Who will win Iran's presidential election?

[Ninong]

Will little Mahmoud actually lose?

Iranians are voting today (Friday, May 12, 2009) for president. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is running for a second term. No Iranian president has ever lost an election since the 1979 revolution.

Just as in the U.S., an Iranian president is limited to two four-year terms. Ahmadinejad is running for re-election to a second term. There are four candidates in the race. It's a direct election, unlike in the U.S. with our electoral college; however, a candidate must receive 50% plus one vote or there will be a runoff between the top two candidates.

That's pretty much the end of the similarities between the U.S. presidency and the Iranian presidency.

In Iran, the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is the highest ranking political and religious authority in the country. Iran is an Islamic theocracy. The president is elected by the people but he is subordinate to the supreme leader.

Ayatollah Khamenei has held the position of supreme leader since 1989, when he was selected by the Assembly of Experts.

Iran has an elected parliament but the Catch 22 is that all potential candidates must first be approved by the unelected Guardian Council (mostly conservative religious clerics). They can, and often do, refuse permission to run to candidates they deem too reformist.

The supreme leader selects the commanders of both the Revolutionary Guard and the regular forces. He also appoints chief judges and prosecutors, as well as six of the Islamic jurists who sit on the 12-member Guardian Council. Remember that the Guardian Council decides who will be allowed to run for parliament.

So the supreme leader controls the armed forced, the judiciary and the council that decides who will be allowed to run for parliament. In addition to that, he is the highest religious authority in the country. For an analogy, think of the pope in Italy and then give him all of the political authority over Italy that the supreme leader has in Iran.

The president is allowed to conduct national affairs and foreign policy and he is even allowed to appoint cabinet positions and ambassadors but he is still subservient to the supreme leader and he doesn't get to choose the military commanders or appoint judges. In fact, he doesn't even have a security clearance to see any classified military documents.

P.S. -- In a speech just a few days ago, Ayatollah Khamenei urged voters not to support "pro-Western" candidates.

It will be interesting to see what happens if a "pro-Western" candidate wins the election. Foreign policy is conducted by the president but it is subject to the approval of the supreme leader, who has the final say on important foreign policy decisions.

[Ninong]

"I won."

"No, I won."

"No, you didn't, I won."

Haha! Iran's politicians are even funnier than ours on election night. Hours after the polls closed, Mir Hossein Mousavi, the leading rival to President Mahmoud Amadinejad, claimed victory. Then, minutes later, Iran's official news agency claimed victory for Amadinejad.

Not only that, both candidates claim to have won in a two-to-one landslide. Each is claiming to have gotten two-thirds of the vote. None of this too-close-to-call stuff like we have. They go all out over there when they claim victory in a close election.

Mousavi called a news conference in Tehran to claim victory soon after voting came to an end.

"In line with the information we have received, I am the winner of this election by a substantial margin," he said.

Only minutes earlier, close Mousavi aide Ali Akbar Mohatshemi-Pour was reported by the AFP news agency as saying his candidate had won 65 per cent of the vote.

But IRNA, Iran's official news agency, soon afterwards announced that Ahmadinejad had won re-election.

"Doctor Ahmadinejad, by getting a majority of the votes, has become the definite winner of the 10th presidential election," the news agency said.

According to Kamran Daneshjoo, chairman of the electoral commission at the interior ministry, with 35.2 per cent of the votes counted, Ahmadinejad had received 7,027,919 votes.

That compared to 2,955,131 for Mousavi, Daneshjoo said.

The figures from the interior ministry so far give Ahmadinejad 68.88 per cent of the vote and Mousavi 28.87 per cent.

We will probably know who won some time Saturday, unless it is a very close election. Right now both the president and his chief rival are claiming victory in a landslide.

[Reefland]

Bush would have won it in a landslide.
Posted via Mobile Device

[Ninong]

Iran will have four more years of little Maddog Mahmoud. It's not even close. With two-thirds of the vote counted, Maddog Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has 65% of the vote. It is virtually impossible for Mousavi to catch him at this point.

I don't understand how all of the Western media could have been so far off the mark, predicting that this would be a very close election because their polls had Mousavi ahead.

[Ninong]

The official results give Ahmadinejad 63% to Mousavi's 34%, but Mousavi is claiming that the results were rigged. The supreme leader, who has ultimate authority over everything, said it was God's will.

It is unfortunate that the Obama administration will have to deal with this delusional religious fanatic for another four years but such is life.

The End.

P.S. -- Websites in Iran maintained by the opposition are reporting a curious observation of yesterday's election results as reported offically by the interior ministry. Throughout the evening, the results reported for Ahmadinejad were consistently two to one over Mousavi from every district, including districts in Tehran where it was known without a shadow of a doubt that Mousavi was favored by a very, very strong majority.

Demonstrations in the streets of Tehran are being put down by police who are beating the protesters with batons. Foreign media crews who attempt to film the demonstrations are being arrested.

The NY Times has an interesting blog going with posts from Iranians, including video clips of huge demonstrations/riots in the streets of the capital city.

All three of the rival candidates are claiming the election results were a complete fraud and rigged by the government.

The turnout was 85%. I wish we could get an 85% turnout over here in the birthplace of modern democracy.

[Ninong]

Juan Cole explains why he believes Iran's election was a complete fraud.

[Ninong]

According to the official results, Ahmadinejad won 80 percent of the vote in Mousavi’s home town.

That's just not credible.

[Ninong]

The supreme leader has asked the Guardian Council to investigate the results of the election. The Guardian Council said they will give their report in ten days.

This is a complete joke. The supreme leader controls the Guardian Council. They will not overturn the results of this election unless the supreme leaders orders them to do so.

In doing this, the supreme leader is just buying time and hoping that the daily protests will die down. Twelve protesters were killed Monday alone. More than 200 student leaders have been pulled from their dormitories and thrown into jail. Any clerics who speak out against the regime are being placed under house arrest and silenced.

For the results of the election to be overturned, it would take a virtual revolution that overturns the entire system of government in Iran. For a revolution to succeed, the leadership in the Revolutionary Guards, the regular armed forces and the paramilitary forces would have to crack, as well as the leaders in the clergy and the judiciary. All of those positions are controlled by the supreme leader. Getting a substantial number of high-ranking leaders to switch sides and oppose the supreme leader would take an enormous outpouring of public support for change.

A ruthless military crackdown on the protesters would put an end to the demonstrations but it would not solve the problem. The supreme leader must hope that the demonstrations gradually fade away over time or he must make concessions, even going so far as to call for a new election. He will only call for a new election if he thinks his position as supreme leader is in jeopardy. He was challenged by a very high-ranking grand ayatollah yesterday who spoke out publicly against the results of the election and the supreme leader had him placed under house arrest almost immediately.

It will be interesting to see how this thing plays out.

[Ninong]

The situation in Iran is about to explode!

Khamenei to protesters: Shut up and go home or face the consequences.

He's taking a very hard line. That was pretty much expected. Whether it will work or not is another question. This could lead to his downfall within the coming days, or weeks. I doubt that he can survive this. The highest ranking clerics are already split. The question is what will the military do? Especially the Revolutionary Guards. I don't think a coup can succeed without the military being on board.

The vote stealing in Iran was amateurish. In more than 140 towns, Ahmadinejad received more votes than the total number of registered voters in the town. He won a huge majority of the votes in Mousavi's home town and home province. That's comparable to John McCain winning 80% of the African-American vote over Barack Obama.

[Ninong]

Several hundred protest leaders have been arrested. They are usually taken from their homes in the middle of the night. Hundreds of students have been hauled off to jail. Many have died from beatings. They have been buried without being identified and without any notification of their families. The death toll will turn out to be much higher than the current estimate of 32.

Grand Ayatollah Montazeri has called the election a fraud. He is under house arrest. Ayatollah Sanii has issued a "legal ruling" that Admadinejad is not the legitimate president of Iran. He has not yet been arrested.

Former president Rafsanjani has gone to Qom in an attempt to drum up support for Mousavi among the country's leading clerics. Remember that Iran is a theocracy much more than it is a domocracy.

Al Jazeera English has the best reports and the best video. I think it's because their reporters on the ground can blend in better. They have quite a few Farsi-speaking reporters. Al Jazeera's offices in Iran were ordered closed by the regime several days ago but they're still getting video out.

[Ninong]

LONDON, England (CNN) -- A survey of Iran's election results raises "serious questions" about the victory that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is said to have won and uncovers irregularities in the official results, a British think tank said Sunday.

Official statistics obtained from Iran's Ministry of the Interior show the votes cast exceeded the number of eligible voters in two provinces, said Chatham House, a London-based institute that analyzes international affairs.

Claims that Ahmadinejad, the conservative incumbent, swept the board in rural provinces also flies in the face of previous results, said Chatham House, which conducted the survey with the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

[...]

For the survey published Sunday, researchers worked from the province-by-province breakdowns of the 2009 and 2005 results, released by the Iranian Ministry of Interior, and from the 2006 census as published by the official Statistical Center of Iran, Chatham House said.

The survey made four main observations:

In two conservative provinces, Mazandaran and Yazd, a turnout of more than 100 percent was recorded.

At a provincial level, there is no correlation between the increased turnout and the swing to Ahmadinejad. This challenges the notion that his announced victory was due to the massive participation of a previously silent conservative majority.

In a third of all provinces, the official results would require that Ahmadinejad had received not only all former conservative voters, all former centrist voters and all new voters but also up to 44 percent of former reformist voters -- despite a decade of conflict between these two groups.

In the 2005 election, as in the elections of 2001 and 1997, conservative candidates -- and Ahmadinejad in particular -- were markedly unpopular in rural areas. That makes it "highly implausible" that the countryside swung substantially toward Ahmadinejad.

"The analysis shows that the scale of the swing to Ahmadinejad would have had to have been extraordinary to achieve the stated result," said professor Ali Ansari, a co-author of the survey who is director of the Institute for Iranian Studies at St. Andrews.

Data from the June 12 election suggests a sudden shift in political support toward Ahmadinejad in rural areas, which had not previously supported him or any other conservative, the survey said.

At the same time, the official data suggests the vote for challenger Mehdi Karrubi -- who was extremely popular in the rural, ethnic minority areas in 2005 -- has collapsed entirely, even in his home province of Lorestan, the survey said.

In that province, his vote went from 55.5 percent in 2005 to 4.6 percent in the most recent vote, the survey found. At the same time, Ahmadinejad won 50.9 percent of the vote in this election, including the votes of nearly half (47.5 percent) of those who voted for reformist candidates in 2005, the survey found.

Such an outcome is "highly implausible," the survey said.

[Ninong]

From Iran's state-funded Press TV:

Guardian Council: Over 100% Voted in 50 Cities

Iran's Guardian Council has suggested that the number of votes collected in 50 cities surpass the number of people eligible to cast ballot in those areas.

The council's Spokesman Abbas-Ali Kadkhodaei, who was speaking on the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) Channel 2 on Sunday, made the remarks in response to complaints filed by Mohsen Rezaei -- a defeated candidate in the June 12 Presidential election.

"Statistics provided by the candidates, who claim more than 100% of those eligible have cast their ballot in 80-170 cities are not accurate -- the incident has happened in only 50 cities," Kadkhodaei said.

P.S. -- It happened in well over 100 cities!