Inkless Wells

Paul Wells on all the latest out of Ottawa—along with the occasional post about jazz. Follow Paul on Twitter: @InklessPW
He also offers his thoughtful perspective of Stephen Harper’s last 10 years in his recent eBook, The Harper Decade.

Categories: Capital Read, Inkless Wells

If you still think the Iran protesters are just sore losers…

by Paul Wells on Monday, June 22, 2009 3:40pm - 27 Comments

…read this. One of many passages that should persuade skeptics this election was stolen, and clumsily too:

…in at least ten provinces, in order to have amassed the vote totals given to him, Ahmadinejad would have had to have won all the voters who backed him in 2005, all of the voters who, last time, voted for the centrist candidacy of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, all of the voters who, last time, sat out the election and didn’t vote at all, and — on top of that — up to 44 percent of the voters who, in 2005, backed the reformist slate!

Tags: iran

More by Paul Wells

http://intensedebate.com/people/Jack_Mitchell Jack Mitchell

I guess that's what I just don't get: if you're going to steal an election, how incompetent do you have to be to wind up with such unbelievable vote tallies; to declare the results before the ballots could be physically counted; to ignore ethnic vote patterns; etc.? It's like they decided to steal the election after the polls had closed. Very poor staffwork.

http://intensedebate.com/people/SeanStok SeanStok

I suppose fraud on such a massive scale requires a fair bit of skill, finesse and coordination. It could be that a bunch of overly eager conspirators independently went overboard. Thankfully (in that it's pretty darned obvious).

http://intensedebate.com/people/Jack_Mitchell Jack Mitchell

Perhaps the result of not having a free & professional punditariat? Between them, Kady and Paul could surely devise some plausible scenario in which the NDP squeaked in to a minority.
http://intensedebate.com/people/MacCross MacCross

It was terribly done, but listen to what the ayatollah said last Friday (source: BBC); "There is 11 million votes difference," the ayatollah said. "How can one rig 11 million votes?" I guess the mullahs believed in the 'Big Lie' theory of propaganda put forward by Hitler, then by Goebbels:

"That is of course rather painful for those involved. One should not as a rule reveal one's secrets, since one does not know if and when one may need them again. The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous."

http://intensedebate.com/people/jolyon jolyon

"I guess that's what I just don't get: if you're going to steal an election, how incompetent do you have to be to wind up with such unbelievable vote tallies;"

I have been wondering about this as well. Did the mullahs think the outcome would not be questioned so they did half-assed job in preparing to steal election or were the results so worrisome they decided to rig the election at the last moment, after the polls had closed.

My fav revelation yesterday/today(??) was the 'yes, more than 100% of the electorate voted in some ridings but it only happened in 50 cities and did not affect outcome'.
CAPS

I really want to thank you Paul for keeping on top of this most important story. I hope it is allowing some of the more "exuberant" commenters to put our political stories in perspective.

One thing I have been wondering is that, even though Ahmadinejad is now thought of as this holocaust denying, Israel destroying, nuclear proliferating, mysticism believing nut bar I thought that when he was first elected it was because he was the populist and popular Mayor of Tehran, champion of the downtrodden and fighter of corruption. Is there any of that core left or has the former picture overtaken the latter in how he is even perceived within Iran?
Dee

Every analysis I've seen of the Iranian election confirm that the announced voting results were subject to widespread fraud. However, the truly amazing thing about the whole debacle is how inept and incompetent the Guardian Council was in carrying out the fraud.
http://intensedebate.com/people/SeanStok SeanStok

lol! But isn't Wells always claiming a math disability? Hopefully O'Malley could pick up slack and help them avoid anything so obvious as an Alberta sweep.
RayK

Check out this piece in the Iranian press.

The Guardian Council itself is now announcing that the total number of votes exceeds 100% turnout of eligible voters in 50 cities! Amazingly they report this in the context of knocking down opposition claims that this happened in as many as 80 to 170 cities.

The council further claims that this could "affect" up to 3 million votes. I assume by "affect" they mean that those 3 million votes are obviously invalid as there were no people to cast them. The council also questions the relevance of this revelation on the basis that 3 million votes would not enough to overcome margin of victory for Ahmadinejad.

I'm not really sure what they are trying to convince people of here because–regardless of the margin of victory–the mere fact that 3 million ballots were apparently cast by non-existant voters would seem to be enough for any sensible person to disregard the integrity of the entire election.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/98711.htm?sectionid=…
http://intensedebate.com/people/DroppingBY DroppingBY

I feel obligated to invoke Godwin's Law.

Godwin's Law (also known as Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
Spock

Picard, but Kirk had a better time.

Orson Bean

. . . and way better "battle music" in the background whenever he was fighting somebody.

hosertohoosier

That is illogical, Orson.

Picard would make a better captain than Bizzaro Kirk. Therefore an intrinsic quality of evil Kirk is that he is a worse captain than Picard. However, another intrinsic quality of evil Kirk is that he is the opposite of good Kirk. ergo, logically, good Kirk must be better than Picard.

hosertohoosier

Here are the 10 provinces where Chatham house assumes Ahmadinejad won reformists, and the percentage of reformist votes they assume he won.

Lorestan is Karroubi's home province (he won 55% of the vote there in 2005), Ilam is a neighbour of Lorestan (Karroubi won there by a solid margin too in 2005). The collapse of the Reformist vote there is easily explained by the overall collapse of Karroubi's electoral machine. Even though Karroubi did do worse than expected, none of the (admittedly inaccurate) polls had Karroubi doing well – they all had him well behind his 2005 results.
(source: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=r_uwMuClOf…

The same is true of the three provinces with defection rates in the 20's – Karroubi did well there in 2005, and collapsed in 2009. Looking at provincial totals you can't see if voters switched, or if new voters showed up. Karroubi's support might have not shown up, while new voters flocked to Ahmadinejad, for instance. Or Ahmadinejad could have reasonably won a large stake among ethnic Lurs who are not necessarily adverse to his politics (or his rural vote-buying).

Lorestan: 44.47%
Ilam: 35%
Hormozegon: 25.35%
Koghilouye & Boyerahmad: 24.99%
Hamedan: 24.56%
Northern Khorasan: 11.3%
Zanjan: 9.33%
Sistan & Baluchistan: 6.46%
Fars: 5%
Golestan: 4.69%
Source: Chatham house report

Mulletaur

Nice work.

Canuckistanian

interesting.

ot, but that blogger for the nation really should have called his blog: "Dreyfuss' Affairs". while it may titillate some readers' prurient interests, it could boost traffic from Harlequin fans ;-)
http://intensedebate.com/people/avr avr

Sore losers? Has anyone been selling that line, other than the usual shameless tyrant-apologists?

hosertohoosier

Hey! Just because I like Harper doesn't make me an apologist for tyr… no wait… I guess the shoe fits.

Chuck VS Macleans

Damn, I thought there was no gay people in Iran, according to there government.

Now your telling me the fix might have been in, for the elections..

Say it aint so…
Chuck VS Macleans

Just to ad, thank-you very much on your reporting Mr.Wells. And everyone else who has commented on this issue.

Really crazy time right now. Listening to some of my friends from Iran right now, reminds me of some of my family mebers during the 90's over the collapse of the USSR.

Sadly I don't think it is going to end well..

http://intensedebate.com/people/SeanStok SeanStok

I think I'd rather be living in Iran right now, as opposed to Iraq, Afghanistan and scores of other nations. (And that's not to diminish your point, but to note that there are reasons to have hope in the face of such a widespread movement for justice. Also, without diminishing the terrible price being paid by many.)

http://intensedebate.com/people/madeyoulook madeyoulook

Is it possible to be a sore loser when the contest was rigged?

It's touching to see the bewilderment that dictators can so incompetently falsify election results. As if competence and dictatorship went together or something.

Dee

Well, these dictators have kept an iron grip on the country for about 30 years so this does demonstrate some level of competence in their malevolence. It's merely surprising that they would be so inept in their fraud such that the obvious latent anger in the country would be so effectively stirred up. Hopefully, their incompetence is the catalyst for real change in Iran.
Canuckistanian

ask Al Gore ;-)

http://wakinguponplanetx.blogspot.com Candace

Paul, thanks for keeping on top of this. I've been following a few different sites and it truly makes me ashamed when I think of all the b*tching and whining we do about our ELECTED (whether we like the results or not) governments. And our crappy turnout.

Hoser: Good number crunching EXCEPT:
- Our elections allow for scrutineers from each party, at each polling station (and, since I've been one a few times, I can attest to one for each poll, although a scrutineer may have more than one poll at a station to review).
- Each poll is counted with a minimum of two scrutineers watching while gov't officials count the actual votes, twice, before recording them.
- Scrutineers were only allowed in a minority (don't know the exact number) of polls, and were NOT allowed to view the actual tallying of the votes, just the voting process.

At this point, does it really matter whether Admadinnerjacket won or not? NOBODY'S vote counted, the numbers were probably pulled out of thin air.

It isn't always about what the US or the west would prefer.

hosertohoosier

I'm not sure the numbers were pulled out of thin air. While that would have been the easiest way to rig the election I doubt you would see turnout over 100% in such an instance. The best way to avoid scrutiny is to pick reasonable numbers. If the election was rigged, it was rigged by ballot-stuffing and possibly fraudulent reporting from some election officers. It doesn't look like a centralized job (otherwise they could have made more reasonable numbers).

Amateur Hour

"hosertohoosier" raises some fair points about the tendency (especially amongst bloggers — but also of "mainstream" journos) to take as gospel reports that make really bad people look even worse — though the information be skewed, biased or contrary to facts.

Mr. Dreyfuss, the journalist making use of Chatham House's numbers, has a coulourful background concerning Iran, dating back to the intrigues of the Revolution and the Iran-Contra affair. Indeed, he seems to have spent some time working for Lyndon LaRouch's Executive Intelligence Review and LaRouch Publishing. That he does not mention this on his impressive resume is a bit odd. He's an accomplished and widely-published journalist, but so are Thomas Friedman, Judy Miller, Mark Steyn and David Frum. Having a thriving career doesn't insulate one from bias or from being flat-out being wrong on occasion.

I respect the work of Chatham House (and have happily worked with them in the past), but as with all think-tanks, they are also not immune to bias, either.

It's exceedingly difficult to check one's sources in a place like Iran. The most compelling argument regarding vote-rigging has been made by Mousavi himself in his letters to the Guardian Counsel. Apparently, ballots were printed with serial numbers. Prior to the election, in anticipation of high turnout, even more serial-numbered ballots were produced. Then, additional quantities of non-serial-numbered ballots were printed. Despite this, Mousavi's side claims voting stations in areas where he has strong support ran out of ballots.

This allegation (ballots without serial numbers and running out of ballots) is at the core of his contention that the vote was flawed and must be re-run.