The 2009 Iranian presidential election was characterized by huge candidate rallies in Iranian cities, and very high turnout reported to be over 80 percent. Iran holds a run-off election when no candidate receives a majority of votes, and this would have been held on 19 June 2009. At the closing of election polls, both leading candidates, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Mir-Hossein Mousavi, claimed victory, with both candidates telling the press that their sources have them at 58–60% of the total vote. Early reports had claimed a turnout of 32 million votes cast although the actual figure could not be determined until all of the votes were counted. Mousavi warned the Iranian people of possible vote fraud.
According to Reuters, several noted political analysts contested the results immediately. The website mowj.ir announced that Mousavi in fact was the person that received the majority of the voting and that his name was replaced by Ahmadinejad's. Mousavi urged his supporters to reject what he saw as "blatant violations" of democracy and its replacement by "the rule of authoritarianism and tyranny." He declared on Friday:"The results announced for the 10th presidential elections are astonishing. People who stood in long lines and knew well who they voted for were utterly surprised by the magicians working at the television and radio broadcasting".
Results
Analysis
Pre-election independent poll results
Ken Ballen is president of Terror Free Tomorrow: the Center for Public Opinion, a nonprofit institute that researches attitudes toward extremism. Patrick Doherty is deputy director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation Washington-based think tank chaired by Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
On June 15 in the Washington Post, they reported the results of their May 11–20 poll based on 1001 nationwide Iranian voter interviews (in all 30 provinces) with a 3.1% margin of error.
While Western media reported a surge for Mousavi, the results showed Ahmadinejad way ahead. "The breadth of Ahmadinejad's support was apparent in our preelection survey. During the campaign, for instance, Mousavi emphasized his identity as an Azeri, (Iran's second largest ethnic group after Persians), to woo Azeri voters." Yet poll results showed they favored Ahmadinejad 2 – 1.
Also, 18- to 24-year-olds strongly supported Ahmadinejad while Mousavi scored well only among university students and graduates and Iran's "highest-income" earners. The writers concluded "the possibility that the vote (was) not the product of widespread fraud" but reflected the electorate's true choice. They also said: "Before other countries, including the United States, jump to the conclusion that the Iranian presidential elections were fraudulent, with the grave consequences such charges could bring, they should consider all independent information. The fact may simply be that the reelection of President Ahmadinejad is what the Iranian people wanted."
Allegations of fraud Farideh Farhi, professor at University of Hawaii, says the result was "pulled out of a hat." Among several anomalies that she addresses, she points at the "secret" Iranian government polls reported by Newsweek on June 5 estimated that Mousavi would win 16 to 18 million votes, and Ahmadinejad just 6 to 8 million and the final "official" figures, that gave Ahmadinejad 24.5 million votes, and Mousavi 13.2 million.
Mohtashami, former interior minister of Iran, who was in the election monitoring committee of Mousavi's campaign claimed that according to official censuses, the number of counted votes in 70 municipalities are more than total population of people who could vote in those regions. In all those cities Ahmadinejad won by 80% to 90% On June 17, Tabnak, the news agency close to defeated candidate Mohsen Rezaee who got only 678,240 votes in the election stated that "Mohsen Rezaee, until yesterday afternoon, found evidence that proves at least 900,000 Iranians, based on their national ID cards, voted for [him]."
BBC Iranian affairs analyst Sadeq Saba found abnormalities in the way results were announced. Instead of results by province, the "results came in blocks of millions of votes," with very little difference between the blocks in the percentages going to each candidate. This suggested that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did equally well in rural and urban areas, while his three opponents did equally badly in their home regions and provinces as in the rest of the country. This contradicted "all precedent in Iranian politics", where Ahmadinejad had been very popular in rural areas and unpopular in the big cities, where ethnic minorities had favored anti-establishment candidates, and where candidates had tended to carry their home provinces. Another anomaly, according to British-based researcher Ali Alizadeh, is that a large turnout did not favor the opposition, since in elections, both in Iran and abroad, "those who usually don’t vote, i.e. the silent majority, only come out when they want to change the status quo." Historically, low turnout has always favored conservatives in Iranian elections, while high turnout favors reformers. That's because Iran's most reliable voters are those who believe in the system; those who are critical tend to be reluctant to participate.June 13, 2009. The Iranian Vote, by Laura Secor According to modern Middle Eastern and South Asian historian Juan Cole, there were several anomalies in the election results. Official reports gave Ahmadinejad 50% of the vote in the city of Tabriz despite the fact that this was the capital of Mousavi's home province, Eastern Azerbaijan, where Mousavi's rallies were well attended and which has traditionally given good turnouts for even "minor presidential candidates" who came from the province. Ahmadinejad also won Tehran by over 50%, even though his popularity in larger cities is considered to be low. Meanwhile, Karroubi, who received 17 percent in the first round of the 2005 presidential elections, got less than one percent of the vote this time, and lost even his own province of birth, despite the tendency for Iranian voting to follow ethnic lines. A survey of votes by a London-based think tank Chatham House found that in a third of all provinces, the official results would require that Ahmadinejad had received "not only all former conservative voters, all former centrist voters and all new voters but also up to 44 percent of former reformist voters -- despite a decade of conflict between these two groups.".Survey raises questions about Iran vote results 6-21-09. CNNPreliminary Analysis of voting in iran's election
June 13 letter On June 18, a letter was presented by Iranian filmmakers Marjane Satrapi (director of the critically Acclaimed Film Persepolis) and has since been widely circulated with Mousavi supporters. No verification of the letter has been provided. The letter was allegedly written by Interior Minister Sadegh Mahsouli to Ayatollah Khamenei on June 13 (a day after the elections), states the fraud and lists the authentic vote count. The letter was roughly translated as follows;
Disputes against fraud allegations Abbas Barzegar, reporting for The Guardian, has described the Western reaction to the election results as evidence of wishful thinking. Western journalists, Barzegar argues, have been reporting primarily from the wealthier areas of the greater cities, ignoring the wide support Ahmadinejad enjoys in poor and rural communities. Juan Cole, on the other hand, rejects this interpretation. According to Cole, this analysis ignored the social development that has taken place in Iran over the last decade, the large pro-reform election victories in 1997 and 2001 (prior to the reformist voter boycott of 2005), and the fact that the concern of the electorate today is "about culture wars, not class."
United States Intelligence estimates indicate that Ahmadinejad has a stronger public support than the news coming out of Tehran suggest and a U.S. official commenting on the matter said:"Tehran is Tehran, but it’s not Iran, and it is not outside the realm of possibility that Ahmadinejad won this election".
Opinion polls prior to election
Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty of the New America Foundation noted that an opinion poll conducted just after the election campaigning period started and prior to the highly talked-about TV debate between Mousavi and Ahmadinejad on June 3 also found twice as much support for Ahmadinejad as for Mousavi. Jon Cohen has noted that at the time of the poll only a third of Iranians were willing to express their preference, as "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."
Reasonable size of fraud
The Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has stated that the votes are "beyond question" due to the overwhelming size of the lead for Ahmadinejad. However, Nate Silver disagrees with claims that the mere size of the alleged fraud makes it unlikely, explaining that the lack of election monitors means that actual ballots did not need to be faked and hence fraud "is simply a matter of changing numbers on a spreadsheet." The Guardian Council of Iran has rejected this argument claiming that representatives of all candidates were present at most ballot boxes and during the process of counting votes, despite this not being constitutionally required. However, Mousavi has claimed that the government "[had] prevented some of [his] representatives from being present at polling stations."
Statistical analyses of results
General considerations
Several statisticians have attempted to determine whether the results (or some of the results) are significantly different from what is expected. This approach considers whether the election results can be modeled accurately; if not, this could indicate widespread fraud (though it could also indicate an inadequate model). Alternatively, it looks for specific results which do not fit the model; if found, these outliers could indicate fraud in those results (though they could also indicate deviation from the model for non-fraudulent reasons). Some statisticians have also argued for caution in examining claims of fraud based purely on statistical analysis of the results. While statistical analysis may indicate something unusual, in many cases this must be taken as an impetus for further investigation rather than conclusive evidence in and of itself.
Instances
Blogger and statistician Nate Silver on June 13 performed a preliminary outlier analysis, comparing Ahmadinejad's share of the vote in 2009 as compared with 2005. He wrote that a statistical analysis of the official results was ultimately inconclusive as far as determining that there was election fraud. On June 15, Silver posted regional results that he had received from a student of Iranian Studies at the University of St Andrews, who had translated them from the original Persian. He compared Ahmadinejad's 2009 results with the conservative candidates' results in the first round of the 2005 election (Ahmadinejad, Larijani and Ghalibaf), and found the results from certain provinces to be suspicious. While conservative candidates in Lorestān received only 20% in 2005, Ahmadinejad reportedly got 71% in 2009. In Tehran, on the other hand, the conservative vote was relatively speaking lower than in the previous election. Silver further compared the votes for Ahmadinejad only, and found the correlation between 2005 and 2009 to be "fairly weak". He did, however, warn against differences between the two elections and changes over time, and declined to make a judgement on the validity of the official result.