Iran’s Contested Election by Eskandar Sadeghi

The 12^th of June 2009 saw Iran’s tenth presidential election get underway with Iranians turning out in record numbers. The official estimate claims that 85% of the eligible electorate participated in what Tehran University professor, Sadeq Zibakalam called “a big “no” to Ahmadinejad!” and thus the policies pursued by the hard-line president over the course of the last four years which have seen Iran’s international isolation increase and inflation and unemployment soar. Two, in many respects, irreconcilable visions for Iran’s future (at least at the domestic level) were presented by the two frontrunners, though it should not be forgotten that only the incumbent president out of the four presidential hopefuls, continues to maintain that the country’s present course is on the right track.

What followed, however, defied what many Iran-watchers expected. By the following day the incumbent president had been declared the victor by a landslide. Many prominent commentators, including former Revolutionary Guard, Reformist journalist turned political analyst/dissident-in-exile, Mohsen Sazgara, world-renown film director and Mousavi-campaign spokesman, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and a host of other prominent individuals contend what took place in the run-up to the announcement of the election results and shortly thereafter was nothing short of a coup d’état.

If Makhmalbaf and others are right, it would confirm a longstanding trend in which we have witnessed the growing militarization and securitization of Iranian politics, whereby the Supreme Leader, Seyyed Ali Khamenei has increasingly come to rely on the coercive arm of the Iranian state – the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and basij militia. This “sacred pact” has been established against not only the reformist wing of the political elite, but also the conservative pragmatists and “old-guard” such as former president Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani.

At present there is no getting away from the counter-argument that much of the evidence for electoral tampering is circumstantial or due to many of the results’ counter-intuitive character. The evidence that does exist (of which more and more is being leaked all the time), however, leaves us with compelling grounds to conclude that the severely limited “democratic process” which exists within the Islamic Republic has gone awry. Prior to the election, experts and a multitude of indictors were pointing to a Mousavi win, if not in the first round, then certainly in the second in which Mousavi would be forced to run-off against the incumbent president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Initially there were sporadic reports that opposition observers were barred from entering some voting stations. Officials from the Mousavi campaign also alleged that a number of stations in the northwest and south had run out of ballots. There were further complaints that many voting stations did not comply with the order issued by the Interior Ministry to extend voting hours.

The speed with which the results were announced also concerned many, especially since it patently broke with existing protocol, according to which the Interior Ministry is supposed to wait 3 days so that candidates have had the opportunity to lodge complaints with the Guardian Council. The Guardian Council then has an additional 10 days to investigate the various complaints, resolve disputes and finally verify or repudiate the result.

In a matter of hours after polls closed, Sadeq Mahsouli, Minister of the Interior, former IRGC commander and Ahmadinejad confidante, was announcing the results. The obvious question presents itself: how were millions of paper ballots counted in mere hours after polls closed?

Even the manner in which votes were announced was a strange deviation from standard practice. Instead of announcing the votes province by province or city by city, the results were released in several waves.

If only that was the end of the story.

Mousavi, who is an ethnic Azeri, assiduously cultivated the minority vote (approximately 49% of the Iranian electorate). We also know from previous elections that Iran’s minorities are wont to vote reformist or not vote at all.[i] According to the results released by the Interior Ministry, Mousavi was beaten by Ahmadinejad in his hometown of Khamene, and the capital of Iranian Azerbaijan, Tabriz, where he had addressed massive crowds in Azeri, to great applause.

Similarly, in Loristan, from which both Mehdi Karoubi and and Mousavi’s wife hail, Mousavi and Karoubi were both beaten by Ahmadinejad. Karoubi received only 3% of the votes in his hometown of Aligudarz. Even the most convoluted of reasoning would have a hard time explaining away Karoubi’s 44,036 votes to Ahmadinejad's 677,829 – leaving the latter with 15 times as many votes as his competitor.[ii] It should be noted that in the 2005 presidential election in which Karoubi also stood, he won six times more votes in his hometown than Ahmadinejad.[iii]

More generally, the number of votes Karoubi received appears counter-intuitive and jarring given expectations preceding the election. In the 2005 presidential election, Karoubi received 5 million votes nationwide, shrinking to just over 300,000 in the 2009 contest!

Another vote-getter was the presence of Mousavi’s formidable wife, the academic and public intellectual, Zahra Rahnavard, who worked tirelessly at the very forefront of his campaign in a bid to appeal to women voters.

Rahnavard and Mousavi, day-in and day-out, addressed thousands upon thousands of supporters, on the importance of women’s rights, the rule of law and social justice, even going so far as to pledge the dissolution of the morality police, who stalk Iran’s city streets hauling in those who dare deviate from the strict dress code envisioned by the powerful conservatives forces who occupy the many official and unofficial organs of governmental power. On the basis of anecdotal evidence, the public statements of representatives of Iran’s indigenous women’s rights movement, and the Iranian and foreign press, there is little doubt that both Mousavi and Karoubi had the overwhelming support of women voters.

Another anomaly which has raised several eyebrows and has since been admitted to by the Guardian Council is that the number of votes cast, exceeds the number of eligible voters in some 50 cities.[iv] How are these to be explained away?

If one’s confidence in the impeccability of the election result still hasn’t been shaken, what was the reason behind the arrest and detention of some 110 reformist politicians, political activists and journalists who were rapidly picked up, with no word as to where they were being taken and when they would be released? These figures include Mohsen Mirdamadi of the Islamic Participation Front of Iran, Behzad Nabavi of the Party of the Islamic Mojahedin, Hamidreza Jalaeipour, spokesman of Third Wave, and even the former president’s brother, Mohammad-Reza Khatami. The total arrested as of June 22^nd stands at approximately 300 and continues to increase.

Moreover, in the wake of the election results announcement, a slew of Reformist websites, as well as SMS messaging via mobile, were blocked as part of a clearly orchestrated media/communication blackout. The reformists campaign headquarters were also surrounded by security forces. In the eyes of those who allege fraud, all this adds up to far more than mere “circumstantial evidence” or banal “coincidence”. And it’s certainly strange behavior coming from a government putatively convinced of its “popular mandate”.

Professor Muhammad Sahimi, one of the most astute Iran pundits presently covering the election has argued the results declared by the Interior Ministry are themselves indicative of electoral fraud.

$C:\Users\Eskandar\Desktop\Iran Presidential Election 2009\linearvote-590x493.jpg$

To quote Sahimi: “a perfect linear relation between the votes received by the President and Mir Hossein Mousavi has been maintained, and the President’s vote is always half of the President’s. The vertical axis (y) shows Mr. Mousavi’s votes, and the horizontal (x) the President’s. R^2 shows the correlation coefficient: the closer it is to 1.0, the more perfect is the fit, and it is 0.9995, as close to 1.0 as possible for any type of data.”

Moreover, “[s]tatistically and mathematically, it is impossible to maintain such perfect linear relations between the votes of any two candidates in any election — and at all stages of vote counting. This is particularly true about Iran, a large country with a variety of ethnic groups who usually vote for a candidate who is ethnically one of their own.”[v]

Many have found this argument compelling but it should be noted that it has been criticized by American political scientist Nate Silver, who contends that a very similar statistical relationship is evinced by the 2008 American presidential election, which swept Obama to the Whitehouse, when analyzed in a comparable fashion.[vi] He argues that the aforesaid statistical relationship is not the “smoking gun” it proponents claim. The jury is still out.

Nader Uskowi, another Iran-watcher, claimed that sources inside the Interior Ministry gave word to him that Mousavi was in fact the real winner of the election with some, 19,075,623 votes or 52% of the votes cast, while Ahmadinejad lagged behind with 13,387,104 or 37% of the total votes cast. Mousavi’s early declaration of victory was apparently due to a tip-off by a Ministry of Interior official.[vii]

Makhmalbaf has supported this claim and stated that Mousavi was even notified by the Interior Ministry of his imminent victory and told to prepare his victory speech. Obviously, much of this information is difficult to confirm and may never be “forensically” verified. We can only hope for further leaks of the sort which have been coming out of official circles.

A Case of “Northern Tehran Syndrome”?

Though there has undoubtedly been some stern criticism in the western media regarding the lack of transparency and numerous anomalies which blight this election, some journalists and pundits have put down the “unexpected” character of the Ahmadinejad win down to western observers’ “northern Tehran syndrome”. This criticism alleges that western journalists are guilty of restricting themselves to the most affluent areas of Iranian cities while paying scant attention to those rural and lower-income areas which go to make up Ahmadinejad’s power-base. They therefore fallaciously view “northern Tehran” as representative of Iran as a whole.

While this syndrome has been present in some of the more superficial reporting, in the final analysis, such an explanation just doesn’t hold water. Not only in light of the many glaring stated aberrations which have marred this election, but more importantly the fact that Iran’s society is overwhelmingly urban (70%), many of whom voted for the previous reformist president, Mohammad Khatami.

Eric Hoogland, arguably the most important scholar working on the politics of Iran’s rural areas has harshly criticized some journalists’ rationalization of the election results by means of the uncritical refrain that “Ahmadinejad’s popular-base resides in the countryside”. He argues by contrast such a bald assertion flies in the face of thirty years of research and empirical evidence gathered over the last couple of years in which he gauges Ahmadinejad’s support to rarely exceed 20%.[viii]

Though there is little doubt that the Iran’s long dissatisfied middle-class have been crucial to the depth of participation witnessed in this election and the subsequent protests broadcast to the world through all manner of electronic and telecommunications media, in stark opposition to the student-led protests of 1999 and 2003, the mass protests seen on the streets of Iran’s major cities in the aftermath of the election represent a broad cross-section of the Iranian population, with everyone from students, women’s rights activists, religious students, bazaaris, housewives, members of the middle-class, industrial workers, artisans and rural immigrants.

A Self-Inflicted “Legitimacy Crisis”?

The massive irony of this episode is the self-inflicted wound cum “legitimacy crisis” and the growing polarization of Iranian society and even the governing elite, sparked by this episode. When the Iranian electorate chose to vote on such a massive scale, they were accepting the constitutional parameters postulated by the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is common knowledge that Iran’s presidential candidates and MPs are vetted by an unelected body, the Guardian Council and that the incumbent president by means of his powers of patronage has an asymmetrical advantage with respect to his opponents, but within such parameters it was expected that the election itself would be largely fair and transparent. When it became apparent that neither of these was the case, and the fraud perpetrated so vast, the gap between people’s sense of moral/ethical propriety and the events which in fact transpired has led hundreds of thousands to vent their anger and frustration by means of (predominantly) peaceful protest.

Moreover, Grand Ayatollahs Yousef Sanei and Saafi Golpaygani are reported to have called the election results suspect. The predominantly reformist Association of Combatant Clerics and even the conservative Society of Teachers of Qom Theological Colleges have requested an immediate investigation into the allegations of electoral fraud.[ix] It is undoubtedly significant that vociferous opposition to Ahmadinejad’s “victory” even emanates from the Iranian bastion of religious conservatism.

Ayatollah Khomeini’s one-time heir-apparent, turned dissident cleric, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri has baulked at the results and unequivocally denounced them such that “no wise person in their right mind can believe”.[x] We thus find the Islamic Republic fighting off potential “legitimacy crises” on multiple fronts – in addition to its democratic deficit it may well be facing a full-blown “religious” one – a rather ominous sign for a self-styled theocracy.

Due to the unparalleled protests taking place, the Supreme Leader, who was so swift to endorse the election results, has been vacillating between unapologetic endorsement of the president and exhorting the disaffected candidates to pursue their grievances within the bounds of the law delineated by the constitution. The more serious problem, however, with which the Leader will have to reckon in both the short and longer term is that the protestors no longer see the state as a neutral arbiter, but rather as a collaborator in the alleged fraud.

Iran’s Contested Election by Eskandar Sadeghi

[vii] The Real Votes: Mousavi at 52%, Uskowi on Iran, Nader Uskowi, 14.06.2009