Results of the Iranian presidential election, 2009
Encyclopedia
The 2009 Iranian presidential election
was characterized by huge candidate rallies in Iranian cities, and very high turnout reported to be over 80 percent. Iran holds a run-off election
when no candidate receives a majority of votes, and this would have been held on 19 June 2009. At the closing of election polls, both leading candidates, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Mir-Hossein Mousavi
, claimed victory, with both candidates telling the press that their sources have them at 58–60% of the total vote. Early reports had claimed a turnout of 32 million votes cast although the actual figure could not be determined until all of the votes were counted.
Mousavi warned the Iranian people of possible vote fraud.
According to Reuters
, several noted political analysts contested the results immediately. The website mowj.ir announced that Mousavi in fact was the person that received the majority of the voting and that his name was replaced by Ahmadinejad's. Mousavi urged his supporters to reject what he saw as "blatant violations" of democracy and its replacement by "the rule of authoritarianism and tyranny." He declared on Friday:
Although Iran is a theocracy with standards leaving a lot to be desired, it's one of the few Middle East countries holding real elections, unlike regional monarchies or dictatorial states like Egypt where Hosni Mubarak has ruled for nearly 30 years and wins easily with well over 90% of the "vote" in little more than a sham process.
Pre-Election Independent Poll Results
Ken Ballen is president of Terror Free Tomorrow: the Center for Public Opinion, a nonprofit institute that researches attitudes toward extremism. Patrick Doherty is deputy director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation Washington-based think tank chaired by Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
On June 15 in the Washington Post, they reported the results of their May 11–20 poll based on 1001 nationwide Iranian voter interviews (in all 30 provinces) with a 3.1% margin of error.
While Western media reported a surge for Mousavi, the results showed Ahmadinejad way ahead. "The breadth of Ahmadinejad's support was apparent in our preelection survey. During the campaign, for instance, Mousavi emphasized his identity as an Azeri, (Iran's second largest ethnic group after Persians), to woo Azeri voters." Yet poll results showed they favored Ahmadinejad 2 - 1.
Also, 18 - 24 year-olds strongly supported Ahmadinejad while Mousavi scored well only among university students and graduates and Iran's "highest-income" earners. The writers concluded "the possibility that the vote (was) not the product of widespread fraud" but reflected the electorate's true choice. They also said:
"Before other countries, including the United States, jump to the conclusion that the Iranian presidential elections were fraudulent, with the grave consequences such charges could bring, they should consider all independent information. The fact may simply be that the reelection of President Ahmadinejad is what the Iranian people wanted."
Perhaps so according to University of Michigan Professor Walter Mebane. He used statistical and computational "election forensics" to detect fraud in comparing 366 Iranian district results with those in the 2005 election and concluded that "substantial core" local results were in line with basic statistical trends. "In 2009, Mr. Ahmadinejad tended to do best in towns where his (2005) support was highest, and he tended to do worst (where) turnout surged the most." He didn't rule out the possibility of manipulation but found no evidence to prove it.
Nonetheless, Washington may be capitalizing on a pretext to stir trouble with large protests continuing for days. Obama hinted it in a June 12 statement several hours before polls closed by saying: "....just as has been true in Lebanon, what can be true in Iran as well is that you're seeing people looking for new possibilities" - perhaps aided by covert CIA mischief, comparable to earlier decades of subversion, beginning in Iran in 1953.
, says the result was "pulled out of a hat." Among several anomalies that she addresses, she points at the "secret" Iranian government polls reported by Newsweek on June 5 estimated that Mousavi would win 16 to 18 million votes, and Ahmadinejad just 6 to 8 million and the final "official" figures, that gave Ahmadinejad 24.5 million votes, and Mousavi 13.2 million.
Mohtashami, former interior minister of Iran, who was in the election monitoring committee of Mousavi's campaign claimed that according to official censuses, the number of counted votes in 70 municipalities are more than total population of people who could vote in those regions. In all those cities Ahmadinejad won by 80% to 90% On June 17, Tabnak, the news agency close to defeated candidate Mohsen Rezaei who got only 678,240 votes in the election stated that "Mohsen Rezaei, until yesterday afternoon, found evidence that proves at least 900,000 Iranians , based on their national ID cards, voted for [him]."
BBC Iranian affairs analyst Sadeq Saba found abnormalities in the way results were announced. Instead of results by province, the "results came in blocks of millions of votes," with very little difference between the blocks in the percentages going to each candidate. This suggested that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did equally well in rural and urban areas, while his three opponents did equally badly in their home regions and provinces as in the rest of the country. This contradicted "all precedent in Iranian politics", where Ahmadinejad had been very popular in rural areas and unpopular in the big cities, where ethnic minorities had favored anti-establishment candidates, and where candidates had tended to carry their home provinces. Another anomaly, according to British-based researcher Ali Alizadeh, is that a large turnout did not favor the opposition, since in elections, both in Iran and abroad, "those who usually don’t vote, i.e. the silent majority, only come out when they want to change the status quo." Historically, low turnout has always favored conservatives in Iranian elections, while high turnout favors reformers. That’s because Iran’s most reliable voters are those who believe in the system; those who are critical tend to be reluctant to participate. According to modern Middle Eastern and South Asian historian
Juan Cole
, there were several anomalies in the election results. Official reports gave Ahmadinejad 50% of the vote in the city of Tabriz
despite the fact that this was the capital of Mousavi's home province, Eastern Azerbaijan, where Mousavi's rallies were well attended and which has traditionally given good turnouts for even "minor presidential candidates" who came from the province. Ahmadinejad also won Tehran by over 50%, even though his popularity in larger cities is considered to be low. Meanwhile Karroubi, who received 17 percent in the first round of the 2005 presidential elections
, got less than one percent of the vote this time, and lost even his own province of birth, despite the tendency for Iranian voting to follow ethnic lines. A survey of votes by a London-based think tank Chatham House found that in a third of all provinces, the official results would require that Ahmadinejad had received "not only all former conservative voters, all former centrist voters and all new voters but also up to 44 percent of former reformist voters -- despite a decade of conflict between these two groups.".
(director of the critically Acclaimed Film Persepolis
) and has since been widely circulated with Mousavi Supporters. No verification of the letter has been provided. The letter was allegedly written by Interior Minister Sadegh Mahsouli
to Ayatollah Khamenei on June 13 (a day after the elections), states the fraud and lists the authentic vote count. The letter was roughly translated as follows;
, has described the Western reaction to the election results as evidence of wishful thinking. Western journalists, Barzegar argues, have been reporting primarily from the wealthier areas of the greater cities, ignoring the wide support Ahmadinejad enjoys in poor and rural communities. Juan Cole, on the other hand, rejects this interpretation. According to Cole, this analysis ignored the social development that has taken place in Iran over the last decade, the large pro-reform election victories in 1997
and 2001
(prior to the reformist voter boycott of 2005), and the fact that the concern of the electorate today is "about culture wars, not class."
Flynt Leverett
and Hillary Mann Leverett, CEO of STRATEGA, argue that Ahmadinejad got almost the same percentage of votes in this election as in the 2005 election where he received 61.69% and no claims of fraud were put forward. They further suggest that the shock over the result is "self-generated" and due to "wishful thinking". They also point out that Ahmadinejad was seen by most Iranians as having won the nationally televised debates, especially the one with Mousavi. The Leveretts state that the notion that a high turnout would favour Mousavi is based on nothing more than assumptions. In response to the claim by some experts that Mousavi was more likely to have won in the Azeri majority provinces because of his Azeri background, they point out that Ahmadinejad speaks fluent Azeri as a result of his eight years of service as an official in two Azeri-majority provinces and that he during his campaigning quoted Azeri and Turkish poetry. The criticism made by Mousavi that some precincts had run out of ballot paper and some polls were not open long enough, could not in themselves have tipped the outcome so clearly in Ahmadinejad's favour, according to the Leveretts. Furthermore they state that the flaws in the electoral process seem less significant than the U.S. presidential election in Florida in 2000
. United States Intelligence estimates indicate that Ahmadinejad has a stronger public support than the news coming out of Tehran suggest and a U.S. official commenting on the matter said:“Tehran is Tehran, but it’s not Iran, and it is not outside the realm of possibility that Ahmadinejad won this election.”
noted that an opinion poll conducted just after the election campaigning period started and prior to the highly talked-about TV debate between Mousavi and Ahmadinejad on June 3 also found twice as much support for Ahmadinejad as for Mousavi. Jon Cohen has noted that at the time of the poll only a third of Iranians were willing to express their preference, as "27 percent expressed no opinion in the election, and another 15 percent refused to answer the question at all. Eight percent said they'd vote for none of the listed candidates."
Ayatollah
Ali Khamenei
has stated that the votes are "beyond question" due to the overwhelming size of the lead for Ahmadinejad.
However, Nate Silver
disagrees with claims that the mere size of the alleged fraud makes it unlikely, explaining that the lack of election monitors means that actual ballots did not need to be faked and hence fraud "is simply a matter of changing numbers on a spreadsheet." The Guardian Council
of Iran has rejected this argument claiming that representatives of all candidates were present at most ballot boxes and during the process of counting votes, despite this not being constitutionally required. However, Mousavi has claimed that the government "[had] prevented some of [his] representatives from being present at polling stations."
on June 13 performed a preliminary outlier analysis, comparing Ahmadinejad's share of the vote in 2009 as compared with 2005. He wrote that a statistical analysis of the official results was ultimately inconclusive as far as determining that there was election fraud. On June 15, Silver posted regional results that he had received from a student of Iranian Studies
at the University of St Andrews
, who had translated them from the original Persian
. He compared Ahmadinejad's 2009 results with the conservative candidates' results in the first round of the 2005 election (Ahmadinejad, Larijani
and Ghalibaf
), and found the results from certain provinces to be suspicious. While conservative candidates in Lorestān
received only 20% in 2005, Ahmadinejad reportedly got 71% in 2009. In Tehran, on the other hand, the conservative vote was relatively speaking lower than in the previous election. Silver further compared the votes for Ahmadinejad only, and found the correlation between 2005 and 2009 to be "fairly weak". He did, however, warn against differences between the two elections and changes over time, and declined to make a judgement on the validity of the official result.
Walter Mebane
performed two analyses of the province-level results. In an early simplistic model, one simply assuming an identical distribution of votes across districts, found that all 54 outlier districts had more votes for Ahmadinejad than expected. A second model uses the first-round 2005 results and second-round 2005 results to predict the 2009 results. In doing so, he finds a high number of precincts with results which do not fit the model, and finds that 2/3 of these have higher-than-expected votes for Ahmadinejad.
On June 21, Chatham House
and Institute of Iranian Studies of the University of St. Andrews released a report noting several anomalies in the election results. In two provinces, Yazd
and Mazandaran, turnout exceeded 100%. The report also compared voting results in the highly competitive 2005 first round and 2009. In 10 provinces, Ahmadinejad could not have achieved his reported totals through retaining his own 2005 voters, winning every voter who voted for other conservatives in 2005, winning every Rafsanjani voter, and winning every single 2005 non-voter who turned out in 2009. He would also have had to get a number of voters who had previously voted for a reformist candidate in 2005 to defect to him.
The findings of the Chatham House report itself have been disputed by Reza Esfandiari and Yousef Bozorgmehr who maintain that it is fundamentally flawed and that the election data does comport to a natural outcome, allowing for some fraud at the local level.http://www.wepapers.com/Papers/52959/Report_on_the_Iranian_presidential_election_2009.
. This law concerns the distribution of the first few digits of numbers. There will be more numbers starting with 1 than with 2, more with 2 than with 3, etc. These proportions are measurable and expected for certain types of populations; there are distributions for both first and second digits. Since people cannot effectively create random numbers, there is a good chance that human-fabricated numbers will not follow Benford's law for the distribution of digits. However, while Walter Mebane
argues that the second digits of election data do follow Benford's law, the Carter Center
concluded that "there is insufficient evidence that Benford’s Law applies to election results in general."
Walter R. Mebane, Jr.
, performs a 2nd-digit Benford test on the ballot-box/polling station-level data. He finds that the test shows significant deviations in the vote counts for Karroubi and Rezaei, as well as for Ahmadinejad. He concludes, "The data give very strong support for a diagnosis that the 2009 election was affected by significant fraud [...] The simplest interpretation is that in many ballot boxes the votes for Karoubi and Rezaei were thrown out while in many ballot boxes extra votes were added for Ahmadinejad." He added that for a benign interpretation, "additional evidence needs to explain how the strong support for Ahmadinejad happens to line up so strongly with the proportion of invalid votes in the ballot-box vote counts."
Analysis of the first digits of vote counts for all candidates, at the district level, was performed by Boudewijn Roukema, a cosmologist at the Nicolas Copernicus University in Poland. Roukema notes that there are significantly more vote totals for Karoubi beginning with the digit "7" than would be expected by Benford's Law. However, Nate Silver
and Andrew Gelman
have expressed skepticism about the strength of this result as has Thomas Lotze.
Walter R. Mebane, Jr.
, identifies a relationship between the proportion of invalid ballots in a ballot box and the proportion of votes for Ahmadinejad. The rate at which Ahmadinejad gains support as the proportion invalid decreases is monotonic and sometimes very steep: as the proportion invalid falls from the median value of about 0.0085 to zero, Ahmadinejad’s share of the vote increases from an average of about 0.64 to an average of about 0.77. The increases in vote share for Ahamdinejad are matched by decreases in the vote share for Mousavi. Mebane argues that ballot box stuffing, or some analogous artificial augmentation of Ahmadinejad’s vote counts, is the simplest way to explain these patterns.
Ph.D. candidates Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco have released an analysis concluding that the patterns of the last two digits of the election results contain characteristics of human manipulation. The province vote totals possess oddities, including too many sevens in the last digits and too few fives, as well as too few non-adjacent ending digits. The authors of the report concluded that the probability of such oddities occurring naturally is only one chance in 200. After their publication, a mathematician noted that the authors had made a computational error, and that the correct probability is lower, 0.13%; this correction was confirmed by Beber and Scacco. However, Zach at AlchemyToday pointed out that the tests suffer from issues of post-hoc test selection
and concluded that by Pearson's chi-square test the results did not meet confidence intervals for being non-random.
graphed Ahmadinejad's proportion of the vote total, as election results continued to be reported during the night of the election. The consistency of his proportion throughout the additional votes being counted, it was argued, was evidence of fraud. However, this was quickly criticised by Nate Silver
and later by Jordan Ellenberg
.
requested that the Supreme Leader extend the legal period for the registering of complaints by five days, from the original 7–10 days allotted by Iranian election laws. During this time few specific complaints were registered by the opposing parties. The Guardian Council refuted the accusations that pertained to its sphere of authority, which was during and after the elections, and opened the question of why violations prior to the election had not been raised before. Even though the main allegation of fraud were pertaining to ballot box stuffing, after a recount of 10% of the ballot boxes from the election chosen randomly, which was videotaped and done in the presence of representatives of the opposing parties, the Guardian Council certified the results and declared Ahmadinejad the winner of the 2009 Iranian presidential elections on 29 June.
Iranian presidential election, 2009
Iran's tenth presidential election was held on 12 June 2009, with incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad running against three challengers. The next morning the Islamic Republic News Agency, Iran's official news agency, announced that with two-thirds of the votes counted, Ahmadinejad had won the election...
was characterized by huge candidate rallies in Iranian cities, and very high turnout reported to be over 80 percent. Iran holds a run-off election
Two-round system
The two-round system is a voting system used to elect a single winner where the voter casts a single vote for their chosen candidate...
when no candidate receives a majority of votes, and this would have been held on 19 June 2009. At the closing of election polls, both leading candidates, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Mir-Hossein Mousavi
Mir-Hossein Mousavi
Mir-Hossein Mousavi Khameneh is an Iranian reformist politician, artist and architect who served as the seventy-ninth and last Prime Minister of Iran from 1981 to 1989. He was a Reformist candidate for the 2009 presidential election and eventually the leader of the opposition in the post-election...
, claimed victory, with both candidates telling the press that their sources have them at 58–60% of the total vote. Early reports had claimed a turnout of 32 million votes cast although the actual figure could not be determined until all of the votes were counted.
Mousavi warned the Iranian people of possible vote fraud.
According to Reuters
Reuters
Reuters is a news agency headquartered in New York City. Until 2008 the Reuters news agency formed part of a British independent company, Reuters Group plc, which was also a provider of financial market data...
, several noted political analysts contested the results immediately. The website mowj.ir announced that Mousavi in fact was the person that received the majority of the voting and that his name was replaced by Ahmadinejad's. Mousavi urged his supporters to reject what he saw as "blatant violations" of democracy and its replacement by "the rule of authoritarianism and tyranny." He declared on Friday:
"The results announced for the 10th presidential elections are astonishing. People who stood in long lines and knew well who they voted for were utterly surprised by the magicians working at the television and radio broadcasting".
Pre-Election Independent Poll Results
One or more independent pre-election polls conducted several weeks before June 12 provide evidence of Ahmadinejad's strong victory, and it shouldn't surprise. It was comparable to his sweeping 2005 runoff win in which he trounced former President Rafsanjani as explained above. This time, no second round was needed because only two dominant candidates contested. The others needn't have bothered as final results showed.Although Iran is a theocracy with standards leaving a lot to be desired, it's one of the few Middle East countries holding real elections, unlike regional monarchies or dictatorial states like Egypt where Hosni Mubarak has ruled for nearly 30 years and wins easily with well over 90% of the "vote" in little more than a sham process.
Pre-Election Independent Poll Results
Ken Ballen is president of Terror Free Tomorrow: the Center for Public Opinion, a nonprofit institute that researches attitudes toward extremism. Patrick Doherty is deputy director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation Washington-based think tank chaired by Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
On June 15 in the Washington Post, they reported the results of their May 11–20 poll based on 1001 nationwide Iranian voter interviews (in all 30 provinces) with a 3.1% margin of error.
While Western media reported a surge for Mousavi, the results showed Ahmadinejad way ahead. "The breadth of Ahmadinejad's support was apparent in our preelection survey. During the campaign, for instance, Mousavi emphasized his identity as an Azeri, (Iran's second largest ethnic group after Persians), to woo Azeri voters." Yet poll results showed they favored Ahmadinejad 2 - 1.
Also, 18 - 24 year-olds strongly supported Ahmadinejad while Mousavi scored well only among university students and graduates and Iran's "highest-income" earners. The writers concluded "the possibility that the vote (was) not the product of widespread fraud" but reflected the electorate's true choice. They also said:
"Before other countries, including the United States, jump to the conclusion that the Iranian presidential elections were fraudulent, with the grave consequences such charges could bring, they should consider all independent information. The fact may simply be that the reelection of President Ahmadinejad is what the Iranian people wanted."
Perhaps so according to University of Michigan Professor Walter Mebane. He used statistical and computational "election forensics" to detect fraud in comparing 366 Iranian district results with those in the 2005 election and concluded that "substantial core" local results were in line with basic statistical trends. "In 2009, Mr. Ahmadinejad tended to do best in towns where his (2005) support was highest, and he tended to do worst (where) turnout surged the most." He didn't rule out the possibility of manipulation but found no evidence to prove it.
Nonetheless, Washington may be capitalizing on a pretext to stir trouble with large protests continuing for days. Obama hinted it in a June 12 statement several hours before polls closed by saying: "....just as has been true in Lebanon, what can be true in Iran as well is that you're seeing people looking for new possibilities" - perhaps aided by covert CIA mischief, comparable to earlier decades of subversion, beginning in Iran in 1953.
Allegations of fraud
Farideh Farhi, professor at University of HawaiiUniversity of Hawaii
The University of Hawaii System, formally the University of Hawaii and popularly known as UH, is a public, co-educational college and university system that confers associate, bachelor, master, and doctoral degrees through three university campuses, seven community college campuses, an employment...
, says the result was "pulled out of a hat." Among several anomalies that she addresses, she points at the "secret" Iranian government polls reported by Newsweek on June 5 estimated that Mousavi would win 16 to 18 million votes, and Ahmadinejad just 6 to 8 million and the final "official" figures, that gave Ahmadinejad 24.5 million votes, and Mousavi 13.2 million.
Mohtashami, former interior minister of Iran, who was in the election monitoring committee of Mousavi's campaign claimed that according to official censuses, the number of counted votes in 70 municipalities are more than total population of people who could vote in those regions. In all those cities Ahmadinejad won by 80% to 90% On June 17, Tabnak, the news agency close to defeated candidate Mohsen Rezaei who got only 678,240 votes in the election stated that "Mohsen Rezaei, until yesterday afternoon, found evidence that proves at least 900,000 Iranians , based on their national ID cards, voted for [him]."
BBC Iranian affairs analyst Sadeq Saba found abnormalities in the way results were announced. Instead of results by province, the "results came in blocks of millions of votes," with very little difference between the blocks in the percentages going to each candidate. This suggested that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did equally well in rural and urban areas, while his three opponents did equally badly in their home regions and provinces as in the rest of the country. This contradicted "all precedent in Iranian politics", where Ahmadinejad had been very popular in rural areas and unpopular in the big cities, where ethnic minorities had favored anti-establishment candidates, and where candidates had tended to carry their home provinces. Another anomaly, according to British-based researcher Ali Alizadeh, is that a large turnout did not favor the opposition, since in elections, both in Iran and abroad, "those who usually don’t vote, i.e. the silent majority, only come out when they want to change the status quo." Historically, low turnout has always favored conservatives in Iranian elections, while high turnout favors reformers. That’s because Iran’s most reliable voters are those who believe in the system; those who are critical tend to be reluctant to participate. According to modern Middle Eastern and South Asian historian
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...
Juan Cole
Juan Cole
John Ricardo I. "Juan" Cole is an American scholar, public intellectual, and historian of the modern Middle East and South Asia. He is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. As a commentator on Middle Eastern affairs, he has appeared in print and on...
, there were several anomalies in the election results. Official reports gave Ahmadinejad 50% of the vote in the city of Tabriz
Tabriz
Tabriz is the fourth largest city and one of the historical capitals of Iran and the capital of East Azerbaijan Province. Situated at an altitude of 1,350 meters at the junction of the Quri River and Aji River, it was the second largest city in Iran until the late 1960s, one of its former...
despite the fact that this was the capital of Mousavi's home province, Eastern Azerbaijan, where Mousavi's rallies were well attended and which has traditionally given good turnouts for even "minor presidential candidates" who came from the province. Ahmadinejad also won Tehran by over 50%, even though his popularity in larger cities is considered to be low. Meanwhile Karroubi, who received 17 percent in the first round of the 2005 presidential elections
Iranian presidential election, 2005
Iran's ninth presidential election took place in two rounds, the first on June 17, 2005, the run-off on June 24. Mohammad Khatami, the previous President of Iran, stepped down on August 2, 2005, after serving his maximum two consecutive four-year terms according to the Islamic Republic's constitution...
, got less than one percent of the vote this time, and lost even his own province of birth, despite the tendency for Iranian voting to follow ethnic lines. A survey of votes by a London-based think tank Chatham House found that in a third of all provinces, the official results would require that Ahmadinejad had received "not only all former conservative voters, all former centrist voters and all new voters but also up to 44 percent of former reformist voters -- despite a decade of conflict between these two groups.".
June 13 Letter
On June 18, a letter was presented by Iranian filmmakers Marjane SatrapiMarjane Satrapi
Marjane Satrapi is an Iranian-born French contemporary graphic novelist, illustrator, animated film director, and children's book author...
(director of the critically Acclaimed Film Persepolis
Persepolis (film)
Persepolis is a 2007 French animated film based on Marjane Satrapi's autobiographical graphic novel of the same name. The film was written and directed by Satrapi with Vincent Paronnaud. The story follows a young girl as she comes of age against the backdrop of the Iranian Revolution. The story...
) and has since been widely circulated with Mousavi Supporters. No verification of the letter has been provided. The letter was allegedly written by Interior Minister Sadegh Mahsouli
Sadegh Mahsouli
Sadegh Mahsouli is an Iranian politician who was Minister of Interior from 2008 to 2009 and Minister of Welfare and Social Security from 2009 to 2011. He was appointed to this post in 19 November 2009, as part of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's second cabinet after received vote of from Parliament...
to Ayatollah Khamenei on June 13 (a day after the elections), states the fraud and lists the authentic vote count. The letter was roughly translated as follows;
Disputes against fraud allegations
Abbas Barzegar, reporting for The GuardianThe Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
, has described the Western reaction to the election results as evidence of wishful thinking. Western journalists, Barzegar argues, have been reporting primarily from the wealthier areas of the greater cities, ignoring the wide support Ahmadinejad enjoys in poor and rural communities. Juan Cole, on the other hand, rejects this interpretation. According to Cole, this analysis ignored the social development that has taken place in Iran over the last decade, the large pro-reform election victories in 1997
Iranian presidential election, 1997
Iranian presidential election of 1997 took place on May 23, 1997, which resulted in an unpredicted win for the reformist candidate Mohammad Khatami. The election was notable not only for the lopsided majority of the winner - 70% - but for the high turnout...
and 2001
Iranian presidential election, 2001
Iranian presidential election of 2001 took place on June 8, 2001, and resulted in Mohammad Khatami being elected as the President of Iran for his second term.-Candidates:* Mohammad Khatami, Incumbent President...
(prior to the reformist voter boycott of 2005), and the fact that the concern of the electorate today is "about culture wars, not class."
Flynt Leverett
Flynt Leverett
Flynt Leverett is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. and a professor at the Pennsylvania State University School of International Affairs. From March 2002 to March 2003, he served as the senior director for Middle East affairs on the National Security Council...
and Hillary Mann Leverett, CEO of STRATEGA, argue that Ahmadinejad got almost the same percentage of votes in this election as in the 2005 election where he received 61.69% and no claims of fraud were put forward. They further suggest that the shock over the result is "self-generated" and due to "wishful thinking". They also point out that Ahmadinejad was seen by most Iranians as having won the nationally televised debates, especially the one with Mousavi. The Leveretts state that the notion that a high turnout would favour Mousavi is based on nothing more than assumptions. In response to the claim by some experts that Mousavi was more likely to have won in the Azeri majority provinces because of his Azeri background, they point out that Ahmadinejad speaks fluent Azeri as a result of his eight years of service as an official in two Azeri-majority provinces and that he during his campaigning quoted Azeri and Turkish poetry. The criticism made by Mousavi that some precincts had run out of ballot paper and some polls were not open long enough, could not in themselves have tipped the outcome so clearly in Ahmadinejad's favour, according to the Leveretts. Furthermore they state that the flaws in the electoral process seem less significant than the U.S. presidential election in Florida in 2000
United States presidential election in Florida, 2000
The 2000 United States presidential election in Florida took place on November 7, 2000 as it did in the other 49 states and D.C., which was part of the 2000 United States presidential election...
. United States Intelligence estimates indicate that Ahmadinejad has a stronger public support than the news coming out of Tehran suggest and a U.S. official commenting on the matter said:“Tehran is Tehran, but it’s not Iran, and it is not outside the realm of possibility that Ahmadinejad won this election.”
Opinion polls prior to election
Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty of the New America FoundationNew America Foundation
The New America Foundation is a non-profit public policy institute and think tank with offices in Washington, D.C. and Sacramento, CA. It was founded in 1999 by Ted Halstead, Sherle Schwenninger, Michael Lind and Walter Russell Mead....
noted that an opinion poll conducted just after the election campaigning period started and prior to the highly talked-about TV debate between Mousavi and Ahmadinejad on June 3 also found twice as much support for Ahmadinejad as for Mousavi. Jon Cohen has noted that at the time of the poll only a third of Iranians were willing to express their preference, as "27 percent expressed no opinion in the election, and another 15 percent refused to answer the question at all. Eight percent said they'd vote for none of the listed candidates."
Reasonable size of fraud
The Supreme LeaderSupreme Leader of Iran
The Supreme Leader of Iran is the highest ranking political and religious authority in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The post was established by the constitution in accordance with the concept of Guardianship of the Islamic Jurists...
Ayatollah
Ayatollah
Ayatollah is a high ranking title given to Usuli Twelver Shī‘ah clerics. Those who carry the title are experts in Islamic studies such as jurisprudence, ethics, and philosophy and usually teach in Islamic seminaries. The next lower clerical rank is Hojatoleslam wal-muslemin...
Ali Khamenei
Ali Khamenei
Ayatollah Seyed Ali Hoseyni Khāmene’i is the Supreme Leader of Iran and the figurative head of the Muslim conservative establishment in Iran and Twelver Shi'a marja...
has stated that the votes are "beyond question" due to the overwhelming size of the lead for Ahmadinejad.
However, Nate Silver
Nate Silver
Nathaniel Read "Nate" Silver is an American statistician, psephologist, and writer. Silver first gained public recognition for developing PECOTA, a system for forecasting the performance and career development of Major League Baseball players, which he sold to and then managed for Baseball...
disagrees with claims that the mere size of the alleged fraud makes it unlikely, explaining that the lack of election monitors means that actual ballots did not need to be faked and hence fraud "is simply a matter of changing numbers on a spreadsheet." The Guardian Council
Guardian Council
The Guardian Council of the Constitution , also known as the Guardian Council or Council of Guardians, is an appointed and constitutionally-mandated 12-member council that wields considerable power and influence in the Islamic Republic of Iran....
of Iran has rejected this argument claiming that representatives of all candidates were present at most ballot boxes and during the process of counting votes, despite this not being constitutionally required. However, Mousavi has claimed that the government "[had] prevented some of [his] representatives from being present at polling stations."
General considerations
Several statisticians have attempted to determine whether the results (or some of the results) are significantly different from what is expected. This approach considers whether the election results can be modeled accurately; if not, this could indicate widespread fraud (though it could also indicate an inadequate model). Alternatively, it looks for specific results which do not fit the model; if found, these outliers could indicate fraud in those results (though they could also indicate deviation from the model for non-fraudulent reasons). Some statisticians have also argued for caution in examining claims of fraud based purely on statistical analysis of the results. While statistical analysis may indicate something unusual, in many cases this must be taken as an impetus for further investigation rather than conclusive evidence in and of itself.Instances
Blogger and statistician Nate SilverNate Silver
Nathaniel Read "Nate" Silver is an American statistician, psephologist, and writer. Silver first gained public recognition for developing PECOTA, a system for forecasting the performance and career development of Major League Baseball players, which he sold to and then managed for Baseball...
on June 13 performed a preliminary outlier analysis, comparing Ahmadinejad's share of the vote in 2009 as compared with 2005. He wrote that a statistical analysis of the official results was ultimately inconclusive as far as determining that there was election fraud. On June 15, Silver posted regional results that he had received from a student of Iranian Studies
Iranian Studies
Iranian studies , is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the study of history, literature, art and culture of the Iranian people. It is a part of the wider field of Oriental studies....
at the University of St Andrews
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews, informally referred to as "St Andrews", is the oldest university in Scotland and the third oldest in the English-speaking world after Oxford and Cambridge. The university is situated in the town of St Andrews, Fife, on the east coast of Scotland. It was founded between...
, who had translated them from the original Persian
Persian language
Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...
. He compared Ahmadinejad's 2009 results with the conservative candidates' results in the first round of the 2005 election (Ahmadinejad, Larijani
Ali Larijani
Ali Ardashir Larijani is an Iranian philosopher, politician and the chairman of the Iranian parliament. Larijani was the Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council from August 15, 2005 to October 20, 2007, appointed to the position by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,replacing Hassan Rowhani...
and Ghalibaf
Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf
Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf is the current Mayor of Tehran, Iran.-Early life and military career:Ghalibaf was born to a Khorasani Kurdish father and a Persian mother. At the age of nineteen, he was one of the commanders of the defense forces during the Iran–Iraq War...
), and found the results from certain provinces to be suspicious. While conservative candidates in Lorestān
Lorestan Province
Lorestan Province is a historic territory and province of western Iran, amidst the Zagros Mountains. The population of Lorestan was estimated at 1,716,527 people in 2006.Lorestan covers an area of 28,392 km²...
received only 20% in 2005, Ahmadinejad reportedly got 71% in 2009. In Tehran, on the other hand, the conservative vote was relatively speaking lower than in the previous election. Silver further compared the votes for Ahmadinejad only, and found the correlation between 2005 and 2009 to be "fairly weak". He did, however, warn against differences between the two elections and changes over time, and declined to make a judgement on the validity of the official result.
Walter Mebane
Walter Mebane
Walter R. Mebane is a University of Michigan professor of political science and statistics and an expert on detecting electoral fraud. He has authored numerous articles on detecting fraudulent results in elections, including a recent series of notes on the Results of the Iranian presidential...
performed two analyses of the province-level results. In an early simplistic model, one simply assuming an identical distribution of votes across districts, found that all 54 outlier districts had more votes for Ahmadinejad than expected. A second model uses the first-round 2005 results and second-round 2005 results to predict the 2009 results. In doing so, he finds a high number of precincts with results which do not fit the model, and finds that 2/3 of these have higher-than-expected votes for Ahmadinejad.
On June 21, Chatham House
Chatham House
Chatham House, formally known as The Royal Institute of International Affairs, is a non-profit, non-governmental organization based in London whose mission is to analyse and promote the understanding of major international issues and current affairs. It is regarded as one of the world's leading...
and Institute of Iranian Studies of the University of St. Andrews released a report noting several anomalies in the election results. In two provinces, Yazd
Yazd
Yazd is the capital of Yazd Province in Iran, and a centre of Zoroastrian culture. The city is located some 175 miles southeast of Isfahan. At the 2006 census, the population was 423,006, in 114,716 families....
and Mazandaran, turnout exceeded 100%. The report also compared voting results in the highly competitive 2005 first round and 2009. In 10 provinces, Ahmadinejad could not have achieved his reported totals through retaining his own 2005 voters, winning every voter who voted for other conservatives in 2005, winning every Rafsanjani voter, and winning every single 2005 non-voter who turned out in 2009. He would also have had to get a number of voters who had previously voted for a reformist candidate in 2005 to defect to him.
The findings of the Chatham House report itself have been disputed by Reza Esfandiari and Yousef Bozorgmehr who maintain that it is fundamentally flawed and that the election data does comport to a natural outcome, allowing for some fraud at the local level.http://www.wepapers.com/Papers/52959/Report_on_the_Iranian_presidential_election_2009.
Initial Digit Distribution/Benford's Law
Another way to look for evidence of possible fraud is to analyze the data using Benford's lawBenford's law
Benford's law, also called the first-digit law, states that in lists of numbers from many real-life sources of data, the leading digit is distributed in a specific, non-uniform way...
. This law concerns the distribution of the first few digits of numbers. There will be more numbers starting with 1 than with 2, more with 2 than with 3, etc. These proportions are measurable and expected for certain types of populations; there are distributions for both first and second digits. Since people cannot effectively create random numbers, there is a good chance that human-fabricated numbers will not follow Benford's law for the distribution of digits. However, while Walter Mebane
Walter Mebane
Walter R. Mebane is a University of Michigan professor of political science and statistics and an expert on detecting electoral fraud. He has authored numerous articles on detecting fraudulent results in elections, including a recent series of notes on the Results of the Iranian presidential...
argues that the second digits of election data do follow Benford's law, the Carter Center
Carter Center
The Carter Center is a nongovernmental, not-for-profit organization founded in 1982 by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn Carter. In partnership with Emory University, The Carter Center works to advance human rights and alleviate human suffering...
concluded that "there is insufficient evidence that Benford’s Law applies to election results in general."
Walter R. Mebane, Jr.
Walter Mebane
Walter R. Mebane is a University of Michigan professor of political science and statistics and an expert on detecting electoral fraud. He has authored numerous articles on detecting fraudulent results in elections, including a recent series of notes on the Results of the Iranian presidential...
, performs a 2nd-digit Benford test on the ballot-box/polling station-level data. He finds that the test shows significant deviations in the vote counts for Karroubi and Rezaei, as well as for Ahmadinejad. He concludes, "The data give very strong support for a diagnosis that the 2009 election was affected by significant fraud [...] The simplest interpretation is that in many ballot boxes the votes for Karoubi and Rezaei were thrown out while in many ballot boxes extra votes were added for Ahmadinejad." He added that for a benign interpretation, "additional evidence needs to explain how the strong support for Ahmadinejad happens to line up so strongly with the proportion of invalid votes in the ballot-box vote counts."
Analysis of the first digits of vote counts for all candidates, at the district level, was performed by Boudewijn Roukema, a cosmologist at the Nicolas Copernicus University in Poland. Roukema notes that there are significantly more vote totals for Karoubi beginning with the digit "7" than would be expected by Benford's Law. However, Nate Silver
Nate Silver
Nathaniel Read "Nate" Silver is an American statistician, psephologist, and writer. Silver first gained public recognition for developing PECOTA, a system for forecasting the performance and career development of Major League Baseball players, which he sold to and then managed for Baseball...
and Andrew Gelman
Andrew Gelman
Andrew Gelman is an American statistician, professor of statistics and political science, and director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University. He earned an S.B. in mathematics and in physics from MIT in 1986 and a Ph.D...
have expressed skepticism about the strength of this result as has Thomas Lotze.
Walter R. Mebane, Jr.
Walter Mebane
Walter R. Mebane is a University of Michigan professor of political science and statistics and an expert on detecting electoral fraud. He has authored numerous articles on detecting fraudulent results in elections, including a recent series of notes on the Results of the Iranian presidential...
, identifies a relationship between the proportion of invalid ballots in a ballot box and the proportion of votes for Ahmadinejad. The rate at which Ahmadinejad gains support as the proportion invalid decreases is monotonic and sometimes very steep: as the proportion invalid falls from the median value of about 0.0085 to zero, Ahmadinejad’s share of the vote increases from an average of about 0.64 to an average of about 0.77. The increases in vote share for Ahamdinejad are matched by decreases in the vote share for Mousavi. Mebane argues that ballot box stuffing, or some analogous artificial augmentation of Ahmadinejad’s vote counts, is the simplest way to explain these patterns.
Final Digit Distribution
Columbia UniversityColumbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
Ph.D. candidates Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco have released an analysis concluding that the patterns of the last two digits of the election results contain characteristics of human manipulation. The province vote totals possess oddities, including too many sevens in the last digits and too few fives, as well as too few non-adjacent ending digits. The authors of the report concluded that the probability of such oddities occurring naturally is only one chance in 200. After their publication, a mathematician noted that the authors had made a computational error, and that the correct probability is lower, 0.13%; this correction was confirmed by Beber and Scacco. However, Zach at AlchemyToday pointed out that the tests suffer from issues of post-hoc test selection
Post-hoc analysis
Post-hoc analysis , in the context of design and analysis of experiments, refers to looking at the data—after the experiment has concluded—for patterns that were not specified a priori. It is sometimes called by critics data dredging to evoke the sense that the more one looks the more likely...
and concluded that by Pearson's chi-square test the results did not meet confidence intervals for being non-random.
Consistency During Result Announcements
An early analysis by Andrew SullivanAndrew Sullivan
Andrew Michael Sullivan is an English author, editor, political commentator and blogger. He describes himself as a political conservative. He has focused on American political life....
graphed Ahmadinejad's proportion of the vote total, as election results continued to be reported during the night of the election. The consistency of his proportion throughout the additional votes being counted, it was argued, was evidence of fraud. However, this was quickly criticised by Nate Silver
Nate Silver
Nathaniel Read "Nate" Silver is an American statistician, psephologist, and writer. Silver first gained public recognition for developing PECOTA, a system for forecasting the performance and career development of Major League Baseball players, which he sold to and then managed for Baseball...
and later by Jordan Ellenberg
Jordan Ellenberg
Jordan S. Ellenberg is a mathematician working as a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research covers a wide variety of topics within arithmetic geometry. He received both the A.B. and Ph.D...
.
Provincial results
On June 15 Iranian State owned PressTV reported the provincial results. The report also includes a list of cities and vote counts where Mir-Hossein Mousavi won over Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It does not include totals of any other cities or the totals of the other two candidates.| Province | Mahmoud Ahmadinejad | Mehdi Karroubi Mehdi Karroubi Mehdi Karroubi is an influential Iranian reformist politician, democracy activist, mojtahed, and chairman of the National Trust Party. He was Chairman of the parliament from 1989 to 1992 and 2000 to 2004, and a presidential candidate in the 2005 and 2009 presidential elections.He is a founding... |
Mir-Hossein Mousavi Mir-Hossein Mousavi Mir-Hossein Mousavi Khameneh is an Iranian reformist politician, artist and architect who served as the seventy-ninth and last Prime Minister of Iran from 1981 to 1989. He was a Reformist candidate for the 2009 presidential election and eventually the leader of the opposition in the post-election... |
Mohsen Rezaee Mohsen Rezaee Mohsen Rezaee Mirgha'ed, also spelled Rezai and Rezaie , born Sabzevar Rezaee Mirgha'ed , is an Iranian politician, economist and former military commander, currently the Secretary of the Expediency Discernment Council of the Islamic Republic of Iran... |
Spoiled ballots | Total votes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ardabil Ardabil Province Ardabil Province is one of the 31 provinces of Iran. It is in the north west of the country, bordering the Republic of Azerbaijan and the provinces of East Azerbaijan, Zanjan, and Gilan. Its centre is the city of Ardabil... |
325,911 | 2,319 | 302,825 | 6,578 | 4,372 | 642,005 |
| Azarbaijan, East East Azarbaijan Province East Azerbaijan Province or East Azarbaijan Province is one of the 31 provinces of Iran. It is in the northwest of the country, bordering Armenia and the Republic of Azerbaijan, and the provinces of Ardabil, West Azerbaijan, and Zanjan... |
1,131,111 | 7,246 | 837,858 | 16,920 | 17,205 | 2,010,340 |
| Azarbaijan, West West Azarbaijan Province West Azerbaijan Province or West Azarbaijan Province , is one of the 31 provinces of Iran. It is located in the North West of the country, bordering Turkey, Iraq and Nakhchivan, and the provinces of East Azerbaijan, Zanjan and Kurdistan.... |
623,946 | 21,609 | 656,508 | 12,199 | 20,094 | 1,334,356 |
| Bushehr Bushehr Province Bushehr Province is one of the 31 provinces of Iran. It is in the south of the country, with a long coastline onto the Persian Gulf. Its center is Bandar-e-Bushehr, the provincial capital. The province has nine counties: Bushehr, Dashtestan, Dashti, Dayyer, Deylam, Jam, Kangan, Ganaveh and Tangestan... |
299,357 | 3,563 | 177,268 | 7,607 | 6,193 | 493,989 |
| Chahar Mahaal and Bakhtiari | 359,578 | 4,127 | 106,099 | 22,689 | 2,953 | 495,446 |
| Fars | 1,758,026 | 16,277 | 706,764 | 23,871 | 18,359 | 2,523,300 |
| Gilan Gilan Province Gilan Province is one of the 31 provinces of Iran. It lies along the Caspian Sea, just west of the province of Mazandaran, east of the province of Ardabil, north of the provinces of Zanjan and Qazvin.... |
998,573 | 7,183 | 453,806 | 12,022 | 11,674 | 1,483,258 |
| Golestan Golestan Province Golestan Province is one of the 31 provinces of Iran, located in the north-east of the country, south of the Caspian Sea. Its capital is Gorgan.... |
515,211 | 10,097 | 325,806 | 5,987 | 14,266 | 869,453 |
| Hamadan | 765,723 | 12,032 | 218,481 | 13,117 | 9,816 | 1,019,169 |
| Hormozgan Hormozgan Province Hormozgan Province is one of the 31 provinces of Iran. It is in the south of the country, facing Oman. Its area is , and its provincial capital is Bandar Abbas... |
482,990 | 5,126 | 241,988 | 7,237 | 5,683 | 843,024 |
| Ilam Ilam Province Ilam Province is one of the 31 provinces of Iran. It is in the south-west of the country, bordering Iraq. Its provincial center is the city of Ilam. Covering an area of 19,086 square kilometers, the cities of the province are Ilam, Mehran, Dehloran, Dareh Shahr, Sarable, Eyvan, Abdanan and Arkwaz... |
199,654 | 7,471 | 96,826 | 5,221 | 3,495 | 312,667 |
| Isfahan | 1,799,255 | 14,579 | 746,697 | 51,788 | 25,162 | 2,637,482 |
| Kerman | 1,160,446 | 4,977 | 318,250 | 12,016 | 10,125 | 1,505,814 |
| Kermanshah Kermanshah Province Kermanshah Province is one of the 31 provinces of Iran. The province was known from 1969 to 1986 as Kermanshahan and from 1986 to 1995 as Bakhtaran.-Counties:... |
573,568 | 10,798 | 374,188 | 11,258 | 13,610 | 983,422 |
| Khorasan, North North Khorasan Province North Khorasan Province is a province located in northeastern Iran. Bojnord is the centre of the province.Other counties are Shirvan, Esfarayen, Maneh-o-Samalqan, Jajarm, Faroj and Germeh.... |
341,104 | 2,478 | 113,218 | 4,129 | 3,072 | 464,001 |
| Khorasan, Razavi Razavi Khorasan Province Razavi Khorasan Province is a province located in northeastern Iran. Mashhad is the centre and capital of the province.Other cities and townships are Ghouchan, Dargaz, Chenaran, Sarakhs, Fariman, Torbat-e Heydarieh, Torbat-e Jam, Taybad, Khaf, Roshtkhar, Kashmar, Bardaskan, Nishapur, Sabzevar,... |
2,214,801 | 13,561 | 884,570 | 44,809 | 24,240 | 3,181,990 |
| Khorasan, South South Khorasan Province South Khorasan Province is a province located in eastern Iran. Birjand is the centre of the province. The other major cities are Ferdows and Qaen.... |
285,983 | 928 | 90,363 | 3,962 | 1,920 | 383,157 |
| Khuzestan Khuzestan Province Khuzestan Province is one of the 31 provinces of Iran. It is in the southwest of the country, bordering Iraq's Basra Province and the Persian Gulf. Its capital is Ahwaz and covers an area of 63,238 km²... |
1,303,129 | 15,934 | 552,636 | 139,124 | 28,022 | 2,038,845 |
| Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad | 253,962 | 4,274 | 98,937 | 8,542 | 2,311 | 368,707 |
| Kurdistan Kurdistan Province (Iran) Kurdistan Province or Kordestan Province or Kurdestan Province is one of the 31 provinces of Iran, not to be confused with the greater geographical area of Iranian Kurdistan. The province of Kurdistan is 28,817 km² in area which encompasses just one-fourth of the Kurdish inhabited areas of Iran or... |
315,689 | 13,862 | 261,772 | 7,140 | 12,293 | 610,757 |
| Lorestan Lorestan Province Lorestan Province is a historic territory and province of western Iran, amidst the Zagros Mountains. The population of Lorestan was estimated at 1,716,527 people in 2006.Lorestan covers an area of 28,392 km²... |
677,829 | 44,036 | 219,156 | 14,920 | 8,329 | 964,270 |
| Markazi Markazi Province Markazi Province is one of the 31 provinces of Iran. The word markazi means central in Persian. Markazi lies in western Iran. Its capital is Arak. Its population is estimated at 1.35 million... |
572,988 | 4,675 | 190,349 | 10,057 | 7,889 | 785,961 |
| Mazandaran Mazandaran Province Mazandaran Province is a Caspian province in the north of Iran. Located on the southern coast of the Caspian Sea, it is bordered clockwise by the Golestan, Semnan, Tehran, Alborz, Qazvin, and Gilan provinces.... |
1,289,257 | 10,050 | 585,373 | 19,587 | 15,571 | 1,919,838 |
| Qazvin Qazvin Province The Qazvin Province is one of the 31 provinces of Iran. It is in the north-west of the country, and its center is the city of Qazvin. The province was created in 1993 out of part of Tehran Province and includes 20 cities: Qazvin, Takestan, Abyek, Buin-Zahra, Eqhbalieh, Mohammadieh, Alvand,... |
498,061 | 2,690 | 177,542 | 7,978 | 6,084 | 692,355 |
| Qom Qom Province Qombol Province is one of the 31 provinces of Iran with 11,237 km², covering 0.89% of the total area in Iran. It is in the north of the country, and its provincial capital is the city of Qom. It was formed from part of Tehran Province in 1995. In 2005, this province had a population of... |
422,457 | 2,314 | 148,467 | 16,297 | 9,505 | 599,040 |
| Semnan Semnan Province Semnan Province is one of the 31 provinces of Iran. It is in the north of the country, and its center is Semnan. The province of Semnan covers an area of 96,816 square kilometers and stretches along the Alborz mountain range and borders to Dasht-e Kavir desert in its southern parts.Counties of... |
295,177 | 2,147 | 77,754 | 4,440 | 3,790 | 383,308 |
| Sistan and Baluchestan | 450,269 | 12,504 | 507,946 | 6,616 | 5,585 | 982,920 |
| Tehran Tehran Province Tehran Province is one of the 31 provinces of Iran. It covers on area of 18,909 square kilometers and is located to the north of the central plateau of Iran.... |
3,819,945 | 67,334 | 3,371,523 | 147,487 | 115,701 | 7,521,540 |
| Yazd Yazd Province Yazd Province is one of the 31 provinces of Iran. It is in the centre of the country, and its administrative center is the city of Yazd.The province has an area of 131,575 km², and according to the most recent divisions of the country, is divided into eleven counties: Maybod, Mehreez, Taft,... |
337,178 | 2,565 | 255,799 | 8,406 | 5,908 | 609,856 |
| Zanjan Zanjan Province Zanjan Province is one of the 31 provinces of Iran. Located in the North West of Iran, its capital is Zanjan city. Zanjan province with an area of 36,400 km² has a mostly rural, population of 964,601 . The province lies 330 km northwest of Tehran, connected to it via a freeway.Zanjan... |
444,480 | 2,223 | 126,561 | 7,276 | 5,181 | 585,721 |
| Source: Interior Ministry reported by PressTV | ||||||
Overseas results
A total of 234,812 votes were cast outside Iran, out of which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won 78,300; Mehdi Karroubi won 4,647; Mohsen Rezaei won 3,635 and Mir-Hossein Mousavi won 111,792 votes (Press TV).Attempts by Iranian government to restore confidence
Either due to the uncertainty over the election results and the protests by supporters of Musavi or to buy time for the government militia to suppress the protesters, the Guardian CouncilGuardian Council
The Guardian Council of the Constitution , also known as the Guardian Council or Council of Guardians, is an appointed and constitutionally-mandated 12-member council that wields considerable power and influence in the Islamic Republic of Iran....
requested that the Supreme Leader extend the legal period for the registering of complaints by five days, from the original 7–10 days allotted by Iranian election laws. During this time few specific complaints were registered by the opposing parties. The Guardian Council refuted the accusations that pertained to its sphere of authority, which was during and after the elections, and opened the question of why violations prior to the election had not been raised before. Even though the main allegation of fraud were pertaining to ballot box stuffing, after a recount of 10% of the ballot boxes from the election chosen randomly, which was videotaped and done in the presence of representatives of the opposing parties, the Guardian Council certified the results and declared Ahmadinejad the winner of the 2009 Iranian presidential elections on 29 June.
External links
- Papers on Election Forensics by Walter MebaneWalter MebaneWalter R. Mebane is a University of Michigan professor of political science and statistics and an expert on detecting electoral fraud. He has authored numerous articles on detecting fraudulent results in elections, including a recent series of notes on the Results of the Iranian presidential...
, Professor of Political Science, University of Michigan - Visualizations of the various analyses and collected province-, precinct-, and ballot box-level data by Thomas Lotze, PhD candiddate, University of Maryland