|
This column was published by PostGlobal
at washingtonpost.com on June 26, 2009.
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 that it does not matter whether the
elections were stolen or not, since 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 Teheran. 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, from their web
site:
"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.
|