Iranian Elections

[KarlXII]

I'll just throw in a saying my father told me,

"Absolute power corrupts absolutely"

[Lemur]

Things we civilians can do to help:

Set up a proxy for Iranians to get around government censorship

Change your Facebook page to green, adding this image as your profile

(I'll admit, the second one is kind of dopey, but it's what some of the Iranian students have been asking for, and twenty-year-olds facing down guns don't have a big sense of irony.)

[KarlXII]

Things we civilians can do to help:

Set up a proxy for Iranians to get around government censorship

Change your Facebook page to green, adding this image as your profile

(I'll admit, the second one is kind of dopey, but it's what some of the Iranian students have been asking for, and twenty-year-olds facing down guns don't have a big sense of irony.)

Changed mine to green

[Lemur]

Good post at AmCon for those who think our Prez should dig in and get involved:

The President of the United States is not and must not be seen as a partisan in the elections of other nations. No matter the party and no matter the country, their cause is not and cannot be the same as his. [...] It would be seen as an attempt to use worldwide sympathy for the movement in question to bolster himself politically while doing absolutely nothing for the people with whom he supposedly sympathizes. It would give the regime the pretext of treating Mousavi as an American lackey. They may do this in any case, but Washington need not enable or provide justification for this. The administration’s wait-and-see approach is the right one.

-edit-

Tried to change the background color in Facebook. Epic fail.

This liveblog thread at HuffPo seems to have the most up-to-date information from the most sources.

[Lemur]

Time has a decent article indecently spread over six pages. Here's the text:

Was Ahmadinejad's Win Rigged?

Iran's Interior Ministry announced Saturday that incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won 63.29% of the vote in the country's presidential election — a landslide. But Iran's opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi says he won and that the result had been rigged; Mousavi supporters have taken to the streets in Tehran and other cities to protest the official outcome.

Ahmadinejad, for his part, insists that he won fairly, while Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, initially congratulated Iranians for proving their "great worth." The result, Khamenei said, was a "divine assessment." On Monday, though, Khamenei ordered the powerful Guardian Council to investigate the fraud allegations.

So far, Washington has taken a cautious approach to commenting on the election, though a senior U.S. official called the results "not credible" and Vice President Joe Biden told Meet the Press that "there's some real doubt" whether Ahmadinejad actually won. "There's an awful lot of questions about how this election was run," he said. Here are five key questions being raised about the legitimacy of the results.

Was the Voting Properly Supervised?

As always in Iran, this election was run by the Interior Ministry. In each ward, ministry and local government officials and respected local leaders form committees to oversee the election process. Iran's powerful Guardian Council appoints thousands of officials to supervise actual voting at polling stations. Candidates can also send an observer to each polling station to watch the voting and ballot count. However, there are no independent election observers in Iran.

Did the Voting go Smoothly?

Not everywhere. On Friday, the polling day, there were reports that opposition observers were barred from entering some voting stations. Mousavi campaign officials also said that a number of stations in the northwest and south had run out of ballots.

The huge numbers of people voting — the government says turnout was more than 80%, one of the highest rates since the Revolution in 1979 — meant that some stations were kept open until late Friday night. Many Iranians, especially those in Tehran, have reported that just before voting ended text-messaging and pro-Mousavi websites were blocked.

Was the Government's Fast Announcement of Results Normal?

No. The Interior Ministry announced the first results within an hour of the polls closing, and the official result less than a day later. The ministry is supposed to wait three days after voting before it certifies the result to allow time for disputes to be examined. Friday's announcement, which was based on a very small count, came just minutes after Mousavi declared himself to be "definitely the winner." According to a Mousavi official in Paris, the opposition leader was initially informed by the Interior Ministry that he had won. But ministry officials shortly thereafter publicly called it for Ahmadinejad.

Gary Sick, a Columbia University professor and Iranian-affairs adviser for three U.S. Administrations, said that given the apparent record turnout, it would have been impossible to announce a definitive result so soon after the polls closed because Iran does not use voting machines. The country uses paper ballots that must be counted by hand — a time-consuming process, Sick said in an interview posted on the Council on Foreign Relations website.

A fast announcement is not necessarily proof of rigging, says John Stremlau, vice president for peace programs at the Carter Center, which has monitored 75 elections over the past two decades. But for people to have confidence in those announcements a country needs an independent electoral commission that acts fairly and transparently. "You have none of that in the case of Iran," says Stremlau.

Are Any of the Vote Totals Suspicious?

Yes. Support for Ahmadinejad was strangely consistent across the country, a real change from previous elections when candidates drew different levels of support in different regions.

There were several other puzzlers in the results:

• According to official figures, Ahmadinejad handily beat Mousavi in Mousavi's hometown of Tabriz — a shocking result given the candidate's popularity in his own region.

• Ahmadinejad beat Mousavi in the big cities, even though Iran's very limited polling and anecdotal evidence indicate that Mousavi is far more popular than the President in cities.

• The official figures put support for the other main reformist candidate, Mehdi Karoubi, at below 1%. That is far less than what was expected, and a drastic departure from the pattern in previous elections.

How Popular Is Ahmadinejad in Iran?

It's possible that the President is simply far more popular than people outside Iran want to believe. There's no doubt that he has won the support of many voters by focusing on Iran's nuclear ambitions and by playing up the perceived threat from Washington and Israel.

At the same time, Iran's economy is a mess, and people are unhappy about a raft of everyday issues, from the price of food to joblessness.

The result is also surprising in light of Iran's demographic trends. There is a lot of evidence that as the country grows younger, it is also growing more moderate. A reform candidate won Iran's presidency with 70% of the vote in 1997, and increased his share to 78% four years later. In 2005, the reform movement had fallen on lean times and many young voters stayed at home; Ahmadinejad squeaked into the presidency in a second round of voting widely seen as having been tampered with. If the results this time are legitimate, it means that two-thirds of Iran's voters have become more conservative over the past four years.

It's also worth noting that big turnouts are often a sign that voters want change and tend to favor the challenger. This time around, by contrast, the incumbent President won two-thirds of the votes cast, according to the government.

[Marshal Murat]

Lemur - Thanks for the update and my Facebook profile pick has changed.

Recent HuffPost update also states that some Revolutionary Guard generals have been arrested after trying to get Iranian Army troops to join protests...unconfirmed.

If only there were facts that the media could accurately report to satisfy my curiosity.

[Banquo's Ghost]

The shootings by the Basiji were recorded and broadcast by the UK's Channel 4 news.