However, Diego Jimenez tweeted me this link to a BBC Q&A article on the election.
First off, here are the reasons for claims of voting irregularities:
"The way the result was announced was very unusual. It came out in blocks of millions of votes, in percentages, rather than being announced province-by-province as in past elections.
And as the blocks of votes came in, the percentages for each candidate changed very, very little. That suggested that Mr Ahmadinejad did equally well in rural and urban areas. Conversely, it suggested that the other three losing candidates did equally badly in their home regions and provinces.
This overturns all precedents in Iranian politics and there has been no explanation, despite repeated questions, from the authorities.
It is all very suspicious. But it does not necessarily mean there has been widespread electoral fraud. For example, a group of international pollsters did an independent telephone survey three weeks ago which suggested a two-to-one level of popular support for Mr Ahmadinejad over Mr Mousavi, with the other candidates on less than two percent each."
So, we have international pollsters predicting an Ahmadinejad win. We have suspicious circumstances with questions going unanswered. And we have the fact that there may not necessarily have been widespread electoral fraud.
We also have two powerful leaders with many followers vying for a top parliamentary position. As numerous commentators (and Pres. Obama) have said, Ahmadinejad and Mousavi's policy positions are, in effect, not much different from each other.
Could this be a case of a sore loser using the power of his popularity and multitude of followers to gain the upper hand? From the same BBC article:
"But there are two things happening at the moment. There are the street demonstrations and then there is a tense power struggle between leading figures in the ruling elite as well."
Two leading, elite rulers are struggling for power. What would make Mousavi not pull the "voting irregularity" and "fraud" cards out to use in his favor? Especially when he is well-aware of Ahmadinejad's global unpopularity and the effect global media will have on promoting his view of the election, however inaccurate it may be?
The fact that 99% of the coverage has been on protesters and virtually none on actual election statistics, pre and post polling, and vote-count evidence may signal that Mousavi's bluff has turned into a trump card.
Where is investigative journalism when you need it?
1 comment:
Thomas Jefferson quote of the day: "All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent."
"This quotation has not been found anywhere in Thomas Jefferson's writings. Curiously, the variant of this quotation almost exclusively attributed to Jefferson is "all tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." Other variants are not attributed to Jefferson at all, but typically to Edmund Burke and others. This quotation has never been positively attributed to any specific person, at least in the forms above. Edmund Burke is the figure most often credited with this quotation, although it has never been found in his writings. The Yale Book of Quotations notes the earliest attribution of this quotation to Burke at 1950 (an unsourced attribution in the Washington Post), but the most convincing possible source of the quotation suggested to date is John Stuart Mill, in an address at the University of St. Andrews in 1867: "Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends than that good men should look on and do nothing."
http://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/all-tyranny-needs-to-gain-footholdquotation
A much better quote and easily attributable:
"The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser's intellectual abdication that invites them to take over. When a culture's dominant trend is geared to irrationality, the thugs win over the appeasers. When intellectual leaders fail to foster the best in the mixed, unformed, vacillating character of people at large, the thugs are sure to bring out the worst. When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes." - Ayn Rand, The Objectivist, "Altruism as Appeasement," January 1966.
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