By Andrew L. Jaffee

How do you count almost 40 million handwritten paper ballots in a matter of hours and declare a winner? That’s a key question in Iran’s disputed presidential election. International polling experts and Iran analysts said the speed of the vote count, coupled with a lack of detailed election data normally released by officials, was fueling suspicion around President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s landslide victory. …

AP, 6/15/2009

Doi… Good question with an obvious answer: Dictatorial election fraud perpetrated once again by Iran’s Islamist theocracy. Remember that Iran’s Orwellian “Supreme Leader” can disregard/override/cancel anything parliament or the president decides. But the country’s population isn’t swallowing this ugly exercise in pretend democracy. According to the AFP:

Hundreds of thousands of Iranian opposition demonstrators fill the squares between Revolution and Freedom (background) in support of defeated reformist presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, in Tehran. A protestor was reportedly shot dead by police in Tehran as massive crowds of people defied a ban to stage a rally against the disputed re-election of hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Some tidbits from the AP on Iran’s latest “election:”

… Mir Hossein Mousavi, Ahmadinejad’s reformist challenger, claims he was robbed of the presidency and has called for the results to be canceled.

Mousavi’s newspaper, Kalemeh Sabz, or the Green Word, reported on its Web site that more than 10 million votes were missing national identification numbers similar to U.S. Social Security numbers, which make the votes “untraceable.” It did not say how it knew that information.

Mousavi said some polling stations closed early with voters still in line, and he charged that representatives of his campaign were expelled from polling centers even though each candidate was allowed one observer at each location. He has not provided evidence to support the accusations.

His supporters have reported intimidation by security forces who maintained a strong presence around polling stations.

Observers who questioned the vote said that at each stage of the counting, results released by the Interior Ministry showed Ahmadinejad ahead of Mousavi by about a 2-1 margin.

That could be unusual, polling experts noted, because results reported first from Iran’s cities would likely reflect a different ratio from those reported later from the countryside, where the populist Ahmadinejad has more support among the poor. …

The final tally was 62.6 percent of the vote for Ahmadinejad and 33.75 for Mousavi — a landslide victory in a race that was perceived to be much closer. Such a huge margin also went against the expectation that a high turnout — a record 85 percent of Iran’s 46.2 million eligible voters — would boost Mousavi, whose campaign energized young people to vote. About a third of the eligible voters were under 30. …

But Iran’s electoral system lacks the transparency needed to ensure a fair election, observers said. International monitors are barred from observing Iranian elections and there are no clear mechanisms to accredit domestic observers, said Michael Meyer-Resende, coordinator of the Berlin-based Democracy Reporting International, which tracked developments in the Iranian vote from outside the country.

He noted that the election was organized and overseen by two institutions that are not independent, the government’s Interior Ministry and the Guardian Council, a 12-member body made up of clerics and experts in Islamic law who are closely allied to the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. …

With so many Iranian young people — very alienated by the ultra-uptight ruling Islamists — the “official” election results just smell fishy, to say the least.

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Related: Corruption, Dictator Watch, Elections, Human Rights, Iran, Islam

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