Stolen Election in Iran? An Inside View of Vote Fraud »
Posted By dissent 7 months, 2 weeks ago in NewsMuch was made of the fact that millions of paper ballots had been counted within just a few hours. "Not possible," according to some pundits, and a clear sign of blatant vote rigging. Surely such a huge number of pieces of paper cannot be sorted and counted within such a short time! The authorities must have been making the results up before the counting had finished, was the seemingly logical conclusion.
This is not necessarily so. In fact, results that take one or more days to come out are to be treated with far more caution. It raises the suspicion that some backroom haggling had been going on, where one candidate needed some time to convince the other – either by the sweet lure of money, or the menacing spectre of the bullet – to see things his way. In the properly run elections I observed, the count was often swift and accurate. To illustrate this, a simple bit of arithmetic may suffice.
In my experience an average polling station has anywhere from less than one thousand to 3000 registered voters; let’s take the figure of 2000 for this exercise. An election commission consists typically of some five people; again, an average. In Iran, there were four candidates on the ballot and the reported turnout was around 85%. Thus, assuming that precincts in Iran did not have a meaningfully higher number of registered voters than 2000, some 1700 ballots needed counting. (To be precise, all ballots need to be counted, including the unused and invalid ones, but those are obviously quicker to process than used ones). This comes to 340 ballots per commission member.
Let’s give the election officials one hour to sort the ballots, one hour to count them, and one hour to fill out the various electoral protocols (and count the unused and invalid ballots), so that results can be in within three hours after the closing of the poll. This requires each commission member to sort a little less than 6 pieces of paper per minute, not a particularly cumbersome job, particularly given that there were only four candidates and thus only four different piles on which to put a particular ballot. Now that the ballots are sorted, each member has the same ten seconds per ballot for the count – not a Herculean task either. In fact, a sea of time – enough to allow for a double-check and still make it within the hour.
Given the enthusiastic Western reports of the role played by modern communication technology in the present Iranian upheaval – it seems that everybody is tweeting and facebooking over there – we can safely assume that reporting the official results from the local precincts to the Regional or Central Election Commission did not have to be done by time-consuming pigeon-post.
Wherever I witnessed fraud on the precinct level it either consisted of blatant ballot stuffing (Azerbaijan: the emptying of the ballot box was followed by a loud thud where the huge wad of folded together ballots came down), ballot stealing (Serbia: in order to render the election null and void by "disappearing" ballots so the turnout would fall below the legally required 50%), or voter-faking (Georgia: a tiny, empty station where hardly anyone had voted at noon had magically produced over 1000 enthusiasts for democracy just a few hours later, all using the same curled signature on the voter register…). In all these cases the subsequent count was no doubt perfect (I wasn't at each of these counts, after all, so I cannot be entirely sure), but, if so, that didn’t make the final results fair. The actual counting fraud I have come across was always done at one or two levels above the precinct level – for the sophisticated fraud it made no sense to fiddle results where too many people might see what is going on. It also took time to arrive at these fake results, because it takes time to either buy people off or threaten them enough to make them shut up. Falsifying results is also a bit of a conspiracy – you have to keep (the representatives of) the victims of your fraud away from the action, paperwork has to disappear, people have to be intimidated – it takes some work, really.
Another thing to bear in mind when assessing allegations of fraud in an election is who might have committed the fraud. All too often in the Western mind, the storyline of an "opposition" fighting against a "regime" leads to a reflexive sympathy for, and trust in, the former. Yet, politicians being what they are, it is always possible that the opposition employs the underhand methods in order to fight its way to power.
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dissent
we live in a culture of war.
let's make it a culture of peace.
"my country is the world. and my religion is to ...
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Endoscopy7 months, 2 weeks ago
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This person is an idiot and dissent is for buying this idiocy.
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This person ignores that part of the problem with the 2 to 3 hours is tabulating all of the reports coming in from all over the country. That does not happen instantaneously. Each precint has to report the results in to wherever they are to report them. The place there has to take these calls and there will not be enough phones there for all to call at once. So each precinct has to wait until they get a line in to report their results. These results will have to be tabulated by some means. Using a computer is fine but within 3 hours there is no physical way for all of those precincts to report in and have their results tabulated within 3 hours of the pools closing.
I guess dissent and this foolish person ignores that problem.-
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Candida7 months, 2 weeks ago
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Endoscopy: "within 3 hours there is no physical way for all of those precincts to report in and have their results tabulated within 3 hours of the pools closing."
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I've said this before, and now I'll say it again. You should pay more attention to your neighbors. Canada hand-counts all its ballots and Canada has 6 time zones and some very remote locations. Within 3-4 hours after the election we usually know who the next prime minister will be. I worked in the last election and about an hour after the polls closed, I was at home watching the election results rolling in; all my ballots counted, recoded, packed away and reported. We reported by phone to the chief election officer of our riding, who then reported it to the central election office. I guess with computers, everybody could have reported at the same time and the results could have been tabulated automatically, but even with phone-in reporting, we had the results in 3 hours.
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Charlson7 months, 2 weeks ago
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The man made a credible argument about the quickness of counting ballots but that was not the only irregularity that happened. More ballots than voters, closing voting sites before the official end of voting, and intimidation at voting sites by hard-line supporters of Ahmadinejad.
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Candida7 months, 2 weeks ago
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Charlson,
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The problems you are listing are quite possible, but then the opposition should attack the results on the basis of those facts rather than with mass demonstrations. I know I'm repeating myself, but what would the US government have done if mass demonstrations had been organized in 2000? -
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hyperbola7 months, 2 weeks ago
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The "more ballots than voters" arguments simply show that the propagators of this "story" don't know how elections are run in Iran. OR, that they hope you don't know and will swallow this story at face value.
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The fact is that they don't have precincts in the fashion that we do. An Iranian can vote at ANY polling station in the entire country by presenting his national identity documentation (something that most of the world uses, but we don't have). In such a system, there is no reason to expect the number of votes in any "precinct" to match up with the number of voters living there - and this has been observed in EVERY Iranian election. -
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hyperbola7 months, 2 weeks ago
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Simlarly, the argument that Mousavi should have won his "home, Azeri" district is belied by Azeris themselves.
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We are being told many stories that fit American preconceptions and only have credibility if one does not know much about Iran.
IRAN: AZERIS CAUTIOUS ABOUT SUPPORTING NATIVE SON MOUSAVI IN TEHRAN POLITICAL FIGHT
.... Mousavi’s lackluster record on promoting civil rights for minority groups in Iran is the main reason why many Azeris are currently sitting on the sidelines. Iranian Azeris see little to gain from getting involved. Regardless of the outcome of the power struggle in Tehran and Qom, few Azeris expect that their quality of life will improve significantly....
http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/insightb/art... -
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dissent7 months, 2 weeks ago
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The man made a credible argument about the quickness of counting ballots but that was not the only irregularity that happened. More ballots than voters, closing voting sites before the official end of voting, and intimidation at voting sites by hard-line supporters of Ahmadinejad.
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the speed of the count was the primary reason that drove the protests for some days. mousavi had already declared victory before polls closed. in the end, no evidence of electoral fraud was given. all that was needed in order to initiate the destabilization was the accusation of electoral fraud, whether verified or not. turns out it was not
the us government has been funding efforts to destabilize the iranian government for the past 2 years. $75 million is the confirmed expense but other calculations have it as high as $400 million.
now obama says we had nothing to do with it. $400 million worth of nothing.
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fempatriot7 months, 2 weeks ago
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It appears that the USA was full of voter fraud during the elections of 2000 and 2004, so I don't know why anyone in this nation is obsessing over Iran when nobody tried to stop it here. What it meant for us was 8 years of disaster. The Iranians have already had several years of disaster with Ahmadinejad, and it looks like they're going to have another term with him. Actually, when given the chance to explain himself, he makes a lot more sense than people give him credit for, but many Iranians want to move out from the religious rule of the Ayatollah into a more modern nation. It's a clash of a very old culture with the modern culture, and I'm not sure modernity is always best--but the women could use more rights there. Just remember--American women have only been able to vote for less than a century. And we had to fight for that.
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injest7 months, 2 weeks ago
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This story is JUST NOW showing up on propeller?
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Today is the 23rd the Iran election was on the 12th..
Yes the election was a fraud.
Yes the Mullahs admit the election was a fraud
Yes the Mullahs are allowing the election to stand (I have no idea why)
Yes the people of Iran are protesting
Yes the protesters are being murdered massacred; it’s really a bad situation
Yes our Congress Our Democrat CONTROLLED Congress has taken a stand denouncing the Iranian government AND stands in support of the protesters.
Yes President Obama voted “PRESENT” on the situation in Iran Thus “GREEN LIGHTED” hardcore retaliation against the protesters.
Yes the protesters are being murdered massacred; it’s really a bad situation.
UPDATE!
President Obama is thinking about possibly un-inviting the Iranian government to our 4th of July weenie roast, no decision has been made yet.
Did I mention protesters are being murdered massacred; it’s really a bad situation?
BTW this has been going on for the last 11 days, hope that brings propeller up to date..-
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dissent7 months, 2 weeks ago
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This story is JUST NOW showing up on propeller?
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yes
Today is the 23rd the Iran election was on the 12th..
so?
Yes the election was a fraud.
there is no proof and none has been offered. all there is accusations, outrage and hysteria
Yes the Mullahs admit the election was a fraud
no they haven't
US 'has agents working inside Iran'
UPDATED ON:
Thursday, June 25, 2009
04:01 Mecca time, 01:01 GMT
But the Guardian Council, Iran's highest legislative body, has said that there were no incidences of major fraud in the vote and has declared that the official results will stand.
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2009/06...
note the date and time.
perhaps this will prove more satisfactory to you since you're such a strong believer in the short shelf-life of analytical information or otherwise
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