Iranian Elections

[Marshal Murat]

I am not entirely sure that the election was substantially rigged. A seemingly representative poll before the election suggested that Ahmadinejad was going to win.

I assume (the link was broken) that you're referencing the 2:1 poll taken three weeks before election. Those results are only those who chose to respond to the poll, while 27% said that they didn't have a decision yet. Hardly the best way to refute nearly 100,000 disgruntled Iranians arguing that Mousavi lost a rigged election not only in Tehran but in his hometown.

Previous Link to Polling Data

More to the point, however, the poll that appears in today's op-ed shows a 2 to 1 lead in the thinnest sense: 34 percent of those polled said they'd vote for Ahmadinejad, 14 percent for Mousavi. That leaves 52 percent unaccounted for. In all, 27 percent expressed no opinion in the election, and another 15 percent refused to answer the question at all. Eight percent said they'd vote for none of the listed candidates; the rest for minor candidates.

One should be enormously wary of the current value of a poll taken so far before such a heated contest, particularly one where more than half of voters did not express an opinion.