[Peace-discuss] PostGlobal - Weisbrot: Was Iran's Election Stolen?

[Robert Naiman]

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/needtoknow/2009/06/was_irans_election_stolen.html

Guest Voices

Was Iran's Election Stolen?
By Mark Weisbrot
co-director, Center for Economic and Policy Research

Since the Iranian presidential election of June 12, allegations that
the announced winner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's victory was stolen have
played an important role in the demonstrations, political conflict,
and media reporting on events there. Some say it does not matter
whether the elections were stolen because the government has responded
to peaceful protests with violence and arrests. These actions are
indeed abhorrent and inexcusable, and the world's outrage is
justified. So, too, is the widespread concern for the civil liberties
of Iranians who have chosen to exercise their rights to peacefully
protest.

At the same time, the issue of whether the election was stolen will
remain relevant, both to our understanding of the situation and to
U.S.-Iranian relations, for reasons explained below. It is therefore
worth looking at whether this allegation is plausible.

According to the official election results, the incumbent president
Ahmadinejad won the election by a margin of 63 percent to 34 percent
for his main competitor, Mir Hossein Mousavi. This is a difference of
approximately 11.3 million votes. Any claim of victory for Mousavi
must therefore contain some logically coherent story of how at least
5.65 million votes (one half of the 11.3 million margin) might have
been stolen.

This implies looking at the electoral procedures. There were
approximately 45,000 polling locations with ballot boxes, not
including mobile units. If these ballot boxes were collected by a
central authority and taken away to a central location, and counted
(or not counted) behind closed doors, this would be consistent with an
allegation of massive vote theft.

However, this does not appear to be the case. After searching through
thousands of news articles without finding any substantive information
on the electoral process, I contacted Seyed Mohammad Marandi, who
heads the North American Studies department at the University of
Tehran. He described the electoral procedures to me, and together we
interviewed, by phone, Sayed Moujtaba Davoodi, a poll worker who
participated in the June 12 election in region 13 (of 22 regions) in
Tehran. Mr. Daboodi has worked in elections for the past 16 years. The
following is from their description of the procedures.

According to their account, there are 14 people working at each
polling place, in addition to an observer representing each candidate.
Most polling places are schools or mosques; if the polling place is a
school then the team of 14 people would include teachers. There are
2-4 representatives of the Guardian Council, and 2 from the local
police. After the last votes are cast, the ballots are counted in the
presence of the 14 people plus the candidates' representatives. All of
them sign five documents that contain the vote totals. One of the
documents goes into the ballot box; one stays with the leader of the
local election team; and the others go to other levels of the
electoral administration, including the Guardian Council and the
Interior.

The vote totals are then sent to a local center that also has
representatives of the Guardian Council, Interior, and the candidates.
They add up the figures from a number of ballot boxes, and then send
them to Interior. In this election, the numbers were also sent
directly to Interior from the individual polling places, in the
presence of the 14-18 witnesses at the ballot box.

Each voter presents identification, and his or her name and
information is entered into a computer, and also recorded in writing.
The voter's thumbprint is also put on the stub of the ballot. The
voter's identification is stamped to prevent multiple voting at
different voting places, and there is also a computer and written
record of everyone who voted at each polling place.

If this information is near accurate, it would appear that large scale
fraud is extremely difficult, if not impossible, without creating an
extensive trail of evidence. Indeed, if this election was stolen,
there must be tens of thousands of witnesses -- or perhaps hundreds of
thousands - to the theft. Yet there are no media accounts of
interviews with such witnesses.

Is it possible that, in most of the country, the procedures outlined
above - followed in previous elections - were abruptly abandoned, with
ballot boxes whisked away before anyone could count them at the
precinct level? Again, many of the more than 700,000 people involved
in the electoral process would have been witnesses to such a
large-scale event. Given the courage that hundreds of thousands of
people have demonstrated in taking to the streets, we would expect at
least some to come forward with information on what happened.

Rostam Pourzal, an Iranian-American human rights campaigner, told me
that it is common knowledge in Iran that these are the election
procedures and that they were generally followed in this election.
Professor Marandi concurred, and added: "There's just no way that any
large-scale or systematic fraud could have taken place."

The government has agreed to post the individual ballot box totals on
the web. This would provide another opportunity for any of the
hundreds of thousands of witnesses to the precinct-level vote count to
say that they witnessed a different count, if any did so.

A number of other arguments have been put forward that the vote must
have been rigged. Most of them have been refuted. For example, the
idea that the results were announced too quickly: How long does it
take to count 500-800 ballots at a polling place, with only the
presidential candidates on the ballot? It could easily be done within
the time that it took, as it was in 2005.

The New York Times' front page story on Tuesday, June 23 begins with
this sentence: "Iran's most powerful oversight council announced on
Monday that the number of votes recorded in 50 cities exceeded the
number of eligible voters there by three million, further tarnishing a
presidential election . . ." This was widely interpreted as the
government admitting to some three million fraudulent votes.

Here is the Guardian Council's statement: "Candidates campaigns have
said that in 80-170 towns and cities, more people have voted than are
eligible voters. We have determined, based on preliminary studies,
that there are only about 50 such cities or towns. . . . The total
number of votes in these cities or towns is something close to three
million; therefore, even if we were to throw away all of these votes,
it would not change the result."

The letter from the Guardian Council also offers a number of reasons
that a city or town can have a vote total that exceeds the number of
eligible voters: some towns are weekend or vacation destinations, some
voters are commuters, some districts are not demographically distinct
entities, and Iranians can vote wherever they want (unlike in the
United States, where they must vote at their local polling place). On
the face of it, this does not appear implausible. Contrary to press
reports, there is no admission from the Iranian government that any of
these votes were fraudulent, nor has evidence of such fraud been made
public.

The only independent poll we have, from the New America Foundation and
conducted three weeks before the election, predicts the result that
occurred. And a number of experts have presented plausible
explanations for why Ahmadinejad could have won by a large margin.

Does it matter if the election was stolen? Certainly there are grounds
for challenging the overall legitimacy of the electoral process, in
which the government determines which candidates can compete, and the
press and other institutions are constrained.

But from the point of view of promoting more normal relations between
the United States and Iran, avoiding a military conflict, and bringing
stability to the region, the truth as to the more narrow question of
whether the election was procedurally fraudulent may be relevant. If
in fact the election was not stolen, and Washington (and Europe)
pretend that it was, this can contribute to a worsening of relations.
It will give further ammunition to hard-liners in Iran, who are
portraying the whole uprising as a conspiracy organized by the West.
(It doesn't help that the Obama administration hasn't announced an end
to the covert operations that the Bush administration was carrying out
within Iran).

More importantly, it will boost hardliners here - including some in
the Obama administration - who want to de-legitimize the government of
Iran in order to avoid serious negotiations over its nuclear program.
That is something that we should avoid, because a failure to seriously
pursue negotiations now may lead to war in the future.

Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy
Research, in Washington, D.C.

--
Robert Naiman
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
naiman at justforeignpolicy.org