WHY OUR VOTES WERE STOLEN: UPDATED
Jun 16th, 2009 by pedestrian
In the past few days, there have been widespread reports from some Western news media and blogs claiming the June12th elections in Iran WERE NOT FRAUDULENT.
Irrespective of possible winners or losers or outcomes, these elections were FAR, FAR FROM TRANSPARENT and the winner, who also controls the interior ministry (the body responsible for overseeing the elections) HAS MANY QUESTIONS TO ANSWER.
Another point missing in a lot of the analysis is that they focus on Mousavi alone. As if he were the only one with strong reservations about how the elections were conducted. THAT IS IN FACT NOT TRUE. ALL THREE REMAINING candidates, Mousavi, Karoubi and Rezaie voiced the same concerns and WROTE of the same irregularities.
Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour (from Mousavi’s campaign), Gholamhossein Karbaschi (Karoubi’s campaign) and a representative for Rezaie met with the guardian council today to put forth their complaints. The following is a translation of their statements, and also Mousavi, Karoubi and Rezaie’s separate letters.
[Note: I use "certain areas" or "many areas" in place of real regions and/or names for easier translation. The representatives themselves were not vague!]
VIOLATIONS BEFORE THE ELECTIONS
- Violation of articles 40 and 68 of the constitution in which ARMED FORCES ARE BANNED FROM participating in campaigns - Sepah and Basij forces avidly campaigned for Ahmadinejad and used government resources to promote his election bid. [Note: the letters bring more specific instances of this violation]
- By law, candidates are NOT PERMITTED to use government resources for their campaigns, whereas Ahmadinejad has BALATANTLY VIOLATED this rule. [Note: again, they give specifics, which, DO NOT INCLUDE the use of government transportation as I've seen on some blogs. One example they put forth was Ahmadinejad's shuffling of komiteyeh emdade Emam Khomeini (the Imam Khomeini Relief Committee), the largest state-run charity organization during the last month of the campaign. He dismantled the board of directors, took direct control of this organization ONLY ONE MONTH BEFORE THE ELECTION to freely distribute goods and/or money at his own discretion]
- Jannati (the speaker of the guardian council) and Elham (a member of the guardian council and government speaker) WHO ARE BOTH CONSIDERED GOVERNMENT REPRESENTATIVES AND ARE BY LAW REQUIRED TO REMAIN NEUTRAL, vocally supported Ahmadinejad before the elections.
- The support of state radio and television for the government candidate. This went so far that 48 hours before the election, and an hour before all campaigning was to come to an end, Ahmadinejad was given 20 unplanned airtime minutes despite the SUPREME COURT CALLING THIS ACTION ILLEGAL JUST HOURS BEFORE.
I should note that right after the election, the demand of the three other candidates was not a revote, but an independent investigative body to look through allegations of fraud. By law, the Guardian Council is in charge of such procedures, but since this body did not keep its neutrality prior to the elections, the Mousavi, Karoubi and Rezaie camps asked for an INDEPENDENT investigative body to be formed.
FRAUD DURING THE ELECTION
- Despite the interior ministries claims that voting would continue until 10 p.m., many voting centers were FORCEFULLY SHUT DOWN before 6 P.M.
- Monitors WERE NOT allowed to verify that the boxes were EMPTY prior to voting. As I mention below, there are RECORDED instances at the interior ministry during past presidential elections where for example, in one province alone, five hundred thousand ballots were put in the boxes before voting even began.
- According to the Iranian constitution, for Iran’s mountainous regions, Moving Voting Centers are used for easier access. In his letter, Mousavi writes that for the first time this year, there were numerous such voting centers used in regions where they were had never been used before and were not needed. More problematic is that this had NOT BEEN MENTIONED to the candidates and so no monitors were present except those of the guardian council. He contacted the interior ministry about this the day of the election but was never given an answer.
- Before the election, while the Center for Statistics in Iran had estimated that the number of eligible voters at approximately 45, 200, 000, the interior ministry announced that it had printed 59, 600,000 forms. Days PRIOR to the election, millions more forms were printed without serial numbers. DESPITE THIS, on the day of the election, in regions such as Shiraz, Tabriz, and the northern provinces where Mousavi was widely popular, VOTERS WERE TURNED AWAY and told that the voting centers had run out of forms.
- In many areas, Karoubi and Mousavi’s representatives who were to OVERSEE the counting process, were FORCEFULLY thrown out of the voting locations.
- Those monitors who were given the chance to stay WERE NOT ALLOWED to take their counted results to the governors office, which is the most important part of the counting process. Each voting center has monitors from the interior ministry, from the guardian council, and from each candidate. Historically, after counting, these monitors all go and submit their agreed reslts to the governor’s office and these results are sent to the central office of interior ministry. But this year, in many regions, reps for all or some of the remaining three candidates were not permitted to go. Thus, there is no way to verify that the results they counted were indeed the ones that the ministry used. While some voting centers were still open and people were voting, the ministry STARTED DECLARING OFFICIAL RESULTS ON NATIONAL TV WHICH IS UNPRECEDENTED. OFFICIAL RESULTS ARE NOT DECLARED UNTIL ALL VOTING CENTERS HAVE CLOSED.
- In 170 regions, the number of votes EXCEEDS the number of eligible voters. For example, in one such region, the turnout rate was 140% with 90% of the vote given to Ahmadinejad.
- While it had been previously declared that votes would be counted by hand, and while many voting centers were busy counting them, the interior ministry began reporting results that it claimed it was “computer counting”. To date, no one has had access to this software or their machines.
QUESTIONS AFTER THE ELECTION
- WIDESPREAD arrests of Mousavi and Karoubi’s representatives less than 24 hours after the elections
- On the day of the election, Mousavi wrote over EIGHTY letters to the guardian council noting irregularities none of which were answered.
- COMPLETE FAILURE of Mobile services during the last hours of voting which disrupted all communication between Mousavi and Karoubi’s representatives. This is while IRIB was sending and receiving text messages to viewers (so the entire network had not gone down).
- To vote, each voter had to write BOTH a name and a CODE. Coincidentally, this had been arranged such that Mousaiv’s index in the list (4) was similar to Ahmadinejad’s code (44). This was the cause of MUCH voter confusion and it was never cleared.
- For the first TWENTY million votes, NOT ONE SINGLE null vote or canceled vote had been declared.
I may add a few reasons of my own which do not guarantee fraud, but are DEEPLY suspicious:
- Allegedly, Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, the ultra-fascist supporter of Ahmadinejad, issued a fatwa a few days before the election AUTHORIZING CHANGING VOTES IN THE INCUMBENT’S FAVOR. In an open letter, a group of employees of Iran’s Interior Ministry (which supervises the elections) warned of this fatwa.
- In the history of the Islamic Republic, it IS UNPRECEDENTED that a candidate would lose their hometown. In 2005, a little known man by the name of Mehralizadeh, won FIVE MILLION VOTES in Azerbaijan, only because of his Turkish ethnicity. In all of the other candidates hometowns, Ahmadinejad has won three to four folds. (Before you claim that this is all due to Ahmadinejad’s extreme popularity, think again.)
UPDATE
These following points were made by Abbas Abdi:
- In 1997, the number of votes in the province of Lorestan was more than the number of eligible voters and later investigations found that FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND votes had been cast in the ballots prior to the election. This incident is ON RECORD at the interior ministry. This year, the ministry, BEFORE the election, declared that EXTRA ballots had been printed. But AFTER, they said that the reason some voting centers had been shut down as early as 6 p.m. was that THERE WERE NOT ENOUGH ballots. This makes Abdi suspect that a similar incident may have taken place. Especially since these were centers where the representatives of the other parties (except Ahmadinejad’s) were NOT PERMITTED.
- Karoubi (the only candidate to vocally support dervishes) got less than 10% of the vote in regions where there is a Dervish majority. If you know ANYTHING about dervishes, you would know that this is IMPOSSIBLE especially with the heavy crackdowns and arrests made by Ahamdinejad’s government on their headquarters in the past four years.
The Mojahedin of the Islamic Revolution Organization, Islamic Iran Participation Front and most importantly the Militant Clerics Society have all called these elections UNLAWFUL and have called for a revote. Leading clerics, Ayatollah Montazeri and Ayatollah Sane-i have also given their blessing to Mousavi and Karoubi’s efforts.
As someone who spends a chunk of every single day working for election integrity and upholding the constitution, I have a great deal of empathy for all this, and in a world or time when Iran was not under such heinous threat from Israel and the United States, I would be in 100% agreement with those who wish for free, fair, constitutional and transparent elections in Iran.
But that isn’t the case, now is it?
Most experts and honest Iranians say that approximately a third of the population is prosperous enough, educated enough and cosmopolitan enough to be straining under the strictures of the Islamic regime, and, as is readily apparent, virtually all Iranian expats are as embarrassed by the hotly defamed populist bumpkin who stands with certain others in the leadership between Western Corporations and the Holocaust Industry and their control of Iran’s resources and people.
You did not seem to understand the significance of all the work done by Seymour Hersh to expose the U.S. Congress’ allocation of hundreds of millions of dollars to send in assassination teams, destabilization agents and to fund terrorist groups who want to topple the regime. You do not seem to be paying attention the fact that Obama is not only in 100% accord with the policies of the last administration, but is upping the pressures in all the areas everyone, everywhere, agreed were appalling and evil and a menace to humanity. You don’t seem to understand that your discontent with what two thirds of the Iranian people endorse is being used to help Obama get the American people behind an attack on Iran. You don’t seem to wonder how many of these hot propagandists and Down With The Dictator screamers are actually funded by that allocation of hundreds of millions of dollars by our congress, and lobbied for by AIPAC. You don’t seem, either, to count the consequences of this sellout to the less fortunate population in Iran.
You seem to suffer from the delusion that a more Western-friendly government in Iran would keep Iranians safe, that abandoning Iran’s support for freedom fighters in Lebanon and Palestine, and letting Big Oil in to suck all the profits off Iran’s natural resources, would make Iran more cosmopolitan and free, rather than just flat out an oligarchy of the 1% over struggling and starving masses.
Again, if you were not having to trade the entire worth of your homeland and the livelihoods of most of your people to gain these ends, I would be on your side, but the huge play to the American media with the filthy protest signs in ENGLISH and the massive fraud being fed to the Zionist news outlets through Twitter, when there are actually mountains of evidence that this is a [relatively] privileged minority throwing in with fascist American and Israeli operatives to throw off the yoke of the Islamist bumpkins with the gall to use our oil to benefit their people, completely appalls me.
I know you don’t want to think it, when victory seems within your grasp, but you are helping doom millions of Iranians, whether or not your points and complaints are righteous. There were other ways to go about relaxing the strictures and gaining a more democratic state, but you do not seem to have been able to resist the help from squads of agents who mean you, and your countrymen great harm.
No amount of my begging you to think seems to have made the least impression. How many of the members of those exalted organizations you cite as calling for a revote are living off funds from that AIPAC-lobbied allocation? Hmmm?
99, what is really painful about all of this is that I think a lot of us Iranians are caught in the middle:
I read all your links, and any other I can find. And when destabilization forces are working in Iran as Seymour Hersh mentions, how can you be SO sure which side they are really rooting/working for? You say I am fooled by the lovely dovey shine of the “pro-west” propaganda. What makes you so sure YOU’RE NOT MISLED by Ahmadinejad’s Pro-Palestine rhetoric? What gets to me is that while you know and feel and see and speak of the extreme dangers posed by the far-right in your country. When we talk about the same, we are accused of being pro-AIPAC, pro-Israel, etc, etc. I don’t think you realize the extent of the evil men like Mesbah Yazdi or Sadeq Mahsouli have the power to unleash. You ONLY SEE it in the Ralph Laurent suits and pro-Israel rants of the likes of Karl Rove. But not in the aba of a clergymen chanting freedom for Palestine. As impossible as that may sound in an American context, in Iran, it’s possible to chant the TRUTH about Israel/Palestine and still work for everything that goes AGAINST TRUTH. Bush stealing the election is clear to you. Ahmadinejad stealing it … not so much. If Amy Goodman is arrested, I don’t see how you would accuse her of excepting AIPAC funds. But when Ebrahim Yazdi is, you don’t think it may be the work of the same vicious hands? And how about hundreds of students?
A lot of those who talk of Ahmadinejad’s popularity amongst the poor, forget about Mousavi’s same position. He was an extremely popular PM. We were in war and blood, but we were never hungry or desperate for the most basic human needs. That resonates with a lot of people even now. I come from a small town, a town that would be considered, by all accounts, poor, and even years before the election, people, people who belong to the two thirds of Iran of which you speak would always remember him fondly.
So I don’t buy the “the elite are alienated from the poor and that’s why Mousavi lost” argument. Because it just doesn’t ADD UP.
A LOT of things don’t add up.
I agree that NOW things have taken on a murky twist (the ENGLISH banners, the talks of “green revolution”, etc which ALL make me cringe and sweat with humiliation and worry) but that doesn’t answer the mountain of questions that came BEFORE these recent events.
AND EXACTLY FOR EVERYTHING YOU SPOKE OF, I think these guys need to sit down and think of a way to get these folks to go home content.
But “privileged minority”? I KNOW MANY working class people in Tabriz and Shiraz and Ahwaz who are at these events. Why do label them so easily and hurtfully?
One last point is that Mousavi was NOT the CHANGE candidate. He was not anti-establishment, We didn’t vote for him hoping for him to make “Iran more cosmopolitan and free”. He did not make big promises. He is not the candidate who ran on a pro-Western, pro-freedom platform. Au contraire, Mehdi Karoubi fit that description exactly. And even before this election, I had no doubt that he would come in 3rd or 4th. It’s wrong to label anyone who accuses Ahmadinejad of fraud as pro-West and pro-democrafascism. I find it strange that you think Mousavi’s win would mean “abandoning Iran’s support for freedom fighters in Lebanon and Palestine” because that is A CLEAR MANDATE of the IRI and no president would, could or should change it.
Nice piture P:) Noon barbari and all!
Yup
I think it’s awesome!
I originally had the entire picture up … with the guy’s entire face. But I don’t know how many people will see this, so I cut off half his face
Those agents were sent in by Rove and his ilk, who were lobbied by AIPAC and Israel and Big Oil to go in and relieve the Iranian regime of the ability to back the freedom fighters and block Big Oil’s access to all those trillions of petro-dollars they have been pining for since the revolution booted out the Shah.
NONE OF THEM GIVE A FUCK ABOUT DEMOCRACY OR A CONSTITUTION OR ANYONE.
I’m pleading with you to stop abetting them with this big stink over losing an election… EVEN if there was fraud involved… because it is MORE important that Iran not get nuked or invaded now than whose vote got counted and who cheated.
I don’t know how you can misconstrue “relatively privileged” as some kind of insult. People who are “working class” in Iran ARE “relatively privileged”, and they ARE a minority. And conflating Ahmadinjad with Bush is so insanely distorted that it HAS to have originated within the ranks of the agents provocateurs sent in to bring down the Iranian regime.
All this screeching and whining accomplishes ONLY solidarity for attacking Iran amongst the American sheeple!
WAKE UP!
You can’t even pray our depression will stop us because the big corporations and the big banking interests have all the money, and starving bozos willing to fight anyone for a paycheck, in the world to keep it up for the rest of your lifetime.
This is made all the more aggravating to me because, no matter who Ahmadinejad is, or how dictatorial, he HAS the approval of two thirds of the Iranian people, which, excuse me, IS more democratic than this hateful media campaign being waged through Twitter and Facebook, by stupid, heedless, pumped up, inexperienced and, yes, spoiled children being duped by evil, evil, evil, evil snakes sent in by the American and Israeli governments to RUIN YOUR LIVES. You think Iranians are oppressed now, wait until they come carpet your homeland with depleted uranium. The current regime has been ALL that has stood between Iran and the worst war you could imagine, and now you maybe think you can replace that with a replay of 1953, but, believe me, the Revolution will not take that lying down. There will be war.
It matters that Mousavi not be president because he is either in league with, or owned by, the IDENTICAL people who are involved in the destabilization effort… the Iran/Contra pigs who massacred and tortured so many in Central America in the 1980’s. He dealt with them in trading hostages for arms. And whatever kind of popular PM you think he was, who kept everyone fed, he also killed every leftist and political rival he could get his hands on… with the weapons he got from the guys who are trying to take down Iran right now. He both didn’t win, and should not have been allowed to even run because of this.
I’m begging you again to THINK… at least stop agitating long enough to drop what you want, jump out of your own urges and emotions and conditioning, for just long enough to SEE that dealing with oppression can be done other ways, and CAN CERTAINLY BE MORE PATIENT WHEN EVERYONE’S LIVES ARE AT STAKE.
I’m telling you, truth or no truth, you are being played by vicious killers.
I HATE defending any politician, and I’ve convinced myself that I’m not really defending the entire person, just some points you pointed out:
99, the only first-person accounts of the killings in Iran we have so far are those given by Montazeri. In these accounts, in which he goes into those events in much detail, Mousavi is never part of the story. So I’m not sure how you are so certain that he was.
As for Iran-Contra, Iran bought arms FROM ISRAEL. We were desperate for arms. Rafsanjani was the one heading the operation from the Iranian side, and while I don’t see how killing leftist in Nicaragua can ever be justified, I was never in a position where my countrymen were being shred to pieces, so I don’t claim to be able to come up with better alternatives. And in the mayhem of war with the Iranian side SO DESPERATE against the heavily armed Iraqis, I’m not even sure that we (Iran) knew the complete picture to begin with. What Reagan planned to do with that cash wasn’t their main concern. Dezful, Ahwaz and Khoramshahr blowing up in flames was.
Do you know WHO Ahmadinejad is trying to be? His news site is called RAJAnews. That jacket, his rhetoric … He’s imitating Rajai, Iran’s second president who was assassinated in 81. He’s said this himself many times. Well, Rajai was MOUSAVI’s closest friend, his wife has continuously criticized Ahmadinejad for trying “to steal Rajai” and she’s campaigned for Mousavi this year. Most of the families of war martyrs have backed Mousavi: Hemmat, Bakeri, Jahanara, Babai, etc.
Mohtashamipour, who is often credited as the “founder of the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon” is a spokesperson for Mousavi. Mousavi’s inner circle consists of men who are all somehow or other affiliated with the early days of the revolution. For someone like me, that is not necessarily a good thing. But I’m not sure how you would accuse them of being owned by the destabilization efforts. The only person who has EVER, IN the ENTIRE HISTORY OF THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC, uttered the words “We are friends of the Israeli people” was AHMADINEJAD’S deputy.
And in Iran, after the election, there was a strong sense of dread towards Ahmadinejad coming from the likes of Mohtashamipour or Beheshti. And NO! This is not the same dread CNN advocates! That’s an insult to think that if we fear him, it must be because of Western propaganda.
I’m not sure of the image you have of Iran, but by working class I am referring to teachers and taxi drivers and government employees. They are NOT the privileged here. In Iran, that just means “people WHO HAVE WORK” … Unless you mean that 2/3 of Iran is composed of jobless peasants living in huts WHICH is not very accurate. YOU are VERY CERTAIN that 2/3 of the population backed Ahmadinejad. I’m not so sure.
One such example of this, which I can personally account, is the story of teachers. They were given a $50 bonus promised them since the new year two weeks before the election. Now teachers are some of Iran’s most impoverished workers. Not dirt poor enough to be labeled for charities, but extremely poor nonetheless.
I know for a fact that in my hometown, not only did this not warm them to Ahmadinejad, but angered them.
Why do you think that just because he gave handouts, people overlooked everything else?
TELL me this: a government that is backed by 24 MILLION people, why would it need to cut off all mobile connections of its two rival campaigns the night of the election while it was “counting votes” it had promised they would be able to supervise? There IS EVIDENCE 99! The other mobile networks were working the night of the election, but those in the campaign had no access! They closed down his campaign offices THAT NIGHT, and attacked them with tear gas. WHY?
What DESTABILIZES this system more than ANY THREAT from Israel, AIPAC or that miserable FUCK Obama, is that people feel the “republic” erased from the “Islamic Republic of Iran”. If this regime loses its popular backing, it is gone … AND I DON’T WANT THAT TO HAPPEN. DESPITE WHAT THE MSM HAVE ALWAYS CLAIMED, the Iranian system has always been backed by the people. And that is too much to lose in one night.
Besides the allocation from Congress in 2005, there have been many more governmental movements toward toppling the Iranian regime. This old Telegraph piece just covers some of the ways to undermine governments. Hersh has also been reporting about the JSOC hit squads sent in, and the funding of terrorist groups’ actions against Iran. By now there isn’t a student organization or merchants’ association that doesn’t include any number of agents in our pay. These guys having been doing this stuff in countries where they want control of resources for at least fifty years. They are really good at it now… plus they have the internet and a fully-owned American media to help them now.
No. Wait. Here it is in a very well-done video.
I for one am absolutely skeptical of the ‘green uprising’ occuring in Iran, as it follows the exact template of the other ‘colored revolutions’ and has ‘Made in America’ and Otpor style fingerprints stamped all over it.
I really wonder how many folks in Iran had Twitter and Facebook acounts 6-9 months ago?
Its quite hard to distinguish the reality of what is happening on the ground, between that which is real, and that which is an orchestrated and manufactured event.
I am also quite fearful that the reformers have become willing dupes to forces that are quite beyond their sophitication.
I commend 99 for his commentary as it it also quite hard to find the contrarian view amid all the hype as it seems that nearly everyone is in thrall to the liberalization and reformist rhetoric. I wonder what Western PR outfit is handling the Branding and Narative Paradigm of the Iranian Uprising.
The Rendon Group, Hill & Knowlton?
Ohm, only a very limited number of people have facebook and twitter accounts even now. Or can dream of having regular access to it anytime soon.
99 always has excellent commentary about any issue she decides to speak about and this current one is no exception. I don’t agree with some of her analysis, but answering it in my own mind is one of the things I can do to try and keep a straight head.
I think some reasons the velvet revolution analogies are made include Western perceptions of Rafsanjani (and how quick everyone has linked Mousavi and Rafsanjani), the color of Mousavi’s campaign (while all four candidates chose a “color” this election season), and also certain perceptions of Iran’s poor which is also not necessarily correct.
And none of this accounts for the huge reasons we have to believe that these results were seriously and decisively tampered with.
While I don’t deny that this movement can always be sabotaged by a velvet revolution, I still don’t believe that has much relevance so far.
@99 I cannot agree less with your theory of the Israelis and AIPAC supporting the green movement. Israelis need an ugly anti-Israeli government in Iran to (mis)use all their crappy and hollow propoganga and threats against Isreal in their own benefit.
Supreme Israeli cynic and Mossad chief Meir Dagan’s word to a Knesset committee clearly confirms Israel’s interests in Ahmadinejad’s re-election (see: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1093410.html)
quote from Haaretz article:
“The reality in Iran is not going to change because of the elections. The world and we already know [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad. If the reformist candidate [Mir Hossein] Mousavi had won, Israel would have had a more serious problem because it would need to explain to the world the danger of the Iranian threat, since Mousavi is perceived internationally arena as a moderate element…It is important to remember that he is the one who began Iran’s nuclear program when he was prime minister.”
So, 1st: Israel does not see this as a revolution leading to overthrowing of the Iranian regime, and 2nd: Israel actually favors the incumbent president to remain at the office.
In view of the above, I demand you to stop putting so many labels on the Iranian freedom movement.
I agree that the western media has shown more interest in Iran events than say, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, or other faceless countries (as Homeyra refers to them), but isn’t it obvious that they should do so? Don’t you agree that a change in Iran profoundly affects all the issues in the said countries? Is the importance of Iran in the regional and global political and economical issues comparable of any of those other countries?
Finally, Some other remarks I’d like to make:
1) Russia’s involvement and full support of the coup (As an Iranian living in Tehran, I am truly convinced that this was more than a huge vote rigging and definately more like a coup) has been neglected by the media and is very annoying.
2) The split within the Iranian power structure is a key ingredient to the recent events and may lead to much more serious results in the future (that’s the regime’s weakpoint and shall be poked effectively by outsiders if they are interested in regime change).
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An Iranian in Tehran