Cal Poly Students for Justice & Peace in the Middle East

Iran’s Interior Ministry announced Saturday that incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won 63.29% of the vote in the country’s presidential election — a landslide. But Iran’s opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi says he won and that the result had been rigged; Mousavi supporters have taken to the streets in Tehran and other cities to protest the official outcome.

Ahmadinejad, for his part, insists that he won fairly, while Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, initially congratulated Iranians for proving their “great worth.” The result, Khamenei said, was a “divine assessment.” On Monday, though, Khamenei ordered the powerful Guardian Council to investigate the fraud allegations.

What really happened in last Friday’s Iranian presidential election, whose reported results have set off the deepest political crisis in Iran in 30 years, may never be known. But these results have raised many eyebrows.

This Wednesday, the online edition of McClatchy Newspapers had a detailed article on why the official Iranian election results are suspect. According to Warren P. Strobel, the foreign affairs correspondent of McClatchy Newspapers, the election results compared to American politics, would be as if President George W. Bush won re-election over Sen. John Kerry in 2004 by taking Kerry’s home state of Massachusetts, doing surprisingly well in liberal New York City and besting his 2000 vote totals by 40 percent.

At the same time, Time magazine issued 5 reasons to suspect the Iranian Election Results. They compiled implausible results such as Ahmadinejad handily beating Mousavi in Mousavi’s hometown of Tabriz — a shocking result, given the candidate’s popularity in his own region. Another suspicious result was the official figures put support for the other main reformist candidate, Mehdi Karoubi, at below 1%. Karoubi’s party has more than 400,000 members which is well over 1% of the electorate.

Even the Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri have joined this skepticism.  ”No one in their right mind can believe” the official results from Friday’s contest, he said of the landslide victory claimed by Ahmadinejad. Montazeri accused the regime of handling Mousavi’s charges of fraud and the massive protests of his backers “in the worst way possible.” “A government not respecting people’s vote has no religious or political legitimacy,” he declared in comments on his official Web site. (Full letter here)

According to Reza Aslan, “it is implausible that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won in a landslide re-election. It is doubtful that he not only took the capital city, Tehran — the heart of the reformist movement — by a staggering 50% but also managed to win in Azerbaijan, the birthplace of his chief rival, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, by a 4-to-1 margin. This would be akin to Senator John McCain winning the African-American vote against Barack Obama.”

But, others disagree with the above assesments by “Iranian experts” as “media-driven self-generated analysis, based on preferred assumptions and wishful thinking.” An article on Politico this week is bluntly titled Ahmadinejad won. Get over it. They compare Ahmadinejad’s 62.6 percent of the vote in this year’s election which is essentially the same as the 61.69 percent he received in the final count of the 2005 presidential election.

They cite a poll conducted by a Washington based organization 3 weeks before the election which found Ahmadinejad leading by more than 2 to1 margin over Mousavi. This survey also indicated that Azeris favored Ahmadinejad by 2 to 1 over Mousavi. Some have questioned the validity of this poll since it was taken during the early stages of the campaign and as a result doesn’t include the aftermaths of the televised debates.

The most important voice belongs to Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader, who joined the latter group which is a major boost to  Ahmadinejad. He insisted that there’s been no fraud in the disputed presidential election and ahmadinejad’s reelection was “definitive.” He added that the “Islamic establishment would never manipulate votes and commit treason. The legal structure in this country does not allow vote-rigging. If the difference was 100,000 or 500,000 or 1 million, well, one may say fraud could have happened. But how can one rig 11 million votes?”