Footsteps

Elgar - Nimrod

A recent article published on Politico, entitled "Ahmadinejad won. Get over it", claims the 2009 Iranian presidential election was not fraudulent. The article starts as follows:

"Without any evidence, many U.S. politicians and “Iran experts” have dismissed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s reelection Friday, with 62.6 percent of the vote, as fraud.

They ignore the fact that Ahmadinejad’s 62.6 percent of the vote in this year’s election is essentially the same as the 61.69 percent he received in the final count of the 2005 presidential election, when he trounced former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. The shock of the “Iran experts” over Friday’s results is entirely self-generated, based on their preferred assumptions and wishful thinking."

This is, however, completely misleading. Anybody familiar with Iranian elections knows that the results of the second round of the election where only the winner and the runner-up of the first round are running cannot be compared with the results of the first round of the election where several people are running. In fact, if we consider the first round of the 2005 presidential election, Ahmadi Nejad only received 19.43% of the votes. Even if we consider the votes of all conservative candidates (Ahmadi Nejad, Ghalibaf and Larijani) in that election, their share is only 38%.

Therefore, the article that claims to be impartial appears manipulative or at the very best not well-founded right at the beginning. The article also makes several other misleading and unsubstantiated statements.

In the absence of scientific polls in Iran, we can only treat the 2009 election in a similar manner, i.e. based on circumstantial evidence observed in the aftermath of the election. Such evidence undoubtedly raises many questions on the handling of the election by the Iranian government.

Speaking of scientific polls, one can recall how the conservative establishment shut down what seemed to be the first Iranian polling agency a few years ago just as it started to operate. This action effectively closed the only viable option, outside the bodies controlled by conservatives, to verify the result of an election.

At the end, it should not be left unsaid that Politico contains many articles pointing to many signs of fraud in the 2009 election. However, one particular article, especially when it is based on false information, can still damage the authenticity of a movement.