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By Charles Bird Posted in War — Comments (7) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

After last Friday's election in Iran, the Philadelphia Daily News took a cheap shot at the Bush administration:

Until recently, voter apathy and a lackluster campaign had threatened to deliver the poorest turnout in an Iranian presidential election since Islamic clerics came to power in 1979. With increasing pressure from the West over its nuclear program and a flagging economy that has angered Iranians, a marginal turnout could have undermined the legitimacy of the government.

But harsh statements by President Bush on Thursday, denouncing Iran's elections as a sham because unelected clerics would continue to wield most of the power, allowed them to go on the offensive.

Iran's television and radio networks, run by the conservative leaders, repeatedly broadcast the U.S. pronouncements and urged voters to strike out at Bush by going to the polls.

Nearly two-thirds of the eligible 46.8 million voters responded, giving the clerics the public affirmation they sought. Interior Ministry spokesman Johanbaksh Khanjani told reporters that turnout in some provinces was higher than 80 percent.

Says who? The interior minister? Considering that the legitimacy of the current Iranian regime hinged solely on election turnout, why were Khanjani's statements accepted unchallenged? The Los Angeles Times also succumbed to the propaganda:

Iran's spy chief used just two words to respond to White House ridicule of last week's presidential election: "Thank you." His sarcasm was barely hidden. The backfire on Washington was more evident.

The sharp barbs from President Bush were widely seen in Iran as damaging to pro-reform groups because the comments appeared to have boosted turnout among hard-liners in Friday's election--with the result being that an ultraconservative now is in a two-way showdown for the presidency.

"I say to Bush: 'Thank you,'" quipped Intelligence Minister Ali Yunesi. "He motivated people to vote in retaliation."

Again, says who? Iran's top spy? The fact is this. The theocrats refused to allow access to international election monitors for the June 17th election:

Iran said on Saturday that it will not accept any foreign monitoring of its June 17 presidential elections, asserting that international observers were neither permitted nor required.

"Observing the elections is a red line that no foreigner should cross," said Gholam Hossien Elham, a spokesman for Iran's Guardians Council--a hardline-controlled political watchdog.

"Any talk of international monitoring of the elections in our country is against the constitution and the country's national interest. There is no need for it," he asserted.

His comments, made to Iranian media, came in response to reported calls from dissident Iranian groups for foreign observers.

So how do we know June 17th wasn't rigged? We don't. How do we know that interior ministers and top spies weren't lying through their teeth? We don't. International monitors do not go against national interests, but against the interests of power-hungry theocratic totalitarians trying to hide something. Absent free access, all that's left are observations from those on the scene. Publius Pundit has pictures of polling places and they're empty:

Here’s what I wrote a month ago when Moin was first approved.

This will not make much of a difference in the outcome, however, and the mullahs know this. The problem for the regime is not that they’ll lose the election, but that people may simply reject them by not showing up to vote. By allowing two reform candidates to run, they are hoping that it will draw larger crowds out than they otherwise would.

Sometimes I hate being right. As for the regime, they were dead wrong. Even Moin did not bring out the crowds that they needed for legitimacy. That’s when the regime mobilized.

Fearing a complete shut out, they extended the voting time by four hours, saying that the lines were so long that it was necessary. Meanwhile, they broadcasted images and video from previous elections. They made several polling places too small so that lines were forced to develop outside. The journalists, who had to be accompanied by a regime agent and could only go where permitted, only saw these stations.

Yet, they continue to report as if they know with authority what the hell is going on. The regime is playing the media like a greased harmonica. All that they can really report is "The Interior Ministry says turnout is this high," or "The Guardian Council says it’s higher," without ever being able to investigate outside of their hotel rooms if that is true or not.

It’s because of this that the real story isn’t getting out of Iran: Almost nobody voted. It was a total rejection of the Islamic government. The regime has zero legitimacy.

Opinionjournal:

The one number worth parsing in Friday's election is that of voter participation. Many Iranians had called for a boycott as the only way of showing resistance. Knowing this, the mullahs seem to have taken their usual election manipulations to another level. Intimidation by the Revolutionary Guards and the fact that proof of voting is needed for certain jobs and welfare payments have always pushed up turnout. Still, voter participation has steadily declined in the past few years to barely 50%.

But this time turnout was 62.7%, exactly the level Supreme Leader Khameni had predicted.

When you disqualify over 1,000 candidates--allowing only the ones who support the current regime's ideology--the result is a farce. Michael Ledeen:

The regime had made it clear that the size of the turnout would indicate its legitimacy with the public, so they had to come up with big numbers. After hours of hilarious confusion, during which the "official" numbers oscillated wildly and different vote totals were announced by the interior ministry and the Council of Guardians, the regime finally decided to claim that something like 65 percent of eligible Iranians had voted. But most clear-eyed observers with the freedom to move around the country and actually go to polling places, found very few voters. The Mujahedin Khalq, the longtime allies of Saddam Hussein who have long been a source of information on things Iranian, estimated that the real figure was about 10 percent. If you read The Scotsman, for example, you hear things like this:

...at a polling station in...an affluent suburb of northern Tehran, only 150 voters had arrived by mid-afternoon. "We have been given 1,000 ballot papers, so it seems the turn-out has been a lot lower than expected," said Mohsen Jannati, the school’s headmaster, who supervised the voting.

The lowest participation — maybe as low as 3-5 percent — was in Khuzestan Province, where there had been bombings and protests in recent weeks. But anecdotal evidence from all over the country indicated a very low turnout, as of late afternoon. Despite this, the mullahs trotted out rosy reports of big voter turnouts, and even broadcast "live" TV coverage of voters queued up, waiting patiently to make their voices heard.

The only problem was that the pictures were from past elections. One woman called up a Tehran radio station to say that she was sitting at home watching the tube, and saw herself voting. Very droll indeed.

Realizing that a major fiasco was brewing (a source inside the interior ministry informs me that just before closing time, only seven million people had voted) the regime mobilized its forces. First they announced that the closing time would be extended by several hours. Then the Revolutionary Guards and the fanatical Basijis (the religious paramilitary force) started rounding up their followers, along with governmental employees and anyone who could be blackmailed or intimidated (students were told that they could not attend university unless they voted), and dragged them to the polls. Even so, by early morning the regime — which had millions of blank ballots in reserve, in order to produce whatever outcome they desired — was staggering about, trying to decide what it should announce. Differing results came out of different buildings, and the top candidates accused one another of fraud, and worse...

...As best I can tell, the real numbers are quite different from the official ones. Roughly seven million people voted under normal circumstances, between the opening bell and the official closing time. But there were approximately 29 million ballots, a difference of 22 million. Of these, about five million were produced by the late evening roundups (bringing the total of actual voters to twelve million), and the balance — 17 million — were fraudulent, mostly blank ballots filled out by the representatives of one candidate or another. This out of an eligible pool of about 51 million (remember that the voting age in Iran is 14 years).

The Iranian election was phonier than a $3 bill. The Iranian people view the United States favorably. It's the increasingly illegitimate government that hates us. How is the government responding to charges of fraud and vote rigging? Certainly not by opening up the process. IHT:

The hard-line religious leadership in Iran, striking back at a former speaker of Parliament who accused conservatives and the military of rigging the presidential election, has shut down two newspapers that planned to publish the charges. The leadership also warned in a statement by the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that it would not "allow anyone to create a crisis."

Can't have those pesky reporters or election observers sniffing around. More on the sham election from Human Rights Watch:

"Iran’s elections for all practical purposes are pre-cooked," said Joe Stork, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East Division. "The Guardian Council appoints a few candidates, and then Iranians get to choose from this very restricted list."

The Guardian Council enjoys arbitrary powers, known as "approbatory supervision [nizarat-e istesvabi]," allowing it to disqualify candidates even if they meet the discriminatory criteria stated in the election laws.

In practice, the Guardian Council has consistently approved only candidates that are "insiders" from within the ruling circle. More than a thousand candidates registered for the June 17 presidential elections, but the Guardian Council approved only eight, all of whom former or present government officials.

In this year’s presidential election, 89 women registered their candidacy, but none were approved. The Guardian Council has interpreted the criteria that presidential candidates be "religious or political personalities" to exclude women categorically.

The editors at the Globe and Mail are right: Iran's election is a fraud. What did my group Amnesty International say about the election? Nothing (I should send them a harsh e-mail!). Reporters Without Borders reports on the muzzling of three media outlets by the mullahs. Reza Bayegan is right: This electoral sham was a choice between purgatory and hell. George W. Bush is also right when he said the election was exercise in futility. It is beyond pathetic that too many members of the mainstream press are so accepting of the words of authoritarians and their flacks, yet so dismissive of the Leader of the Free World.

Update: In this Friday's run-off between purgatory and hell, concerns of vote rigging run high. Yesterday, Iranian "security officials" confiscated 500,000 wallet-sized cards and 50,000 posters endorsing Rafsanjani. Why? Because they contained four offensive words: repression, terrorizing, freedom, democracy. The offending sentences:

The poster read, "We supporters of Dr. Moin, in order to confront repression and terrorizing, will vote Hashemi,' " referring to Rafsanjani by his middle name. The cards said: "We supporters of Dr. Moin, in order to avoid the demolition of freedom and democracy, vote Hashemi."