Re: [Marxism] NY TImes bias on Iranian elections dissected by WSWS

[David Picón Álvarez <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: "Shane Mage" <shmage@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Will someone of the mullah-apologists on this list  please explain how
> more than 35 million paper ballots can be hand counted--right down to
> the last vote-- in a few hours.
> That might be difficult, since the "counting" was done in secret by
> anonymous functionaries of a police state's "Ministry of the
> Interior." (like in the GDR's terminal "election").


I don't know how they count votes in Iran, how many civil service people 
there are on it, and so on. I can tell you though that it takes just about 3 
hours to count a similar number of votes for Spain's general elections, and 
they are also paper votes counted by hand. Really, counting is fairly old 
technology...

35000000 votes in 3 hours, requires counting 3240 votes per second. Let's 
say you want to be quite scrupulous about the votes, so you give people 10 
seconds to count and cross-check each vote. Let's say there are 2 people 
engaged in the counting of each vote to avoid corruption. This would require 
64800. Even if you use only civil service personnel, I'm sure it's possible 
to find 65000 civil servants who can count. In Spain we basically conscript 
citizens to do the counting, but that's just to make it a bit more robust 
and probably cheaper to run. If you do it with experienced civil servants 
the 10 seconds per vote assumption are probably a rather pessimistic 
estimate on counting speed.

So this argument at least does not convince me at all.

--David.


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