Comments on FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: Polling and Voting in Iran's Friday Election

酒店經紀人, 菲梵酒店經紀, 酒店經紀, 禮服酒店上班, 酒店小姐兼職, 便服酒店經紀, ...

2009-10-10T08:14:05.125-04:00

酒店經紀人,
菲梵酒店經紀,
酒店經紀,
禮服酒店上班,
酒店小姐兼職,
便服酒店經紀,
酒店打工經紀,
制服酒店工作,
專業酒店經紀,
合法酒店經紀,
酒店暑假打工,
酒店寒假打工,
酒店經紀人,
菲梵酒店經紀,
酒店經紀,
禮服酒店上班,
酒店經紀人,
菲梵酒店經紀,
酒店經紀,
禮服酒店上班,
酒店小姐兼職,
便服酒店工作,
酒店打工經紀,
制服酒店經紀,
專業酒店經紀,
合法酒店經紀,
酒店暑假打工,
酒店寒假打工,
酒店經紀人,
菲梵酒店經紀,
酒店經紀,
禮服酒店上班,
酒店小姐兼職,
便服酒店工作,
酒店打工經紀,
制服酒店經紀,
酒店經紀,
菲
梵,

A significant point at the bottom of Al Jazeera's ...

2009-06-13T14:06:45.468-04:00

A significant point at the bottom of Al Jazeera's report :

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/06/2009613121740611636.html

Breakdown of the vote in individual districts was still patchy, but there were a few results that raised eyebrows.

Incumbent victorious

Ahmadinejad had apparently taken the northwestern city of Tabriz with some ease.

Tabriz is the heart of East Azerbaijan, and Azeris are among the tightest ethnic groups in the country, unfailingly voting along ethnic lines.

In the 2005 presidential election, Mohsen Mehralizadeh was a largely unknown and wholly unsuccessful candidate. He came in seventh and last, and yet he still won the Azeri vote in the Azerbaijani provinces. Mir Hossein Mousavi is an Azeri from Tabriz.

Elsewhere, Mehdi Karroubi failed to take his home state of Lorestan; in Khuzestan, Mohsen Rezai, a local scion, was expecting at least two million votes. His total for the entire country has failed to breach one million.

And with each updated count, Ahmadinjad's lead did not waver from a very stable range of 66-69 per cent, irrespective of which districts were reporting.

This is so shady. I wish Nate would do some sort o...

2009-06-13T14:06:04.882-04:00

This is so shady. I wish Nate would do some sort of numbers crunch on this so we can see HOW shady. I mean the idea of someone losing that heavily in their own home regions is just ludicrous.

That Guardian article was written by an extremely ...

2009-06-13T12:38:03.243-04:00

That Guardian article was written by an extremely naive person. The vote totals are completely non-credible --- according to Iran's Interior Ministry, Mousavi lost by a huge margin in his own home town, in a region that ordinarily votes for reformers.

I'd love to see a region-by-region analysis of the vote results here, to really calcuate how likely these results are.

If there was a fix, Khatemei and the Guardian Coun...

2009-06-13T08:47:59.542-04:00

If there was a fix, Khatemei and the Guardian Council look like being in on it. Any last minute reprieve for the reformers was killed when the Supreme Leader congratulated Ahmadinejad.

But I'm seeing articles like http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/13/iranian-election which make it seem that this result was plausible, with reformist support mainly limited to liberals and pro-business types in the big cities.

Anyone saying the Iranian electoral system is beco...

2009-06-13T02:49:15.590-04:00

Anyone saying the Iranian electoral system is becoming more mature should be shot starting right about...now.

Surprise, surprise. Ahmadinejad wins.

2009-06-13T02:40:20.428-04:00

Surprise, surprise. Ahmadinejad wins.

Juvanya: I can't disagree with most of what you sa...

2009-06-12T21:16:08.892-04:00

Juvanya: I can't disagree with most of what you say, except about Ataturk. Ataturk allowed no elections under his watch; Turkey had a single-party system until well after he died. I suspect the reason he wasn't overthrown like the Shah is that he ruled in the 1920s and 30s; at the time, the population was too poor and uneducated to challenge his rule, and the Soviet Union was not yet in the business of funding communist rebellions globally. One of the lesser known aspects of the Iranian Revolution is the key role that communist and other leftist movements played in it; Khomeini won the subsequent struggle mostly because the Soviet Union never proposed an equally strong leader of its own.

Results that are coming in sound totally bogus - t...

2009-06-12T21:08:40.880-04:00

Results that are coming in sound totally bogus - the other two candidates had a total of 23% support in the latest polls before the vote - now, Ahmadinejad is showing 61% and challenger 36%, for a total of 97% of the vote. It's fairly obvious the government is falsely reporting *all* the votes for candidates other than the challenger as for Ahmadinejad so it will appear he has more than the 50% needed to avoid a runoff :(

@polls_apart: They are constitutionally required t...

2009-06-12T20:42:50.298-04:00

@polls_apart:
They are constitutionally required to get seats. I am not certain if they get five seats or just one. I do know of one Jew who serves in it though: Siamak Morsadegh, whe replaced Maurice Motamed in 2008. There are also Zoroastrians, Christians, Armenians. There may be more Jews in the "parties".

All experts on Iran seem to say what I articulate as "running out of time". The Iranian people are very strong-willed. Half the population was born after the Revolution and doesnt remember the Shah or the revolutionary tensions. What they do know is that they want to be modern, but not necessarily Western. Jeans arent American, theyre just a brilliantly designed article of clothing that as my friend puts it "fashionable and comfortable".

The best we can do for Iran is watch them and leave the door open. When they are ready, we should be there. No need to antagonize them or anything.

@KIC:
It does seem to draw on Obama's campaign. Obama lead an absolutely brilliant campaign that has changed politics throughout the world. Almost everyone is copying the style, even if they dont say it.

The green is an appeal to Islam, as I see it. The way Iranian politics currently work is that you can criticize the government somewhat as long as it isnt critical of Islam and the revolution. The green helps show that they are Muslims and not secular (although many are inwardly secular).

@Alon Levy:
Yes I am aware that the Shah and Ataturk are very comparable. Ataturk, though, built institutions and wasnt quite as oppressive as the Shah. He also, as you said, allowed elections.

You also correctly state that Iran wanted to help a lot after 9/11. Iran thought the Taliban were extreme and we probably could have had them proxy for us with the right maneuvering and get us Osama or enable us to do that. The "evil" thing was about the worst thing we did since treating the Shah for cancer. A 200 year old nation can not call an ancient nation "evil".

Contrary to what people think, every official in Iran is elected or appointed by elected officials, even the Supreme Leader. There is this whole tangle of elections of this and that that I cant really explain because I am not entirely sure myself. But he is elected in a similar way to the Electoral College here and can be removed.

The government is just so tangled and complex, people find it easier to just say it's a dictatorship and the President has no power. In fact, the President and Majlis have a lot of power within certain bounds. They have worked to stretch those bounds a lot and will continue, especially under Mousavi.

A book I read once laid out a plan for what needs to be done: Supreme Leader needs to become a ceremonial guide, the Guardian Council needs to loosen up, the Assembly of Experts also. They need to morph into an upper house.

Next they need to allow political parties (within reason), light criticism, and so on. The stable democracy will build itself and eventually they can adopt a new constitution with no strings attached. If this isnt done, there could very well be a new revolution.

Am I the only one that noticed a negative number i...

2009-06-12T18:35:58.415-04:00

Am I the only one that noticed a negative number in the "other/dk" column of the most recent poll? I wonder how that happened, and whether it throws any doubt on the other numbers.

In fact, I have read on several different sites th...

2009-06-12T17:34:25.207-04:00

In fact, I have read on several different sites that Ahmadinejad has the lead by 3-4 million votes. This is not as bad as it sounds, since the smaller cities and rural areas tend to be counted first. Tehran numbers are likely to come in late in the game and that might be decisive factor in who wins. I am just hoping that the voting fraud is kept to a minimum.

Antmatic, where are you getting your information? ...

2009-06-12T15:55:14.050-04:00

Antmatic, where are you getting your information? It is just after mid-night in tehran, have they released any data yet?

I'm hearing inklings Ahmadinejad has lost

2009-06-12T15:25:11.534-04:00

I'm hearing inklings Ahmadinejad has lost

Juvanya, Ataturk was a lot more like the Shah than...

2009-06-12T15:06:52.902-04:00

Juvanya, Ataturk was a lot more like the Shah than you give him credit for. He ruled as an autocrat, and left a political tradition where the military instigated coups whenever it didn't like the elected leaders. The Shah's attempt at modernization and secularization came from the same page as Ataturk's. However, unlike in Turkey, in Iran there were never elections, so there were no institutes of civil society free from government control except religion. Thus Iran had a revolution, whereas in Turkey the veneer of democracy became increasingly real, so that now the military's influence is greatly diminished, and the government is led by an elected party modeling itself after European Christian democratic parties.

Beavis, Polls_apart, the truth is that the president matters a bit. Khamenei can effectively block reforms that go too far, as well as excessive fundamentalism; one of the possible presidential candidates banned from running is Ahmadinejad's spiritual mentor, Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi. The president has PR power: Ahmadinejad alienated the rest of the world, whereas Rafsanjani or Khatami could have appealed to it.

Khamenei's real agenda is more conservative and realist than reactionary or apocalyptic. Unlike Khomeini, who was a real believer, Khamenei is an Islamist of convenience; if he were in Iraq or Syria, he would be a Ba'athist and preside over mass executions of Islamists. His main interest is the preservation of the current regime and of his own power. If Ahmadinejad's confrontational tone reduces the possibility of a democratic revolution then all the best, but he's not going to risk war. In fact, to the extent that allying himself with the West reduces risk, he's all for it. Iran supported the War on Terror and gave the US intelligence until Bush branded it evil and then ignored its requests to resume back-channel information sharing. At the time, in the early 2000s, Khatami even made noises about diplomatic relations with the US and Israel.

Mehrdad, Thank you for your input, that was inter...

2009-06-12T15:01:25.102-04:00

Mehrdad,

Thank you for your input, that was interesting and educational!

Mr. Sexton, as just about everyone else have alrea...

2009-06-12T14:47:49.428-04:00

Mr. Sexton, as just about everyone else have already mentioned, great work putting this piece together. Your data analysis is right on and I agree with your over all conclusion about Iran’s slow but steady movement towards democracy. Some of the readers have also added insightful commentaries such as Juvanya.

Beavis, although I agree that the Iranian president has limited power, I’d like to add that anyone person of the ruling establishment is in the same boat. There is no one, and that includes Khamenei, who has absolute power. There are 10s if not 100’s of individuals that share the controls at the helms of this country. They do however tend to form two basic groups, the hard-liners at the right driven by ideology and those closer to the center, but still on the right, who understand their survival depends on their willingness to give the people some level of freedom and stay out of trouble internationally.

For what it’s worth, here’s my 2 cents. Iran is largely a non-democratic theocracy, not a dictatorship like how Iraq used to be or North Korea. However, the ruling party is not as uniform as some of the readers may believe. There are many factions influencing Iran’s polices as they try to gain more power and control. These elements include those on the extreme right influenced by hard-line religious factions drawing support all the way from the Shiites of Lebanon and Iraq. There are also those so called moderates that are more level minded and understand that their survival depends on their ability to keep people at bay and their success in working with the international communities.

Neither side of this equation is democratic nor truly on people’s side, but it is note worthy that in their attempt to use the people to grab power and become the dominate faction within their establishment; they have given the Iranian people the opportunity to practice democracy. Mr. Sexton’s observation is absolutely correct that the candidates (even though they are vetted by the establishment) have become more competitive over the years and the differences between them are growing and in fact becoming more substantial. For the first time ever, women’s right is one of the major issues being addressed.

The people of Iran are growing politically. Even though they are new at this, the last 20 years or so have been extremely valuable in giving them the tools they need to practice their freedom and their political will, regardless of how controlled the outcome has been. The people of Iran put Ahmadinejad in power, not because they agreed with his philosophy, but because he promised to rein in inflation and improve the economy, neither of which he managed to do. The importance of his success 4 years ago had to do with the fact that Ahmadinejad beat the more powerful and the figure everyone thought would win the elections, Rafsanjani. People changed the outcome.

The bottom line is that the people of Iran are growing everyday and if the ruling government wants to stay in power, they will have to adapt accordingly and become more moderate over time, getting closer to where Iranians generally stand. The people of Iran are religious for the most part, very much like us here in the states. At the same time and again similar to us here, they believe that religion is a private matter and it should stay out of politics and government. That is one of the main points of contention between the people of Iran and its government.

Beavis, apparently the president has some persuasi...

2009-06-12T13:52:56.071-04:00

Beavis, apparently the president has some persuasion power to influence the ayatollahs.

Plus, unseating Ahmadinejad would be a big symbol.

Anyone have any idea when we start hearing results?

Does it really matter who wins? After all how muc...

2009-06-12T13:26:42.193-04:00

Does it really matter who wins?

After all how much power does the President of Iran really have? Does anything happen without the approval of Ali Khamenei?

I am not very knowledgeable about this and would love to hear clarifications but I think of the Iranian President sort of like a Zaphod Beeblebrox in the sense that people seem to try to believe that he is in charge.

酒店喝酒台北酒店經紀酒店酒店現領酒店經紀酒店小姐酒店工作酒店兼差酒店兼職酒店打工

2009-06-12T12:17:16.969-04:00

酒店喝酒
台北酒店經紀
酒店
酒店現領
酒店經紀
酒店小姐
酒店工作
酒店兼差
酒店兼職
酒店打工

Here's an attempt at a pre-emptive strike: Please...

2009-06-12T11:56:17.228-04:00

Here's an attempt at a pre-emptive strike:

Please don't feed the trolls!

Reasoned discourse is one thing. Baiting is another. Ergo, when someone seems to be unreasonable, just don't bite.

Does anyone else see how much the Obama campaign h...

2009-06-12T11:23:31.211-04:00

Does anyone else see how much the Obama campaign has influenced this one (short as it has been?)

Extensive use of texting in order to organize support for Moussavi
Wife clearly visible by his side, a smart professional woman
The idea of the "green" candidate

I have to wonder just how much the record turnout that appears to be taking place is because people see that getting out and voting can bring change when they saw an historic change here in the U.S. (lets face, people did NOT believe and African American, no matter how moderate, would ever achieve the highest office).

It is true the Iranian president may not be the supreme power, but when a supreme power is not the front man, the front man has to have some effect on the situation.

I am always so ashamed of how much we have meddled in middle eastern affairs. And we seem to reap what we sew and still never learn. *sigh*

@juvanya: I wanted to correct one aspect of your g...

2009-06-12T10:12:01.396-04:00

@juvanya:
I wanted to correct one aspect of your generally accurate post: Jews may be allowed in the Majlis, but can you cite the existence of any? Under the Mullahs, Iran has been extremely intolerant of Christians, Baha'is and Jews. In 1997, several Jewish Iranians were arrested and tried as spies. Ultimately, their lives were spared, but they received lengthy prison sentences.

Reference:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/1346256/Iran-spares-lives-of-10-Jewish-spies.html

I don't believe we can be certain that "the mullahs are running out of time". We can hope so, but we won't know until it actually happens. I would say that some of our (the U. S.) actions have not been helpful (or downright counterproductive) in bringing about changes in Iran.

@Alon Levy: I am not a "pro-war Westerner", but it is only acknowledging reality to state that the Guardian Council and the Supreme Leader hold the real power in Iran, not the President and the Majlis. The election of Ahmadinejad has been useful, in a way, since he did not provide the Mullahs with the "cover" that the previous moderate President Khatami did.

Informative post - thought provoking and factual. ...

2009-06-12T09:21:12.371-04:00

Informative post - thought provoking and factual.

Thanks!

Thank you Renard!!! This is precisely what I've be...

2009-06-12T07:06:48.455-04:00

Thank you Renard!!! This is precisely what I've been looking for - should've know I'd find it here.

None of the main news sites explain even the basics, like the rules on the runoffs percentages.

I love this site!!

Comments on FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: Polling and Voting in Iran's Friday Election

酒店經紀人, 菲梵酒店經紀, 酒店經紀, 禮服酒店上班, 酒店小姐兼職, 便服酒店經紀, ...

A significant point at the bottom of Al Jazeera's ...

This is so shady. I wish Nate would do some sort o...

That Guardian article was written by an extremely ...

If there was a fix, Khatemei and the Guardian Coun...

Anyone saying the Iranian electoral system is beco...

Surprise, surprise. Ahmadinejad wins.

Juvanya: I can't disagree with most of what you sa...

Results that are coming in sound totally bogus - t...

@polls_apart: They are constitutionally required t...

Am I the only one that noticed a negative number i...

In fact, I have read on several different sites th...

Antmatic, where are you getting your information? ...

I'm hearing inklings Ahmadinejad has lost

Juvanya, Ataturk was a lot more like the Shah than...

Mehrdad, Thank you for your input, that was inter...

Mr. Sexton, as just about everyone else have alrea...

Beavis, apparently the president has some persuasi...

Does it really matter who wins? After all how muc...

酒店喝酒 台北酒店經紀 酒店 酒店現領 酒店經紀 酒店小姐 酒店工作 酒店兼差 酒店兼職 酒店打工

Here's an attempt at a pre-emptive strike: Please...

Does anyone else see how much the Obama campaign h...

@juvanya: I wanted to correct one aspect of your g...

Informative post - thought provoking and factual. ...

Thank you Renard!!! This is precisely what I've be...

酒店喝酒台北酒店經紀酒店酒店現領酒店經紀酒店小姐酒店工作酒店兼差酒店兼職酒店打工