Iran election turnout nearly 63%, really not so bad? Or fraud?

Free Thoughts In Iran reports:

Participation: 61.7%

Rafsanjani: 6,108,029 (21.2%)
Ahmadi Nejad: 5,555,458 (19.3%)
Karrubi: 5,394,031 (18.7%)
Qalibaf: 4,009,620 (13.9%)
Moeen: 3,949,240 (13.7%)
Larijani: 1,715,190 (6.0%)
Mehr Alizade: 1,269,790 (4.4%)

Spoiled Ballots: 847,642 (2.9%)

A day before the election, Bush sharply denounced the vote, saying it was designed to keep power in the hands of the clerics. But some Iranians said they were motivated to vote to retaliate against Bush’s denunciations.

“I picked Ahmadinejad to slap America in the face,” said Mahdi Mirmalek after attending Friday prayers at Tehran University.

And I don't even want to start into what happened in Lebanon. In a move sure to annoy the many regime change enthusiasts in Washington, the Iranian public (including a significant number of expatriates) voted in surprisingly large numbers in the first round of their presidential election--although naturally Michael Ledeen now claims that various people cooked the numbers, provided fake ballots and perhaps bussed in a million Shiites from Pakistan. Now the former president, Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, will face off against a rather hardcore mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the final election this Friday. Snooping around the burgeoning Iranian presence online these days shows that progressive Persians are annoyed as hell that they'll have to vote for Rafsanjani to prevent the even more conservative Ahmadinejad from taking over.

Check an interesting NY Times Q&A with professor William Beeman, who just returned from there. (Rafsanjani, by the way, was involved with Iran-Contra back in the good ol' days, but it doesn't seem to bother people too much, because, hey, they got some missiles out of it, right?) A good summary of the whole thing, including a broader look at how American hawks tried to frame the situation.

And there are claims of voting fraud now coming from Rafsanjani's people, as well as the #3 candidate Mehdi Karroubi, who represented sort of an anti-poverty religious angle that progressives took cynically. A letter about fraud that Karroubi published was printed in two daily newspapers, Eqbal and Aftab Yazd, and they got shut down by the government. Even IRNA reported this was about "some rigging in the elections."

There were polls in Los Angeles, and some people tried to picket them. Apparently the "Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran" quoted in this story is basically a one-man front that people shouldn't take seriously. But he did yell at people.

Human Rights Watch summarized Iran's exclusionary election system, termed as 'pre-cooked elections.' The distribution of votes was fairly close among six candidates, which suggests that if the various progressive movements in the country hadn't tried to boycott it, they might have actually gotten someone more preferable into the final round. Mostafa Moin (spellings vary-"Moeen" as well) was the supposed progressive candidate and he seems to be claiming that he took a nap in the morning and when he awoke a million votes had shifted. But Moin might not really be that progressive. As the Sunnis in the next war zone over learned, boycotting elections in imperfect systems doesn't really solve anything.

There are many pictures of the election process available online. That is pretty nifty to see.

As Prof. Juan Cole described the results,

The Iranian voting public put a hardliner and a conservative pragmatist into a run-off election with their ballots on Friday. With a turnout of 62 percent or more, voters rejected reformist youth calls for a boycott and some said they meant their vote to be a slap in the face of US President George W. Bush. In the lead is Mahmud Ahmadinejad, the former mayor of Tehran and a hardliner close to the Islamist vigilantes ("Basij") of the grass roots Khomeinist movement. Coming in close second is former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a conservative pragmatist who dealt with the Americans during the Reagan-era Iran-Contra scandal. They will face each other in a run-off next Friday. Wire services report,

“I picked Ahmadinejad to slap America in the face,” said Mahdi Mirmalek after attending Friday prayers at Tehran University.
At Tehran University, the leader of Friday prayers, Ayatollah Mohammad Emami Kashani, told worshippers that voting “strengthens the pillars of the ruling Islamic establishment.” Followers then joined in with the common chant of “Death to America!”

The vote is a repudiation of the relatively timid reform movement of outgoing president Mohammad Khatami, which never delivered an improved economy or administration. Its attempts to open up the Khomeinist system to greater personal liberties and greater freedom of speech were relentlessly blocked by the hardline clerics that controlled the judiciary and other oversight bodies. The Right closed dozens of reformist newspapers and cracked down on student demonstrations. The most outspoken reformist on the ballot, Mostafa Moin, did poorly. He had initially been excluded by the hardline clerics that vet Iranian candidates, but was put back on the ballot at the insistence of Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei. A more moderate reformer, Mehdi Karrubi, came in third and charged ballot fraud by the Revolutionary Guards who supported Ahmadinejad.

It is likely that the Iranian electorate's swing to the Right reflects in part a deep unease about being surrounded by the United States, which has troops both in Afghanistan and Iraq. Post-revolutionary Iranians are nationalistic and determined to maintain their national independence, and all the talk by the Bush administration about regime change, aggressive action against Iran over its nuclear research program [which so far appears to have been conducted within the limits set by the Non-Proliferation Treaty], and the illegitimacy of the Iranian elections themselves, appears to have contributed to the greater success of the hardliners.

Ahmadinejad is a very bad character, with a long history of essentially fascist activity in suppressing points of view other than those of the hardline Khomeinists. He is said to have plotted the murder of novelist Salman Rushdie and to have been involved in planning terrorist actions by Iranian agents in the 1980s. Ironically, in Iranian terms he is a "Neoconservative," the opposite number of the Cheneys, Perles and Feiths in the United States.

I did some research on how the domestic scene is put together in Iran, and it is interesting that indeed there is a segment labeled 'neoconservative' that is closely tied to the religious establishment and the bazaaris, more traditionalist merchants of the informal economy that have a great deal of influence over affairs. An Interview with Ahmadinejad on IRNA, the Islamic Republic News Agency. What a great name for an agency. Anyway:

Nuclear energy is the scientific achievement of the Iranian nation. Our youth have crowned themselves with this achievement, via domestic technology and by reliance on their own knowledge. The energy belongs to the Iranian nation. Definitely, the progress of a nation can not be obstructed. Scientific, medical, and technical development of our nation is necessary.

I believe there are certain individuals that create a false mood. They want to portray the situation as critical, while there is no crisis here. The technology is at the disposal of the Iranian nation. Certain powers do not want to believe this. They resist a bit against accepting such a right, such an achievement of the Iranian nation. Their scientists and experts have admitted that the Iranian nation is entitled to this right.

I believe the problem can be solved with prudence and wisdom, by utilizing opportunity and relying on the endless power of the Iranian nation, through our self-confidence. The ongoing artificial mood is political sleight of hand. The mood aims to influence the Islamic Republic's domestic developments.

One can not impede scientific progress. You can see scientific progress everywhere in the world. One can not obstruct this movement. This is not something that can be prevented with an order. No one can deprive the Iranian nation of this right. They are vainly trying to stir conditions worldwide. They want to fan tension, create crisis to meet their transitory objectives.

That's a kind of psychological war; nothing else meets the objectives. That may not be the case. This is as if you want to deprive someone of industrial progress. This is something impossible. Industry is intertwined with the nature of an individual. Technical knowledge has now become an integral aspect of the Iranian psyche. You can not say that the Iranian nation should not use math, should not have physicians, should not build large dams, or should not be able to build a refinery or a plane.

So that is kind of disturbing, but interesting... Really shocking that they feel entitled to use technology, oh how could they ever be so crazy? :-P To put another point on this, Beeman said:

I think there is no question that the public, all the candidates, and the current establishment are completely unified on this point: Iran should be developing its nuclear industry.
Here's one point that utterly escapes us in the United States, and I really wish people in power could understand: The discourse on the nuclear question between the United States and Iran is almost a complete disconnect. The United States, not to put too fine a point on it, thinks Iran is going after nuclear weapons in order to do some damage to the United States and its allies. To put it really crudely, as one adviser connected to the White House told me, "Look, we know Iran wants to develop a nuclear bomb to drop on Tel Aviv." This kind of statement just utterly and completely floors me.
The Iranian side of the discourse is that they want to be known and seen as a modern, developing state with a modern, developing industrial base. The history of relations between Iran and the West for the last hundred years has included Iran's developing various kinds of industrial and technological advances to prove to themselves--and to attempt to prove to the world--that they are, in fact, that kind of country.
The nuclear-power issue is exactly that. When Iranians talk about it, and talk about the United States, they say, "The United States is trying to repress us; they're trying to keep us down and keep us backward, make us a second-class nation. And we have the ability to develop a nuclear industry, and we're being told we're not good enough, or we can't." And this makes people furious--not just the clerical establishment, but this makes the person on the street, even 16- and 17-year-olds, absolutely boil with anger. It is such an emotional issue that absolutely no politician could ever back down on this question. But again, the public, when you ask them about nuclear weapons, they just sort of look at you like you are crazy. Because that's not even close to what it means to them.

Here are some links. Editor:Myself by Hossein Derakhshan, who is based in Toronto. He says that things are getting kind of scary.

Also check out Iranian Truth, IranScan1384, Free Thoughts on Iran, IranMania news service/portal, aptly named Brooding Persian, The Iranian Feminist Tribune, Adventures of Mr. Behi, and a huge friggin' list @ blogsbyiranians.com. And of course Iranians have many sites purely in Farsi.

More articles... bitterness about Iran's double apartheid based on gender and beliefs. I liked the different notes on freethoughts.org.
Finally then, I think this post by an Iranian student in Toronto rounded it out:

History seems to follow no pattern. The lesson is that there is simply no lesson to learn(*). Politics due to <put your favorite reason here> is not a deterministic game.

There is no guarantee of what is going to happen to Iran after this presidential elections and many of the heated debates going on about boycott or supporting a specific candidate are at best superficial.
I know this was a lousy post but I thought the nihilistic nonchalant should have a voice as well.
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(*) Reminds me of "We learn from history that we never learn anything from history," as Hegel said.