For those interested in the latest analyses of the Iranian election results, check out the Chatham House report. I heard the BBC News interviewing one of the academics on the polling results. He would not say outright fraud — he couldn’t without good polling data, which he said was nearly impossible to get. However, he noted many of the official voting record results were “shocking.”
An article on the BBC echoes what the Chatham House analyst said this morning:
“Iran is a huge country, nearly four times the size of France and they began announcing the results within four hours, in past elections it’s taken 24. It just seems to me the fix was in,” says Juan Cole, Professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of Michigan.
Others point to particular results which appear unlikely.
For example, in Mr Mousavi’s home province of East Azerbaijan, which is known to have fierce regional and ethnic loyalties to the reformist candidate, he polled far worse than expected.
And the liberal cleric Mehdi Karroubi polled 5% in Lorestan, despite having won 55% there in the first round of voting in 2005 when he also stood as a candidate.
“In some provinces like Khoresan or Mazandaran the number of people who voted exceeded the number of eligible voters in those provinces,” points out Mr Khalaji.
While it’s certainly possible that Ahmadinejad won legitimately, the data blurs the legitimacy of the win.
