My final thoughts on those Iran vote analyses:
From Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004 to Mexico City in 2006 to Iran in 2009, tightly contested elections are often accompanied by claims of fraud or serious error: that is, that the election outcome does not match the intentions of the people who voted. Sometimes there is direct evidence of fraud: people voting multiple times, tampering with ballot boxes, etc., and often there is evidence of mistakes, including overvotes (such as a person choosing a candidate and also writing in his name), lost ballots, and technical problems with voting machines.
But the the usual sort of evidence for major problems is a discrepancy between the overall election outcome and what was expected from polls or from extrapolation from other elections. A notorious example is Patrick Buchanan's votes on the "butterfly ballot" in Palm Beach in 2000, which were inconsistent with patterns in other Florida counties in that year.
For the Iran election, the natural step is to compare to previous election returns and look for large changes, as was done by political scientist Walter Mebane. Striking patterns found in such a comparison to not prove fraud but can be useful in giving people a sense of where to focus attention if they want to look further.
Scacco and Beber's analysis is based on the idea that, if there is election fraud, the cheaters are probably acting in a hurry and with various constraints on what numbers they can actually manipulate. As a result, the fake numbers might show some patterns that would be highly unlikely to be seen in tallies of real votes. Again, it is hard for such circumstantial evidence to be entirely convincing on its own, but the patterns they find can support particular theories of how the vote totals came to be.
Another way to calibrate our understanding of such statistical tests is to apply them to a large number of actual elections to see where apparent anomalies appear. Are anomalies happening pretty much at random, as might be expected if one were simply trawling through the data looking for patterns, or do they actually coincide with elections known to be suspicious or fraudulent on other grounds?
Even if statistical tests cannot prove fraud, they can help the news media and observers on the ground to focus their inquiries.
6.27.2009
Statistical Tests and Election Fraud
@ 4:29 PM
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38 cities where every vote went for A-jad....
At least 50 cities with over 100% voting...
Um, I'm-a-dinner-jacket getting 60% would not qualify as "tightly contested election" - or am I missing something?
Iran has recently released results of individual ballot boxes. These were counted by local volunteers, who keep copies of the original 'form 22' tallies. It should be relatively simple task for any seriously concerned with proving fraud to canvas for inconsistencies between released results and those in the homes of the volunteers.
Masoud
http://www.moi.ir/Portal/Home/ShowPage.aspx?Object=News&ID=973e4894-bb05-4af9-8d41-c4f67017e1c8&LayoutID=b05ef124-0db1-4d33-b0b6-90f50139044b&CategoryID=832a711b-95fe-4505-8aa3-38f5e17309c9
The problem with this article is very simple. There is presumptive evidence (the 100%+ turnout in many areas, the size of A'jad's claimed victory) that if fraud occurred, the numbers you're trying to analyze are complete fiction, with no relation to reality. If that's the case, you can analyze them until doomsday, and they'll tell you nothing.
Brian, perhaps you haven't been folloing close enough; made up numbers, unless done very carefully, do tell you something: they tell you there's a high probability they're made up.
Was there fraud in the Iranian elections? Probably. Is there anything anyone outside Iran co do about it? No.
The recent protests were surprising (to me) in their duration and intensity, however I don’t think we can extrapolate a parallel with the 1979 revolution that upended the Shah. If anything changes it will be done by Hashemi Rafsanjani, provided he can put together enough behind-the scenes support to turn Khamenei out of office. (Note—the Supreme Leader serves at the pleasure of the Assembly of Experts, which Rafsanjani heads, and that Raf-jan has always held a senior position to Khamenei within the forces that put together the Revolution.) Raf-jan doesn’t want to scrap the Islamic Republic, but he isn’t pleased that it has strayed so far into confrontation and troublemaking. The next couple months should determine quite a bit. Even if Khamenei isn’t tossed out, he may end up so seriously weakened that real power may devolve onto someone else.
Masoud's comment is interesting. A lot of the speculation about this ignores the fact that Iran's an extremely populous country that involved tens of thousands of people in counting ballots (the ballots came in fast, but not incredibly faster than earlier elections). Given that the opposition here has widespread support both within the government and with the general populace, a number of their supporters are involved in tabulating the results in some way. Ask them whether the results for their polling place make sense.
I believe the IRS uses the same method outlined in this article to identify tax returns for auditing.
Some real time data from Kentucky, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Michigan is available here:
http://voteforamerica.net/editorials/Comments.aspx?ArticleId=272&ArticleName=Realtime+Results+From+Iran+and+USA
The realttime data also seems to validate the high R^2 found on the Iran fraud graph.
@Pragmatus
Fareed Zakaria has an interesting article in the June 20 Newsweek. He thinks that, no matter what happens with Iran's government, the legitimacy of its theocracy is dying. Legitimacy here is as perceived by the Iranian populace and perhaps even by its rulers. That is, theocracy as an Iranian ideal is dead or dying even if the theocratic government isn't.
JMNorris…
Thanks for that article. I think change in Iran will come, and it surely will come, not by force but by finesse.
No, Peter. Invented numbers tell you nothing, because they bear no relationship to real ballots being cast. They could have been invented weeks, even months, ahead of time.
Here;s a rare example of such fraud actually being uncovered, even if it took 45 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_people%27s_referendum,_1946
The people of Poland voted against abolishing the Senate and introducing Communism. The results were announced as heavily in favor. Not until the Communists were forced out were the real ballots found and tallied. Analyzing the Communist-presented results would tell you nothing about the real status of Polish opinion.
The same holds here- you cannot draw valid conclusions from irrelevant and invalid data.
When my son first told me the results of the Iranian election, he asked me if I thought fraud was involved. I asked him the totals. When I knew the totals, I told him fraud was involved.
It actually is quite confusing why. First of all, the true power is held by the clerics who control the military, the intelligence agencies and the courts. They also vet every candidate for office. It really doesn't matter all that much who is president, so why fudge the results?
The second question is why so blatantly? Ahmadinejad would still be president if he won only 51% of the vote. Heck, make it a nice 56% to claim that a few hundred thousands votes here and there wouldn't make much difference (thus claiming that minor fraud couldn't be a factor), announce the votes the next afternoon, and no one would be the wiser.
Sure, your opponents will claim fraud, but have little proof. Maybe Ahmadinejad's program of passing out money and potatoes to rural Iranians worked. Maybe not. Whatever, a lower percentage of the vote total would have been sufficient to get Ahmadinejad elected and still let Iran claim that they have a viable opposition. Heck, maybe they'll win next time around. (Remember, it really doesn't matter, all real power is controlled by the clerics anyway).
I think what we're seeing is that the clerics are not in control any more. This was Ahamdinejad saying "screw you" to everyone. He announces what could only be assumed to be fraudulent vote totals, and cowed Khamenei to go along. After all, the Assembly of Experts is full of people who aren't too thrilled with Khamenei.
The question is who now controls the military and the Banji street thugs, and I believe they now back Ahamdinejad more than the clerics in Qom.
@Brian Jenkins:
Most of those trying to prove fraud are not looking at the question of how many people voted for whom. They're looking at distributions of digits in the results to give credence to non-random, human manipulation of the results. That's the part you seem to be missing.
The NY Times,in an article published the other day,said:
"Mr. Ahmadinejad has filled crucial ministries and other top posts with close friends and allies who have spread ideological and operational support for him nationwide. These analysts estimate that he has replaced 10,000 government employees to cement his loyalists through the bureaucracies, so that his allies run the organizations responsible for both the contested election returns and the official organs that have endorsed them."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/25/world/middleeast/25tehran.html
So it turns out that that Ahmadinejad's people controlled the vote counting and reporting that matters.
Any news on Ohio '04?
Guess not.
"Tightly contested elections?"
Characterizing these as tightly contested elections is disingenuous and misleading, at least for Florida 2000 and Iran 2009. The point in question for both of these elections is the overwhelming suspicion of fraud created by events that obviously cannot transpire without fraud or massive error taking place.
Pat Buchanan's inordinate vote total in Palm Beach offended common sense; and even his limited supply of it. You call it "inconsistent," but the odds of that were quadrillions to one: That is not "inconsistent," it is obviously "wrong."
The apparently instantaneous ballot counting in Iran is a lie, only a child that believes in flying reindeer can accept that as an actual outcome.
Mousavi failed to win towns in which he had (and still has) overwhelming support and very little opposition; this offends common sense.
In Ohio 2004, some precinct reported a thousand more votes than they had registered voters.
We are not invoking "statistics" to claim that is impossible, we are invoking that more ancient discipline, "arithmetic."
I am a professional mathematician and statistician, but we don't need statistical support to be outraged by blatant theft.
By way of analogy, Newtonian physics breaks down and fails at the extremes of temperature, pressure, gravity, and speed. It demonstrably fails to work. Einstein's theory works much further into those extremes, but also starts to produce nonsense answers when pushed too far.
This is the case for statistics as well. The bell curve is a good approximation of many things, but almost nothing actually works on a bell curve at the extremes.
Gelman and other statisticians pretend that it does and they must maintain their pretense that votes like those in Iran were just "improbable" and not "impossible."
The problem is that using the bell curve and standard deviations, statistics will happily predict non-zero odds of events that are blatantly impossible, because the bell curve is infinitely long. According to it, using a standard poll, there is a non-zero chance a candidate may have received, perfectly legally, over 100% of the votes! And this too, is something the statistician will call "improbable."
The fact is that the bell curve is practically useless when describing extreme events, those with less than a 2% chance of occurrence, and pretending that 1% of the curve on the right or the left is still an accurate model of reality is both misleading and harmful. The chances of voter fraud and a stolen election in Iran are 100%. The chances of fraud in Florida and Ohio --- 100%. We don't know if these last two determined the election; but it is not science to pretend that an equation corresponds to reality when it demonstrably does not. A single counter-example can disprove a hypothesis, and this pretense that the bell curve is a good approximation of reality in the extremes has been disproved literally thousands of times, yet persists.
Statistician's perpetuate harm and fraud when they help maintain the illusion that events just might be fair when in the statistician's own mind blatant fraud occurred. Once there is no reasonable doubt that fraud occurred, a statistician writing for the public has a moral responsibility to state his beliefs.
Two hours after the balloting ended Mousavi declared victory. This caused the Supreme Leader and Little Hitler to announce the results (which they already knew) a day earlier.
Mousavi says his camp made it announcement because Mousavi had been called by someone in one of the ministries and was told to get ready to be announced as the victor.
Sounds like the games being played here are not merely Little Hitler's and his patrons. However, Iran has been changed by all of this. The people born after 1979 are now assuming positions of control and questioning the 14th century theocracy imposed on them without the consent of the governed.
Things will change. There will continue to be pressure from the outside. But the change will occur on the inside first.
I have been reading everything I could about the Iranian elections and I am still SOO confused.
Nate, please help to enlighten as you are such an election expert....
It was reported that the major candidates each had election observers in the polling stations - even though Moussavi states that there were intimidations in some cases. Nobody ever reported whether there were any observers present for the actual vote counting which would be absolutely most important thing to rule out the possibility that phantom numbers were made up by the interior ministry. Curious enough, this was not one of Moussavi's complaints to the election commission - implying that his observers did observe most of the vote counting (?). Some people - and not only the Iranian hardliners are pointing out that it would be pretty darn difficult to develop a vote rigging scheme by the means of adding 11 million fraudulent ballots to the polling stations throughout the country - a major operation that would leave many witnesses to potentially spill the beans. If these results were fraudulent, it could only have been done by completely fabricating vote counts and this implies the absence of any observers during the counting process. It will be interesting to see if the actual ballots or the just the counts per ballot box will be made available by the interior ministry - the actual ballots supposedly have a fingerprint for identification purposes and thus seem hard to forge...
Everybody with more background knowledge about the counting process in Iran, please post here to enlighten me and everybody else....
Thanks so much!
Only a really sloppy fraud, such as in Iran, is easily detectible statistically. As others have pointed out, much of the evidence is solve-by-inspection kind of stuff.
I think we all agree that sanctity of the ballot box is the key to fair elections. That includes more tan just counting the ballots, it includes assuring that people are eligible to vote and only vote once. In the US, that is where the greatest fraud potential lies, and it's a balancing effort to assure that eligible voters votes are not diluted by fraudulent votes.
Here's a new paper submitted to the Annals of Applied Statistics by Boudewijn Roukema analyzing the outcomes of the Iran election using Benford's Law: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0906/0906.2789v1.pdf Fascinating to me, but I would love to hear a real statistician's take on the analysis here.
PS: @Tony C. Your discussion of the moral obligations of statisticians is inspiring to me as an academic in a completely different field. Thanks!
Nate, Nate.
Please moderate.
So much hate.
Poisons 538.
Thanks mate.
Nick
Agree on the hate comment. This thread seems hate-free however. Has it been moderated or did we just get lucky? BTW I love disagreement, not hate.
wv cultsf--a genre I often appreciate
Opus 132:
let NYT write whatever they want. the fact remains that each station has at least one locally trusted person that has to close the empty box, voting, counting, and has to sign the final results. These people are mostly teachers or civil servants known to the neighborhood. that all of them are ahmadinejad's men only shows that after two weeks the blind people here have not been able to find a single decent clue.
Besides, mousavi had observers in 90% of the stations. The fact that he is, now, after the election, complaining that 10% of his observers were rejected based on various reasons by the ministry of the interior speaks volumes i think. these people have signed the final results at each station.
oh, and it is the first time in iran that the results are published by box (station), not just district.
and finally, i think it was a desperate attempt to topple the regime, and not successful.
oh, and for god's sake people, don't say this "turnout of more than 100%":
this is not new, it happens in every election in iran. the reason is:
-the districts are sometimes different for census and for election.
-the election is always held in a weekend and cities along the coast of caspian sea usually have higher than 100% turnout.
-The population of non-local students and soldiers is not counted when they come up with the eligible numbers.
now when you look at the names of cities with high turnout, it makes perfect sense.
Typo? -- "Striking patterns found in such a comparison do not prove fraud"
Nate, now can you do the same thing on the "Leaked List of 104" that's making the rounds? Already in this Rotoworld.com thread (which may vanish), people are saying that there are statistically too many "big names" on the list. Then again, maybe the improvements brought by steroids or the covered tests in 2003 being oriented toward bigger names could account for this?
The only thing that really matters in Iran is that the supreme Khamenei is commander in chief of the Revolutionary Guards, who enjoy an SS-like prominence in both the security apparatus and the econonomy.
And in A-jad, Khamenei has found a kindred spirit who's both eager and capable of gradually evolving Persia into an Islamist equivalent of North Korea.
Rafsanjani? He hasn't figured it out yet, but under the diabolical partnership of K & A, Raf-jan is well on his way to becoming Hindenburg.
Any comments?
Martin Weisbrot writes:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/06/28-3
... After searching through thousands of news articles without finding any substantive information on the electoral process, I contacted Seyed Mohammad Marandi, who heads the North American Studies department at the University of Teheran. He described the electoral procedures to me, and together we interviewed, by phone, Sayed Moujtaba Davoodi, a poll worker who participated in the June 12 election in region 13 (of 22 regions) in Tehran. Mr. Daboodi has worked in elections for the past 16 years. The following is from their description of the procedures.
According to their account, there are 14 people working at each polling place, in addition to an observer representing each candidate. Most polling places are schools or mosques; if the polling place is a school then the team of 14 people would include teachers. There are 2-4 representatives of the Guardian Council, and 2 from the local police. After the last votes are cast, the ballots are counted in the presence of the 14 people plus the candidates' representatives. All of them sign five documents that contain the vote totals. One of the documents goes into the ballot box; one stays with the leader of the local election team; and the others go to other levels of the electoral administration, including the Guardian Council and the Interior.
The vote totals are then sent to a local center that also has representatives of the Guardian Council, Interior, and the candidates. They add up the figures from a number of ballot boxes, and then send them to Interior. In this election, the numbers were also sent directly to Interior from the individual polling places, in the presence of the 14-18 witnesses at the ballot box.
Each voter presents identification, and his or her name and information is entered into a computer, and also recorded in writing. The voter's thumbprint is also put on the stub of the ballot. The voter's identification is stamped to prevent multiple voting at different voting places, and there is also a computer and written record of everyone who voted at each polling place.
If this information is near accurate, it would appear that large scale fraud is extremely difficult, if not impossible, without creating an extensive trail of evidence. Indeed, if this election was stolen, there must be tens of thousands of witnesses -- or perhaps hundreds of thousands - to the theft. Yet there are no media accounts of interviews with such witnesses.
Is it possible that, in most of the country, the procedures outlined above - followed in previous elections - were abruptly abandoned, with ballot boxes whisked away before anyone could count them at the precinct level? Again, many of the more than 700,000 people involved in the electoral process would have been witnesses to such a large-scale event. Given the courage that hundreds of thousands of people have demonstrated in taking to the streets, we would expect at least some to come forward with information on what happened.
Rostam Pourzal, an Iranian-American human rights campaigner, told me that it is common knowledge in Iran that these are the election procedures and that they were generally followed in this election. Professor Marandi concurred, and added: "There's just no way that any large-scale or systematic fraud could have taken place."
The government has agreed to post the individual ballot box totals on the web. This would provide another opportunity for any of the hundreds of thousands of witnesses to the precinct-level vote count to say that they witnessed a different count, if any did so."
Chitragupta:
All of that makes little difference if the ballot boxes are not actually totaled. We know the election was called and certified within hours, and by other accounts, insiders were informed of the results within ONE hour of the polls closing.
I believe, along with some Iranian citizen tweeters, that it is logistically impossible to accurately total and certify this many ballot box totals from across the country.
So who cares if the ballot box total was witnessed, if the addition of ballot box totals was not? What we are likely to see is a show, the government will find a dozen people (or actors) to say "I was as surprised by Ahmadinejad's win as anybody, but I witnessed the total at my ballot box with my own eyes and it is beyond doubt."
Just like the ham-handed actor "confessions" of being influenced by the BBC or VOA to commit immoral acts or looting.
Oops. I'm obviously behind the times! The statistical explanation I was looking for was beautifully done here on 6/18:
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/06/karroubis-unlucky-7s.html
Thanks, everyone & 538 for the great discussion.
well there are some obvious proof for this, in province lorestan, people have voted in 100-packets, i mean all the votes are multipliers of 100!
in pldokhtar city, we have negative bad votes, i mean those not counted.
if u add it up to the correct votes, u get the total votes that is less than correct votes! thats obviously an excel job!
Reese Erlich writes:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/06/28-10
One excerpt:
On the day of the 2009 election, election officials illegally barred many opposition observers from the polls. The opposition had planned to use text messaging to communicate local vote tallies to a central location. The government shut down SMS messaging! So the vote count was entirely dependent on a government tally by officials sympathetic to the incumbent.
I heard many anecdotal accounts of voting boxes arriving pre-stuffed and of more ballots being printed than are accounted for in the official registration numbers. It seems unlikely that the Iranian government will allow meaningful appeals or investigations into the various allegations about vote rigging.
A study by two professors at Chatham House and the Institute of Iranian Studies at University of St. Andrews, Scotland, took a close look at the official election results and found some major discrepancies. For Ahmadinejad to have sustained his massive victory in one third of Iran's provinces, he would have had to carry all his supporters, all new voters, all voters previously voting centrist and about 44% of previous reformist voters.
@ Chitragupta
They add up the figures from a number of ballot boxes, and then send them to Interior. In this election, the numbers were also sent directly to Interior from the individual polling places, in the presence of the 14-18 witnesses at the ballot box.
And who controls the central tabulation and reporting at Interior? That's where the rigging occurs,if only to reduce the number of conspirators to the absolute minimum.(The playbook of Robert Mugabe.)
The might be a nice tie in somewhere here with what happened in Honduras. And to analyze returns of Venezelua's recent referendum.
The President who could not run for re-election tries to do a referendum on getting rid the constitution. Which is a classic way to pretend to have democracy and then rig the results.
The referendum to not sanction by the legislature.
The supreme court rules that it is not constitutional.
The President says he's going to do it any way and orders the army to distribute ballots. The Army says no (following the court and the legislature.) The President fires the head of the army for not following his orders.
The alleged "coup" happens.
Now in the US what would happen is the President trying to do what the Honduran President did would be impeached. But many South American constitutions do have impeachment provisions but have clauses that require the army to uphold and protect the Constitution by a "removing" the would be tyrant/dictator.
I don't know the Honduran Constitution, but maybe the State Department jumped the gun - or least didn't play this as cautious wait and see as the have in Iran.
What accounts for the difference.
After all, the military in Honduras didn't declare martial law like in Poland (1981). Instead the leader of the Legislature (Legitimate civilian control) took the oath to serve out only the remainder of the term, much in the same way that a VP in the US would if there was impeachment and conviction of President.
If they post all the precinct totals so that
a. all observers can certify and
b. we can add up for ourselves
that should do it for fraud, right?
BTW, if you look up yahoo, the election results came out in 12 hours, not 3. India counted 700 million votes in 24-36 hours, so 40 million votes in 12 hours is trivial.
The ballot box by ballot box results are available via the ministry of interior website at moi.ir http://moi.ir in Persian or can be downloaded as English csv files from Prof. Mebanes site at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wmebane/
Everyone reading this can play with these and see what they can find.
Mousavi had some 40,000 observers covering 90% of 45,000 polling stations. I want to know what they saw, what counts they have, and compare that with the official numbers. Mousavi did not show up at the Guardian Council's hearing since he does not believe that they are impartial. He has also not published a detailed explanation of how the fraud took place. His 40,000 observers can draw a detailed picture of what they believe happened. So far the government has gone to excruciating detail showing why fraud didn't happen. It would have been nice if Mousavi's camp would do the same.
Responding to some questions that have been raised...
1. Some claimed that Ahmadinejad could not have won the Azerbaijain province, because Mouserai was Azerbaijan, and ethnic minority in Iran. fact, Ahmad speaks fluent Azeri and visited the provence, and got the bridge built, which previous administartions had failed to do. he won, because the people there believe in him, not because of his ethnicity.
2. The gas subsidy was breaking the budget in Iran. Ahmad wanted to end it except for transportation of goods and fishing. richy rich was outraged that the gov would no longer subsidze their driving habits. The urban, and suburban poor and rural voters back his "populist" economics. He has just announced a gradual removal of the gas subsidies.
3. The votes are counted at the poling places. There are over 45,000, with between 500-800 votes. They are recorded eloctronically and the results are quickly sent to the election council. It doesn't take very long to count 800 votes, when only voting for president is on the ballot.
4. There are 14 officials present, and all the candidates are welcome to have representatives present. One of the complaints about voter fraud went like this: Ballots could have been stuffed into the box before our representatives arrived. it turns out that Mousavis reps did deliberately show up late at many of the polls.
5. The fact that there are those who do not support Ahmad is not proof of a stolen election. It is proof that people do have the right to speak out about who they support.
6. No one should be surprised that there are "cracks" in the power or ruling structure in Iran. We have the very same cracks here in the good old USA. It is normal to have power strugles, and divisions. What is not normal is to claim one supports a democratic process, and then takes to the streets to try and upset the election that way.
7. One would have to be totally brainwashed to believe that only 2 years ago we allocated $400 million for covert black ops to destabilize Iran, and that our opperatives decided to go on vacation for the Iran election, and therefore had nothing to do with the demonstrations and acusations of voter fraud.
8. I still have not has a single reasonable response to why all the signs were in English? Hello?
9. It is well known and often seen tactic of the CIA to conduct media swarming, and the Iran election is a perfect example of that tactic. The moment the media swarms like that, alarm bells should go off.
10 Open minds want to know. Even in Iran there are open minds. people do want to know what actually happened, and do want to investigate. asking for an investigation is not the equivilent of condemning the election. it is the proper way to go about things. The idea that Iranians are all of one mind is silly at best.
@ Chitragupta ..
BTW, if you look up yahoo, the election results came out in 12 hours, not 3. India counted 700 million votes in 24-36 hours, so 40 million votes in 12 hours is trivial.
NY Times,June13,2009:
"Both Sides Claim Victory in Presidential Election in Iran
By ROBERT F. WORTH and NAZILA FATHI
TEHRAN — Iran’s state-run news agency said Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won Iran’s presidential election in a landslide just two hours after the polls closed Friday night. But his main rival, Mir Hussein Moussavi, announced defiantly that he had won and charged that there had been voting “irregularities.”
“I am the absolute winner of the election by a very large margin,” Mr. Moussavi said during a news conference with reporters just after 11 p.m. Friday, adding: “It is our duty to defend people’s votes. There is no turning back.”
The conflicting claims, coming after an extraordinary campaign that saw vast street demonstrations and vitriolic televised debates, seemed to undermine the public legitimacy of the vote and to threaten unrest.
In recent days, Mr. Moussavi’s supporters were predicting a wide victory, citing voter surveys. And Mr. Ahmadinejad, the hard-line incumbent, had appeared on the defensive, hurling extraordinary accusations at some of the Islamic republic’s founding figures.
An hour after Mr. Moussavi declared victory, the state news agency reported that Mr. Ahmadinejad had won the election with 69 percent and that Mr. Moussavi had 28 percent. As the election commission announced new totals early Saturday morning, the numbers changed slightly, but the wide lead by Mr. Ahmadinejad did not."
shoe08:
First, not all the signs were in English, I saw about half of them in Farsi.
Second, those signs that used English did so because English is, by default, the universal language of this world. If you want to communicate on a world stage, English is the most widely translated language of all; even if a person does not read or speak it, somebody they know is likely to do so.
Academic papers are written almost entirely in English; contracts are in English; most novels and reference books are in English; most movies and entertainment are in English.
The objective of protesting is to gain attention, and Iranians are not primitives. They want the world to film their protest to bring pressure at the top; they don't want to be seen as a cute parade of cry babies. That is why the signs were in English, to appeal to the widest possible audience.
Second, Democracy requires transparency, and these people would not be protesting if they didn't think the election was a fraud. Democracy does not mean accepting whatever the government tells you at face value.
They aren't protesting because they failed to win, they are protesting because they are certain they were ripped off and the election was rigged. There is a difference, and if we didn't protest that here in the USA, we would end up exactly as them, slaves before a theocratic master.
I hope they revolt.
There were 38 million votes and 45,000 polling stations. If you divide these numbers by each other you get on average 844 votes per station. Counting 844 votes does not take that long. After each ballot box was counted, its total was entered in a web site. The ministry of interior reported the aggregate total counts via its website as these numbers came in from across Iran. What was announced hours after the polls closed was a partial count, as the boxes were being counted and reported one by one. The reporting is similar to how the election results in the state are reported on via media. It actually took until the next day for the final count and the release of the official results.
The New York Times and other media also told us that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and we believed them. Whenever the mass media is drumming to a uniform beat, you may want to ask yourself, why?
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