The Vote in Iran

when autocracies decide to do something like this, why do they do it so clumsily?

Because they don't understand or respect popular legitimacy in the first place they have never seriously considered what something real would look like, it would be beneath them, so they just toss in something like this as a bone to the saps.

Sheer egotism.

Maybe they wanted to provoke a round of violence from Mousavi's supporters as an excuse to lead a crackdown on dissidents.

I think you've given their response a lot more thought than they did. This may be an after-effect they exploit, but I doubt they directly considered it.

There was a study a couple of years ago, which I've lost track of, that demonstrated how theocracies, in every case, lead to stagnated societies rife with corruption and economic collapse and Iran is a shining example. The theocrats in charge simply do not consider the real needs of society and their lack of consideration is illustrated right here in how they've gone about faking their election returns.

First of all, by the standards of Middle Eastern vote-rigging, this wouldn't be that obvious a fraud. In Egypt, you can count on Mubarak to consistently get 80+ percent of the vote (Nasser used to get 99+), and in his last election, Saddam Hussein got 100%, if memory serves. Of course, in those countries, the top guy would be stealing the election on his own behalf, so the ridiculous numbers are probably a sign of arrogance.

In the case of Iran, everyone agrees that any order to rig the vote would have come from a higher authority than Ahmadinejad, so ego-stoking numbers would not have been necessary. So why not 53%? If Juan Cole's scenario is right, then the clumsiness was just the result of a rushed panic.

Juan Cole explains it all,

http://www.juancole.com/

"The Electoral Commission is supposed to wait three days before certifying the results of the election, at which point they are to inform Khamenei of the results, and he signs off on the process. The three-day delay is intended to allow charges of irregularities to be adjudicated. In this case, Khamenei immediately approved the alleged results. . .

"But just as a first reaction, this post-election situation looks to me like a crime scene. And here is how I would reconstruct the crime.

"As the real numbers started coming into the Interior Ministry late on Friday, it became clear that Mousavi was winning. Mousavi's spokesman abroad, filmmaker Mohsen Makhbalbaf, alleges that the ministry even contacted Mousavi's camp and said it would begin preparing the population for this victory.

"The ministry must have informed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who has had a feud with Mousavi for over 30 years, who found this outcome unsupportable. And, apparently, he and other top leaders had been so confident of an Ahmadinejad win that they had made no contingency plans for what to do if he looked as though he would lose.

"They therefore sent blanket instructions to the Electoral Commission to falsify the vote counts.

"This clumsy cover-up then produced the incredible result of an Ahmadinejad landside in Tabriz and Isfahan and Tehran.

"The reason for which Rezaie and Karoubi had to be assigned such implausibly low totals was to make sure Ahmadinejad got over 51% of the vote and thus avoid a run-off between him and Mousavi next Friday, which would have given the Mousavi camp a chance to attempt to rally the public and forestall further tampering with the election.

This scenario accounts for all known anomalies and is consistent with what we know of the major players."

They were almost certainly motivated by fear, Kevin. Had they thought that Mousavi was any serious threat, or even that his assumption of the reins of power would significantly change things, they simply wouldn't have let him into the election in the first place. Moderates and reformers would boycott, Mahmoud would win, everything would go on like it did in 2005.

But they were overconfident. They didn't see all this coming. And when they realized that they were in serious danger, they panicked, as the overconfident so often do. They quickly and clumsily acted to make sure that their guy won and that the reformers were resoundingly beaten. they hoped it would be enough.

It wasn't. They didn't understand enough about elections to know what a real one looks like, and didn't anticipate that people who were familiar with elections would catch them so quickly. But they did get caught, because it clearly wasn't real. And now there's rioting across half of Iran, they're ineffectively trying to shut down communications, and Khamenei himself is forced to defend this farce.

It's just like the 2006 Republicans who kept believing they were honest to God going to win because it's a Republican Country and the Democrats are either ugly feminists or gay.

Only blatant vote rigging would have been refused because they have little control over the state governments, and they had no time or infrastructure to organize an election steal like that in our massive country.

If you haven't already read it, maybe check out: All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror by Stephen Kinzer....I don't necessarily agree with Kinzer's conclusions, but it's a great story he tells (that puts current events into better context)(I just read it this past autumn).

Oh bah! The graph is already debunked by Nate Silver, see http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/06/statistical-evidence-does-not-pro...

As to the rest I still haven't seen anything persuasive, see http://www.ph2dot1.com/2009/06/theft-of-iranian-election.html Fo example, US poll before the election showed Ahmedinajad beating Moussavi by a margin of 2.4:1 overall and by 2:1 among Azeris, which certainly does NOT support Juan Cole's two main theses... and makes your "no one on this planet" look silly...

The straight-ness of this line is not conclusive, according to the '538.com dude, who knows a mode from a median

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/06/statistical-evidence-does-not-pro...

However the other bits of evidence are pretty fishy,
- the announcing of the tallys so quickly.

Now there is lots of (unconfirmed ) reports that there was widespread 'fatwa ordered' fraud.

hope for peace-

-r

This isn't simply about power, it's about benign contempt. It's "a divine assessment".

The only freedom religious maniacs are interested in is religious freedom, their own religious freedom.

They're like gun nuts who don't care how many rights they lose as long as they keep their guns.

I'm curious. Other than just the fact that "you know", do you have even a scintilla of evidence that the vote was rigged, as you say? Now I certainly hold no brief for this Acmadinajad character, but simply because you don't like the outcome, why is it that "you people" always see it as a fixed election when your man loses? When that idiot candidate of the left, Al Gore, lost to that idiot candidate of the right, George Bush, it was naturally a "fixed election". But when your funny man beat Coleman in Minnesota in the senate race, now that was fair and square election. Give me a break.

What about the possibility that one or more people in the Election Commission didn't like having to create fraudulent results and therefore did so in a ham-handed fashion? That this is their own quiet protest and they wanted it to look obviously fraudulent?

I watched the announcement of the Iranian election on CNN and was horrified. But, it is nothing new in politics.

Radek M. Gadek, MCJ
author: Criminal Justice Degree Online