[Pen-l] from Juan Cole: Chatham House Study Shows Massive Fraud

[Jim Devine <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx>]

>From Juan Cole <jricole@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 9:30 PM

An authoritative study from Chatham House (pdf) , the renowned UK
think tank, finds that with regard to the official statistics on the
recent presidential election in Iran released by the Interior
Ministry, something is rotten in Tehran. The authors compared the
provincial returns in the 2005 and 2009 elections against the 2006
census and found:

' · In two Conservative provinces, Mazandaran and Yazd, a turnout of
more than 100% 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 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 took not only all former conservative voters, and all
former centrist voters, and all new voters, but also up to 44% of former
Reformist voters, despite a decade of conflict between these two
groups.

· In 2005, as in 2001 and 1997, conservative candidates, and
Ahmadinejad in particular, were markedly unpopular in rural areas.
That the countryside always votes conservative is a myth. The claim
that this year Ahmadinejad swept the board in more rural provinces
flies in the face of these trends.'

[However, an Iranian friend points to massive efforts by Ahmadinejad
to bribe rural voters in recent years. - JD]

Note that many reformists did not vote in 2005, because they had
become discouraged by the way the hard liners had blocked all their
programs. Some 10.5 million persons who did not vote in 2005 did vote
in 2009. It is highly unlikely that most of these non-voters in 2005
were conservatives who now came out for Ahmadinejad in 2009. But to do
as well as the regime claimed, Ahmadinejad would have needed to
attract substantial numbers of these voters to himself.

Former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani got 6.2 million votes in
2005. He is a centrist, pragmatic conservative. How likely is it that
his constituency abandoned pragmatic conservatism for Ahmadinejad's
quirky hard line? Over 10 million voted in 2005 for reformist
candidates.

Ahmadinejad got 13 million more votes this time than the combined
total for all conservatives in 2005. The authors of this study concede
that Ahmadinejad could have held on to all the 11.5 million hard line
voters from 2005. But how likely is that, really? Some of those who
voted hard line surely found Ahmadinejad's style abrasive and his
policies, such as provoking high inflation through pumping too much
oil money into the economy as a reward to his constituents, annoying.

So over all, let's say he captured Rafsanjani's entire faction in the
face of Rafsanjani's own dislike of him. That would have give him less
than half of his new votes. So he would have had to convinced over
half of the voters who sat 2005 out to vote for him; but those were
the ones most disgusted with the hardliners. Or he would have needed
to win over substantial amounts of the old Khatami reformist vote. Not
likely.

And in 10 of 30 provinces, the hard liners did poorly enough in 2005
that Ahmadinejad would have had to gain the votes of all those who did
not vote that year but did vote in 2009, of all the Rafsanjani
pragmatic conservatives, and of nearly half the reformist vote.

Even in East Azerbaijan, here were the numbers in 2005

Ahmadinejad: 198,417
Hard Liners 232,043
Non-voters: 684,745
Rafsanjani (pragmatic conservatives): 268,954
Reformists: 690,784

and the result in 2009:

Ahmadinejad: 1,131,111

We could say that a little over 400,000 of these votes are not
surprising, since that is the number that was hard line in 2005. But
Ahmadinejad picked up over 700,000 votes after 4 years. The non-voters
may probably mostly be counted as reformists. So again, Ahmadinejad
needed all the non-voters in 2005 to switch to him in 2009 plus a
large proportion of the Rafsanjani voters. It makes not sense. And
this outcome requires us to believe he picked up all those votes among
people who deeply disliked him 4 years ago despite running against a
favorite son from Azerbaijan! (And no, that Ahmadinejad speaks broken
Azeri would not make Azeris vote for him any more than Latinos voted
in 2008 for all those Republicans who speak good Spanish.)

As I had noted earlier, the official results ask us to believe that
rural ethnic minorities (some of them Sunni!) who had long voted
reformist or for candidates of their ethnicity or region, had switched
over to Ahmadinejad. We have to believe that Mehdi Karroubi's support
fell from over 6 million to 330,000 over all, and that he, an ethnic
Lur, was defeated in Luristan by a hard line Persian Shiite. Or that
Ahmadinejad went from having 22,000 votes in largely Sunni Kurdistan
to about half a million! What, is there a new organization,
"Naqshbandi Sunni Sufis for Hard Line Shiism?" It never made any
sense. People who said it did make sense did not know what a
Naqshbandi is. (Quick, ask them before they can look it up at
wikipedia).

I was careful in my initial discussion of why I thought the numbers
looked phony to say that catching history on the run is tough; and I
later characterized myself as a mere social historian (i.e. not a
pollster or statistician). But this study bears out most of my
analysis with the exception that the authors dispute any rural bias
toward Ahmadinejad. I think they are too categorical in this regard,
however. When people, including myself, said that rural people liked
Ahmadinejad, we meant Shiites living in Persian-speaking villages on
the Iranian plateau, in fair proximity to cities such as Isfahan,
Tehran and Shiraz. We weren't talking about Turkmen or Kurds (both
Sunnis), or about Lurs (everyone suspected Karroubi would get that
vote). I suspect that some of those to whom we referred as rural are
being categorized as living in 'small towns' by the Chatham House
authors. But field workers even in the Shiite, Persian-speaking
villages point out that they often encounter anti-Ahmadinejad
sentiments there, as well.

But that is neither here nor there. The numbers do not add up. You
can't have more voters than there are people. You can't have a
complete liberal and pragmatic-conservative swing behind hard liners
who make their lives miserable.

The election was stolen. It is there in black and white. Those of us
who know Iran, could see it plain as the nose on our faces, even if we
could not quantify our reasons as elegantly as Chatham House.

The Nation will soon have a fine piece by Robert Dreyfuss on this study.

-- 
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own
way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
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