The “Real” Results
Posted on June 18th, 2009
by Daniel Larison |
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Fisk has reported on the circulation of fliers purporting to be copies of a confidential Interior Ministry letter showing the “actual results” of the election, which I suppose we are expected to believe they sent to Khamenei as a souvenir, and is appropriately as skeptical of the ludicrous Mousavi and Karroubi numbers (totaling approximately 80% of the vote to Ahmadinejad’s 14%) as everyone has reasonably been skeptical of Ahmadinejad’s alleged 24 million votes. Of course, why the ministry would have the “actual results” on Monday, when the letter was dated, after the election had already been declared for the incumbent is one of those things the protesters would rather not think about. The 13m+ figure for Karroubi seems almost designed as a retort to the suspiciously low undercount in the official results (400,000), as if to say, “We can make up ridiculously favorable numbers just like you!” Via Clive Davis, Hooman Majd has a helpful, balanced assessment of what the real numbers for Ahmadinejad were likely to have been:
How could the officials, after all, have altered the hand-written ballots of more than 40m citizens or counted enough ballots in such a short time? It has dawned on many Iranians there might never have been any intention to count the ballots. The Big Lie? …There is little question that Mr Ahmadinejad enjoys the support of perhaps as many as 15m Iranians, but the results adding another 10m votes to his hardcore base beggar belief. Shock and awe? You bet.
It does seem clear that the votes, or at least a great many of the votes, were never counted, and it fits with what we know that the final numbers were simply made up. Note that this in itself does not prove that the election was stolen as such (i.e., it doesn’t prove that Mousavi actually won a majority or even a plurality), but merely that the authorities had no intention of letting anyone but Ahmadinejad win. The end result may be the same, but that seems an important distinction to make. Rather than drag out the process into a second round, they wanted to be done with it as soon as possible, so why bother counting anything? That seems to make the most sense of what we have seen, but this, too, is really just speculation.
That said, the flier that Mousavi backers are now waving about as the “proof” appears to be little more than counter-propaganda. If it is incredible and absurd that Ahmadinejad won two-thirds of the vote nationwide, as so many people insist it is, it is no less absurd to think that two-thirds of the people who voted for him in 2005 abandoned him. If Majd’s estimate is even close to being right, the claim that Ahmadinejad won fewer than 6m votes is fairly laughable. Moreover, the idea that the government would go to the trouble of counting all votes after it had already decided to give the election to Ahmadinejad ahead of time is bizarre, and it is even more bizarre to think that the ministry responsible for making up the official numbers would make any kind of official record of the “actual results.” It remains probable that Ahmadinejad still won a plurality, but that no one at the highest levels wanted to take a chance that he wouldn’t, and no one wanted to run the risk of the second round going against their candidate.
Filed under: foreign policy, politics
All well and true, but doesn’t ignoring the election results and just making up winning numbers for Ahmadinejad constitute a grave and audacious crime against the state? We will probably never actually know who won the election, but we are sure of is that Ahmadinejad is guilty of a serious crime, tantamount to treason, for which he has to pay the ultimate political price. Whether Ahmadinejad actually got enough votes to win is no longer even the issue, in that he clearly violated every conceivable election law and the trust of the entire nation in ensuring his victory. If a fully monitored election were held next week, Ahmadinejad would certainly lose, and possibly by as much as the made-up numbers on this flier iindicate. But how can he even be allowed to run, or supervise such an election, in that he’s clearly committed the most grievious election fraud? He has destroyed any sense of trust the people have in him, which is the foundation of any democracy. If Bush had announced his re-election numbers in 2004, carrying Berkeley and San Francisco by 70% majorities, would we have a recount, or an impeachment? Even if the recount showed a slight Bush win, wouldn’t he be impeached for the crime of fraudulently trying to steal the election, even if unnecessarily so? So your argument that it matters, at this point, who actually won the election is pretty much besides the point. A crime against the entire democratic process has clearly been committed, and the government which committed this crime has to be held accountable for it – even if they would have won without having committed the crime. As it stands, the commission of this crime is the only fact we can be certain of, and it appears the people of Iran won’t allow it to go unpunished.
The numbers on the flyer that Fisk reports first appeared on June 14th, apparently from Iranian reporter Maseeh Alinejad. That blogger goes onto comment on the unlikelihood of those particular numbers being accurate.
I did read an analysis of why/how the fraud was perpetrated that proposed that Khamenei and Ahmadinejad became alarmed in the last 1-2 weeks before the election at the size of the rallies for Moussavi and at that point set in motion a poorly-managed initiative to make sure that the vote for Ahmadinejad didn’t look like a wholesale rejection of his leadership. Unfortunately for them, the vote-stuffing appears to have been too blatant.
The Iranian-American Council’s blog has this email from someone in Iran (along with other internal reports):
There are more reports of such fraud which support the assertion that whatever has been reported officially is not an accurate vote count. Certainly Grand Ayatollah Montazeri’s statement leaves no doubt that he considers the official results fraudulent.
All that can really be said at this point is that we don’t know who really won the Iranian election and it’s unlikely that we ever will find out.