Reloaded

27 June 2005



Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Wins Rigged Iranian Vote

Iran is still trying to work out the idea of voting for leaders, and more significantly, the mullahs who misrule that nation are still trying to figure out how to steal elections in a subtle fashion. It looks like they need to take a refresher course in rigging ballots. In Friday’s presidential election, the knuckle-dragging jackbooted Mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, won the run-off against former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a man of no real reformist credentials. As with any theft, the mullahs tried not to get caught, but they bungled it.

In the run-up to the run-off, they announced any Muslim who wanted to run could put their nominations papers in, and the Guardian Council, their top oppressive body, chose to disqualify over 1,000 such candidates. This is enough right there to call the election a fraud. When the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameinei (and real dictator of former Persia) saw there was no reformer among the six remaining candidates, he told the Guardians to find a couple (a plural number so as to split the reform vote and ensure a hardline winner while making things look better to outsiders).

Then, the first round of balloting resulted in Mr. Rafsanjani winning (according to the Iranian Interior Ministry) 21% of the vote, Mr. Ahmadinejad got 19.5%, and Mehdi Karroubi, one of the reform candidates, came in third (and hence not good enough for the run-off) with 17.3%. In the second round, head-to-head between to top two where turnout was slightly lower than the first round, Mr. Ahmadinejad won with 62.2% of the vote against Mr. Rafsanjani’s 35.3%. This suggests that about a third of the reform voters (Mr. Karroubi and Mostafa Moin, who got around 12% in round one) voted for the more regressive candidate. This fails the smell test.

And of course, there were more than a handful of irregularities. Polling stations were kept open for three extra hours, which can be done legitimately to allow voters to turn up, but it also can be done to get extra votes into the hands of people who will vote the way the authorities want. Candidates immediately after the first round charged that money had changed hands to get the result the mullahs wanted. And there were charges that the Army and the Revolutionary Guards (street thugs in service of the regime) used intimidation and outright violence to get the voters’ attention.

All of which may be nonsense. This may have been the cleanest election ever run anywhere on the planet. All the same, Iran now has a president who once led “students” in holding American diplomats hostage and who once said, “We did not have a revolution in order to have a democracy.” What a relief, since Iran doesn’t have one, and the mullahs still own most of the country.


© Copyright 2005 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.
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