates from poor voters and then use them after hours to cast votes in districts where additional votes might be needed. He also reports that because of an illiteracy rate over 20% (confirmed here), the elections officials allow volunteer poll workers to write in the name of the candidate the illiterate wishes to vote for. There is of course no way for the illiterate voter to confirm his or her wishes are being honored.
In other words, the electoral system has a number of built-in mechanisms to allow the state to manufacture votes in the event it believes it needs them. If, however, these manufactured are insufficient to guarantee victory, electoral law has a final fail-safe procedure:
Counting process. The two-stage counting process presents perhaps the most troubling aspect of the elections. At each polling station, after the end of voting hours, the votes are counted and recorded on Form 22 in the presence of representatives from the candidates, the Interior Ministry, and the Guardian Council. These forms are secret however; the results are not announced to the press or released to the candidates. Instead, in the second stage of the counting process, the forms are sent to the Interior Ministry, where the votes are tallied and published on Form 28, which reports the votes by province or county. But because there is no supervision of the preparation, there is no way to compare Form 28 to Form 22. In other words, it is possible for agents from the Guardian Council or the Interior Ministry to change the vote totals before announcing them. This stage provokes suspicion among candidates as well as independent observers about the accuracy and fairness of the counting.
Because there is no independent way to verify the actual vote-counting process, it is theoretically possible for electoral authorities to make up any number they wish. This appears to have happened in yesterday's polling.
Sullivan blogs today that the head of the Iranian electoral commission has declared the results invalid and is calling for a new vote, linking to a site written in Farsi that apparently reports that news. In the same post he notes that Rafsanjani has resigned from the Expediency Council (though for the life of me, I'm not sure what that means).
Now, I know I'm relying on some right of center sources for this diary. Nevertheless, I'm fairly certain an electoral fraud was carried out in Iran yesterday and today, and I believe these are the procedures that allowed it to happen.