How do you figure that?…

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

Matthew 7:3-5 KJV

You can’t say you weren’t warned this was going to happen. America and its stooges no longer have the credibility to criticize anyone else. Personally, I find this a good thing indeed.

Mehdi Khalaji, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Studies (and a Shiite theologian trained in Qom, Iran) has studied the intricacies of Iran’s voting and vote-counting system.

He notes that there are at least five ways that voting can be manipulated.

Birth Certificates

In Iran, there is no voter registration. Instead, a person’s voting eligibility is determined by his or her birth certificate, a document that looks like a passport, with pages that can be stamped.

Mr. Khalaji notes that there have been reports in the past that various groups have “rented” birth certificates from the poor, and used them to secure and fill in ballots fraudulently. Such activity, he says, is often perpetrated after regular voting hours, or when polls remain open for many hours after the designated closing time – as was the case Friday.

“In previous elections,” he wrote this week, “reports have surfaced that the Imam Khomeini Committee, a large state charity affiliated with the [supreme] leader, Ali Khamenei, ‘rent’ birth certificates belonging to the poor.”

Eligible voters

Relying on birth certificates complicates the calculation of eligible voters, Mr. Khalaji, says. Different government offices give very different estimates: “While the Interior Ministry puts the total number of eligible Iranian voters at 46 million, Iran’s Center for Statistics claims the number is over 51 million,” he explains.

Without an accurate estimate of eligible voters, it’s impossible to determine if “ghost” votes have been cast.The National Organization for Civil Registration says that the number of existing birth certificates greatly exceeds the number of Iranians. This can be caused by the loss or theft of certificates, which are then replaced.

Also, says Mr. Khalaji, some Iranians do not invalidate their relatives’ birth certificates after they die.

“In the last presidential election, reformist sources announced that more than two million fraudulent birth certificates may have been used … to obtain ballots.”

[...]

20 per cent [of Iranians] are illiterate, yet the ballot each person casts requires the voter to write out the name of his or her choice – an X is not allowed.

This makes it possible for polling station “volunteers” to write in the name of the candidate they favour, without the voter knowing any better.

Mobile polling stations

In the name of greater voter participation, an estimated 14,000 mobile ballot boxes were to be used in Friday’s vote. These were intended to reach those who could not reach any of the 47,000 regular voting stations (because of disability, members of the military, etc).

However, notes Mr. Khalaji, adequate supervision of the mobile boxes is extremely difficult, creating a situation where no one watches who casts the ballots or is present during the tally.”

Counting process

Counting the ballots is the area with the greatest potential for abuse.

The Guardian Council has the duty of supervising the process at each polling station and has uses observation committees with more than 130,000 members. Importantly, notes Mr. Khalaji, “each candidate has the right to send an observer to each fixed polling station to observe both the voting process and the ballot count.”

However, after the vote is counted at each station the results are recorded on a form, but not released to the press or public. This form is then sent to the Interior Ministry where all the forms are tallied and published. There is no guarantee that the first form’s figures are used in later forms, and no outside or candidates’ observers are allowed to oversee this compilation.

“In other words,” says Mr. Khalaji, “it is possible for agents from the Guardian Council or the Interior Ministry to change the vote totals before announcing them.”

Official validation

Once tallied, the results must be validated in a two-stage process.

The first stage is validation by the Guardian Council. Candidates have three days in which to appeal to this body if fraud or manipulation is suspected. But such an appeal is a double-edged sword.

In the past, says Mr. Khalaji, “the Guardian Council has canceled the voting in some districts where voting problems allegedly occurred and, not surprisingly, these are often districts where reformers do well.”

The second stage of validation is by Supreme Leader Khamenei, who has the constitutional authority to overrule the voters if he so chooses. Ayatollah Khamenei’s official statement issued Saturday embracing the election of Mr. Ahmadinejad, puts an end to and chance of him overturned the results.

In an open letter published last Sunday, a group of Interior Ministry employees expressed concern about the ministry’s plans to manipulate the vote. They cited a fatwa issued by an ayatollah in Qom – allegedly Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, who was Mr. Ahmadinejad’s teacher — that justifies such manipulation.

All in all, concludes Mr. Khajali, “it is abundantly clear that Iran’s election procedures leave ample opportunity for massive voter fraud.”

1) Ahmadinejad legitimately won the election by electoral count
AND
2) The legislative power engineered massive voting fraud and illegally declared a victor before counting the votes.

These statements are ***NOT*** mutually exclusive.

I’m actually wondering myself if the Obama Administration hasn’t asked the news agencies to squelch it, if only because they’re worried about the couch-potato residents of Outer Wingnuttia demanding we ‘liberate’ iran out of pure pavlovian reflex.

‘Coz you can bet your bottom dollar that if BushCo and the lads were still in control, they’d be all “INSTALL PUPPET GUBMINT GO GO GO” with the invasions and the bombings and the ‘we’ll be greeted as liberators!’ speeches all ready to go.

But they *aren’t* in power. And if they prepped up all the prewar hysteria and the Obama administration balked, their audience might start asking a few awkward questions about the last few wars.

Yes, but she really knows how to cut a rug.

It’s in Asia somewhere. They have no qualms about the penis. There are penis shaped popsicles (including the balls) and there’s a festival of some kind. A Penis Festival! ha!

ha, indeed.

I’m 100% with you on the particle accelerator, but I’d also be willing to bet that in such a scenario, both of us would be able to form an understanding what had happened if it was set out in a straightforward way, walking us through the science.

True, but I’d still be completely dependent upon those physicists who would be the ones setting out the straightforward case.

But it’s great to hear from someone with significant levels of training and expertise in the matters you mentioned.

I try to be a skeptic, and often this means I have to be a skeptic of skeptics, too.

Sounds cold, I know, even flat-out nasty, buuuuut … I don’t know & don’t care. I’m a lot more concerned about the violence that’s going on now than whatever did or didn’t happen on election-day.

Think about it for a minute: would a more “progressive” president serving as window-dressing for the theocrats be a major improvement for the real lives of Iranians?

There’s no way in hell the clergy is going to allow the genesis of the same sort of secular state that Saddam set up in Iraq, so which figurehead they put in place as president there is largely a moot point to me.

Sorry, but the international concern-trolling angle kind of sucks, too. If you seriously think Israel (or the US for that matter) will suddenly warm to an Iran “ruled” by Mousavi-Sockpuppet as opposed to Ahmedinijad-Sockpuppet, kindly give your head a good long shake. If you think people here are cynical, try chatting up a diplomat sometime, especially over “refreshments” – I’d bet that within an hour, chances are you’d hear some shit slip out that’d curl your toes & grow hair on your tongue.

On the other hand, if these pro-Mousavi protests lead to a hardcore movement against the mullahs, my ambivalence will change fast.

This smells like some broken bones & bruises for a bunch of well-meaning folks, followed by a return to the status quo … but if it turns into a revolt against the Big Boss Ayatollah, we might well be looking at a serious mass-slaughter far worse than the one that marked the end of the Shah’s regime, & the political reverberations could be dire – not just for Iran.

I’m not saying “election fraud rulez OK” – I’m saying “figure out where the train is headed before you get on” … if your ticket says *Big Fucking Brick Wall – ONE WAY*, you might want to jump off before it gets up to full throttle.

Sometimes things are EXACTLY what they seem to be.

And not knowing for sure doesn’t mean you can’t interpret large-scale events and reach a tentative conclusion…

mikey

1. “It just can’t be true” – we can dismiss that one out of hand. I am quite certain the number of royalists in Iran isn’t as large as in Manhattan.

2. “Reportedly” dissident employees of the Interior Ministry…: Useless. “Reported” by whom? Based on what information? She doesn’t say. It would be just as accurate to claim that the protests are “reportedly” controlled by the CIA, since this has, in fact, been reported.

3. “Allegedly” official polls showed…: See 2. Alleged by whom, when, where? We don’t take this kind of stuff seriously when it’s used to attack, say, Judge Sotomayor – why should we do so now?

4. High turnout favors reformists: this argument rests on the unsupported assumption that A. is widely perceived as the candidate of the establishment in Iran, while Moussawi, who was supported by some of the richest people in that establishment, isn’t. Already in 2005, many who voted for Khatami in 1998 voted for A., suggesting they didn’t vote for Khatami then because of his “reformism”, but rather because of his anti-establishment credentials.

if you read previous output by Secor, you’ll notice that she is clearly close to the pro-Western, neo-liberal elites in Iran. This will skew her view, and it’s not an unwarranted assumption that the sources for her “reported” “allegations” reside in those circles, too. I’m happy to be convinced otherwise, of course.

I really detect an “it would irresponsible not to speculate” approach on the question of fraud in much liberal comment.

As an American, I’m just hoping that WE don’t …

Though with so many self-proclaimed experts running around on the tubes, it’s to your credit that you make no pretense of being one where you’re not, in a lot of cases, it’s not a de facto requirement when you can inform yourself of the basic principles involved. I’m 100% with you on the particle accelerator, but I’d also be willing to bet that in such a scenario, both of us would be able to form an understanding what had happened if it was set out in a straightforward way, walking us through the science. That’s the main thing – to be able to approach something with an open mind so you can gain understanding of it. Having that open mind requires us to admit that we don’t already have the answer.