A Review on Iran’s 2009 Presidential Crisis

An Article by Iranian Students at A&M. More under the cut and very informative. Read the whole thing.

Aditionally there will be a vigil to support at the Galleria Water Wall, Sunday 8:00 Information is here: http://sabzhouston.com/ Please follow all their instructions and rules of Decorum.

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By Mir Emad Mousavi, Mehran Mirjafari, and a group
of Iranian Students at Texas A&M University

This article provides a brief review on the
background and the reasons of the recent conflict after the Iran’s presidential
election and its following riots.

1. Islamic Republic of Iran’s Political System

Iran has a complex political system. The
country is ruled according to a constitution that was passed by a large majority
in a general referendum shortly after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The
constitution was partially changed in 1989 after the former supreme leader,
Ayatollah Khomeini, passed away and the current supreme leader, Ayatollah
Khamenei, started ruling. The changes have given more power to the supreme
leader. According to the constitution, there are three independent institutions
that work under the supervision of the supreme leader; The Judiciary, The
President and his Cabinet, and the Parliament. The president and the members of
the parliament are elected by people, both for four years, and the head of the
judiciary is appointed by the supreme leader. The president and his cabinet
members are also supervised by the parliament who can dismiss them at any time.

The supreme leader is required to maintain
certain characteristics such as justice, wisdom, and leadership. He is appointed
and supervised by the Assembly of Experts whose members are elected by people .
In addition to the judiciary, the supreme leader appoints the heads of the armed
forces and the national broadcasting organization as well as six members of the
powerful Guardian Council. The remaining six members of the Guardian Council are
selected by the parliament from the candidates suggested by the head of the
judiciary. The Guardian Council supervises all the major elections including the
approval of candidates. Additionally, the Guardian Council confirms or rejects
bills that are passed in the parliament to ensure they comply with the
constitution and the Islamic Law. The council is also the only legal interpreter
for the constitution. The supreme leader is the only person in the country that
can order the council to change its decisions.

Reviewing the complex political system of Iran
indicates that the Guardian Council has influence over the whole government
through the filtering of candidates and bills. In fact it is assumed in the
constitution that the characteristics of the supreme leader will keep him and
the guardian council fair. However, by disqualifying many candidates for
Presidency, Parliament and the Assembly of Experts, they essentially have
control over all parts of the government. There are a few reformist candidates
who were accepted by the Guardian Council due to their previous experience and
important government positions during Ayatollah Khomeini’s era. Mir Hossein
Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi are two of the reformist candidates that were
qualified for the recent presidency election. Mir Hossein Mousavi was the prime
minister during the Iran-Iraq war and Mehdi Karoubi was the parliament speaker
during two parliament terms.

It is believed that in general, the election
rules in Iran give too much authority to the guardian council. It is also
believed that both the current supreme leader and the current guardian council
support President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. In fact the chair of the Guardian Council
has clearly stated in one of his speeches a few weeks before the election that
he believes the current administration is doing very well. He mentioned in the
same speech that the guardian council will not allow those whom he called
opponents of the Islamic Revolution to come to power through the presidency
election. In addition to the chair, some other members of the guardian council
are known to be supporters of Ahmadinejad including Gholam Hossein Elham who is
both a member and the speaker of the President’s cabinet.

2. Violations of Iranian presidential election
rules before and during the Election Day

According to Iran’s presidential election
rules, the ministry of interior is in charge of organizing the election. During
all the steps of the election, candidates have the right to place
representatives in the voting locations and in the ministry of interior where
the results are collected and announced. The candidates are not allowed to use
any public funding or government facilities and properties for the campaigns.
The Islamic Republic of Iran’s Broadcasting (IRIB), the only legal Radio and TV
provider in Iran, must provide equal coverage to each candidate. It is worth
mentioning that in Iran, the IRIB is the sole source of national news for many
people, especially in the villages and small towns.

There are several examples before and during
the Election Day that the election rules were violated by the governing
candidate, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, but the guardian council has ignored these
violations. Some of these examples are listed below. This information was
collected from the state media and formal letters of other candidates to the
Guardian Council:

1 – A major part of the violations of the
election rules before the day of election are related to the use of public funds
and properties by Mahmud Ahmadinejad for his presidential campaigns. In several
cases the special payments of the government to employees were paid just a few
weeks before the election while they should have been paid several months
earlier. In several other incidents, additional payments were given to
government employees with the explanation of being a ‘special gift’ from the
President just weeks prior to the election. Also the Islamic Republic News
Agency, a national institution with public funding, the Kayhan Newspaper, one of
the major national newspapers, and the IRIB had all widely supported Ahmadinejad
by providing analysis overwhelming in his favor and against the other candidates
during the weeks leading up to the election.

2 – There were six live presidential debates
between the presidential candidates on one of the IRIB’s national TV channels.
Two of the four candidates attended each debate. Every candidate was given about
40 minutes during each debate. However, after all the six debates were
completed, 20 additional minutes were offered to President Mahmud Ahmadinejad by
the IRIB to defend himself and his policies. The IRIB announced that because in
some of the debates between other candidates, where Ahmadinejad was absent, his
policies were challenged, he was given extra time. But the Iran’s Judiciary
officially called this offer ‘illegal’.

3 – According to Iran’s constitution and
several rules, the armed forces are prohibited from involvement in political
campaigns and support of any political parties. However, General Jafari, the
head of the Revolutionary Guard which is one of the state armed forces of Iran,
clearly stated his support for the current administration in a general meeting
about two months before the election. He also stated that the revolutionary
guard will not allow the enemies of the Islamic revolution to come to power
through the election. The Revolutionary Guard stated in a later time that
General Jafari’s words were misinterpreted. However, it is believed that the
revolutionary guard had organized its troops to vote for Ahmadinejad, who is
also a member of the non-armed section of the revolutionary guard (Basij).

4 – Some infrastructural projects were
inaugurated by the President a few weeks before the election while they were
still incomplete (i.e. the Isfahan – Shiraz and Kerman – Zahedan railways) and
the IRIB covered the opening celebrations just a few days before the election as
important national events.

5 – According to the election rules, the
government must issue ID cards for the representatives that are assigned by the
candidates to watch the election process at least 48 hours before the election
starts. These ID cards are required for admission of the representatives to the
voting locations, but the cards were not issued for 250 representatives of Mr.
Mousavi in Tehran and for many others nationwide. For many representatives, the
ID cards had some errors (female representatives had photos of male
representatives!) and thus they could not use the ID cards (they were not
admitted to the voting locations by the officers and there was no time to fix
the problem). For some others, the location was different on the ID cards of
several representatives from where they were assigned by the candidates. As a
result, many voting locations had no candidate representatives (i.e. about 50%
of the locations in Tehran).

6 – According to the election rules, forcing
the candidate representatives to leave the voting locations during the election
process is punishable with six to twelve months in prison, but in most
locations, the representatives were forced to leave the voting locations during
the packing of the ballot boxes and the counting of the votes.

7 – The total number of Iranian citizens that
were eligible to vote was announced by the authorities to be about 46 millions.
A total of 59.6 million ballots were published by the ministry of interior for
this election with special serial numbers. In addition, it was reported that an
unknown number of ballots were illegally published by the ministry with no
serial numbers one day before the election (letter of Mousavi to Guardian
Council – June 20). However, on the day of the election, a significant number of
voting locations had run out of ballots just few hours after the election
started and many people were waiting for several hours in the lines until more
ballots arrived. This is very strange as the number of available ballots was at
least 20% more than the total number of possible voters. This especially
happened in areas where Mousavi had more supporters than any other candidates
(i.e. larger cities and his hometown) based on previous polls.

8 – According to the election rules, and as
conducted in several previous elections, the voting shall continue until all the
people waiting in the voting lines have voted. In the previous elections, the
time of voting was even extended to make sure that everyone had the opportunity
to vote. However in this election, the voting time was not extended as usual and the
people in the voting lines were forced to leave the locations at 9 pm. It
included the locations where the ballots run out early and people had waited for
several hours until additional ballots arrived in the afternoon.

9 – A large number of mobile voting stations
were used in the election and while legally the candidates are allowed to have
representatives in all the locations including the mobile stations, the
representatives were not allowed to watch the voting process at these locations.

10 – For the first time, cell phone and text
messaging services were inactivated in the whole country at the day of election.
Additionally, 400 office phone lines that were planned for the use of Mr.
Mousavi’s representatives in the voting locations were inactivated on the day of
the election. Since there was no internet access in the voting locations, this
caused a complete disconnection between the representatives and the central
office of Mousavi’s campaign on the Election Day.

Recognizing the shortages of the ballots,
items seven through nine are especially important since the number of votes in
170 cities was between 95% and 140% of the total number eligible voters. The
official results in some cases reported more than 100% of the total eligible
voters voted for Mahmud Ahmadinejad.

3. Results analysis

Besides all the violations of rules mentioned in
the two previous sections, the results of elections were very far from the
expected ones. We conduct an analysis on the results to see if there is any
obvious trace of wrongdoing in them. Here’s what they’ve found out:

3.1. Results announced so fast

In some parts of Iran polls closed on 9 PM local
time while a few of polling stations were open until 11 PM.  Table below
shows the time and number of votes counted. All results have been taken from
Iran Student News Agency (www.isna.ir).  The time mentioned for announcements is
absent in some of them so the time in which the news came out has been taken
into account and marked by a “before” word which means the time of counting has
been before this time.

The table below also shows the time and
number of votes counted in the first round of previous presidential election in
2005. These results have also been taken from Iran Student News Agency news
archive:

Considering 20-30 minutes for the news to be
published, the following graph show the number of votes counted per minute in
each of those elections:

As it can be seen in the graph the number of votes
counted per minute is considerably higher than the previous election except in
one step. In fact in one step it is 15 times larger than the 2005 election while
in another step it is 11 times larger. It should be noted that this early surge
and high ratio of votes/minute has happened in early morning while most of the
people were asleep and no proper action could be taken.

3.2. Linear correlation between votes of the
two main candidates

Some people noticed a somewhat linear relation
between votes of the two main candidates in the early stages public
announcements. The graph below show the relation of Mousavi’s votes Vs.
Ahmadinejad’s votes:

The following graph shows the relation between the
votes of the leading candidate (Hashemi) and two other candidates (Ahmadinejad
and Karoubi) following him in 2005 election:

As it can be seen the results in 2009 election is
highly irregular comparing with those of year 2005. It should also be noticed
that for the announcements made in early hours of June 13^th 2009 the results are very close to be
linear.

3.3. Election details did not come out after
three days

While there was a huge discussion if the election
has been stolen or not, Iran Interior Ministry did not give out the detailed
result of the election immediately despite what used to be done in elections
conducted before. Ministry of Interior finally gave out the detailed results of
towns and provinces after three days which fueled the controversy.

According to BBC Persian Service, after five days
of the election (June 17^th) Mohsen Rezaei, one of the candidates,
sent a letter to the Sadeq Mahsouli, the Interior Minister, telling that his
representatives still don’t have access to the detailed results of each ballot
box and thus, it is impossible for him to file a complaint. The reaction came
from the chief of Election Committee, Kamran Daneshjoo, saying that according to
law they are not obliged to give out such information. However, on June 19^th the Ministry of Interior started to
give out the detailed results for all ballot boxes. They have given out the
detailed results of 21 out of 30 provinces until now (June 21^st)

3.4. Decline in Rezaei’s votes

In the early hours of June 13^th, some
of the Iranians on Facebook noticed that a decline in Mohsen Rezaei`s votes has
happened in two consecutive public announcements. Referring to news archive of
ISNA, it is evident that indeed, Rezaei’s votes have been declined from 633048
to 587913 between two official announcements on 8:45 AM and before 1:55 PM on
June 13^th. While this might seem as a typo as Ministry of Interior
claimed later, it should be noted that votes of the four candidate still sum up
to the total which shows that this decrease is not a simple typo in the news
story.

3.5. Three of the candidates lost in their
hometowns and provinces

While Ministry of Interior had not officially
given out the detailed results by town and province, pro-government newspapers
and websites, even the official Iran news agency (IRNA) claimed that all of the
candidates except Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have lost the election in their own
hometowns. Three days later, when the official detailed result came out, the
claim proved not to be true for two of the three candidates but the numbers
which IRNA had given in its story were completely wrong. The following table
shows the result of the candidates in their hometown comparing to Ahmadinejad`s
based on the official results given out by Ministry of Interior:

And here is what IRNA claimed to be the
candidates` votes in their homwtown:

Which do not agree with official results except
for one candidate. What makes it more doubtful is that IRNA is the official news
agency of Iran government.

The following table show the votes of three
candidates in their own provinces comparing to Ahmadinejad’s:

Considering the popularity of candidates in their
own provinces, those results are extremely doubtful. In 2005 election, Mohsen
Mehralizadeh, which was an ethnic Azeri, stood in 7^thplace among 7
candidates and received votes almost 5 times less than two leading candidates.
However, he won the election in three Azeri speaking provinces (East Azarbaijan,
West Azarbaijan and Ardabil). It seems to be the first time ever that such a
thing happened in Presidential Election in Iran.

3.6. Turnout exceeded the number of eligible
voters

According to Tabnak news website, on June 18^th,
Mohsen Rezaei claimed that in 170 towns and villages, the turnout is more than
95% of the number of eligible voters. The highest among those 170 was the small
town of Taft, in Yazd province, which turnout has been 141%. It seems to be the
first time that such a thing has ever happened in a Presidential Election in
Iran.

Kamran Daneshjoo, the chief of Election Committee,
responded several days later that because of the spring time and the weekend,
many people took trips to provinces other than their own and that is the reason
of turnout higher than 100%. It has to be mentioned that most of the schools
hold their final exams on Late May and June which usually take between 2 to 3
weeks and families do not travel that much in those times. It is also
interesting to notice that Yazd province is a very hot and dry place and is not
a popular destination for travelers on this time of the year.

3.8. Surprisingly low number of votes for Mehdi
Karoubi

Mehdi Karoubi, which was one the candidates belong
to Reformist movement, was running also for 2005 election. He received 5.06
million votes, only 644000 less than 2^ndcandidate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
and thus stood in the third place and could not make it to run-off. After 2005
he founded a new party and announced as early as 2005 that he is going to run
for 2009 election. Despite early indifference between other reformist figures,
he succeeded to tempt some of the most popular figures to join him for his
campaign including Gholamhossein Karbaschi, the former mayor of Tehran,
Mohammadali Abtahi, the former chief of staff of President Khatami Ataollah
Mohajerani, the former minister of Khatami`s government and a very effective
speaker and debater and Mohammad Ghouchani, a young and talented editor in chief
of several prominent Reformist newspapers and magazines. He campaigned actively
in and before the official campaign season and according to Time Magazine was
the most progressive candidate among the four.

His extremely low number of votes surprised
everyone. His votes were even less than voided votes which made his newspaper to
choose this headline for June 14^th: “Ministry of Interior announced
that Karoubi stood in 5^th place
after 3 candidates and voided votes”. Indeed, Karoubi received votes 15 times
less than the previous election while it seemed before the election that he is
going to receive at least the same amount of votes.

A study also shows a meaningful correlation
between the Karoubi’s votes and voided votes in different provinces. The
following charts show this correlation:

3.9. Statistical errors

On june 15^th, Professor Walter R.
Mebane Jr., a professor in political science and department of statistics in
university of Michigan, published a note on his website regarding Iranian
Presidential election which contain several statistical tests which make the
results doubtful¹. Alex Scacco and Bernd Beber from Columbia
University also conducted an analysis showing an excessive number of number 7 in
the first and last digits of country-level election results². The
latter analysis was published in Washington Post website on June 20^th.
While it might be too much scientific for this text, reader can study the main
reports by following the links provided on the bottom of the page.

3.10. Huge difference between expectations and
results

People visited Iran on the week before the
election can hardly believe that the results are true. It seemed that Mousavi is
riding the horse to the victory and Ahmadinejad is not a big obstacle.
Unfortunately there is nothing like polls before the presidential elections in
Iran. Indeed there are many of them but almost none of them are trustable
because of lack of transparency. However, it should be noted that Ahmadinejad
received 17 million votes on 2005 while the turnout was 62%. It is commonly
believe that most of the 38% who didn’t vote in 2005 were among the middle class
and educated people who were disappointed after Khatami’s failure to bring
structural reform to the system. Long lines in the polling stations and stations
running out of ballots were evidences showing that the turnout is going to be
high and Ahmadinejad is not going to win at least by a landslide. The results
showed something else.

There are many predictions on Iranian election
before June 12^th. For example, Newsweek published an article³ in its website saying that they have
seen a secret poll funded by government predicting Ahmadinejad’s defeat.

4. Riots after the Election

After the election, the results were disputed by
all three challengers of Ahmadinejad. In separate announcements, Mousavi,
Karrubi and Rezaee alleged fraud in the election. Although the Guardian council
had 10 days to review the complaints, Kadkhodaie the spokesman of the Council
appeared on Iranian TV the day after the election and refused any possibilities
of fraud in the election.

In the aftermath of the election, the government
arrested several reformist figures and prominent journalists. The arrests may be
interpreted as a means for the government to put pressure on Mousavi to accept
the official results. In his statement, however, Mr. Mousavi announced that the
fraud in the election was obvious and called for a rally in Tehran. Although the
government issued the permission of the rally for the supporters of Ahmadinejad,
it refused the request of Mousavi for the protest. Several rallies were held
during the week after the election. On Thursday 16^th Mr. Mousavi appeared among hundreds of
thousands of protestors and asked the Guardian Council to nullify the election.

Although the rallies and protests were generally
peaceful, the riot police and fundamentalist militia used violence to disperse
the protesters. There were several incidents of using tear gas, batons, and
water cannon by the police. The exact number of casualties is still unknown but
according to Iran’s government at least 20 people were killed and several
hundred were injured.

The government tried to limit the media coverage
of the protests. International journalists were banned from filming the rallies.
The BBC correspondent was ordered to leave the country. The government also cut
off the cellular phones, filtered several social networking websites such as
Twitter and Facebook to prevent protestors from sharing the photos and videos
they took from the protests with their mobile phones or cameras.

In a rare event, the militia forces attacked one
of the dormitories of the University of Tehran and the main dormitory of the
Isfahan University of Technology. They beat up the students and destroyed the
belongings of them. According to unconfirmed reports, five students were killed
by the militia in the dormitory of University of Tehran.

On Friday, 17^th, Ayatollah Khamenei,
the supreme leader of Iran gave a speech in the Friday prayers in Tehran. He
denounced the protests and rallies and announced that “those who set up the
rallies are responsible for the bloodshed”. He also asked the candidates to send
their complaints to the Guardian Council, but at the same time he stated that he
will not accept the request for re-holding the election. He also said that
because of the 11-million-difference in the votes of Ahmadinejad and Mousavi
there could not be any chance of fraud in the election.

Despite the requests of the supreme leader, on
Saturday, 20^th, another rally was held in Tehran. The police and
militia violently tried to disperse the protestors. They even took the injured
protestors to military hospitals. More than 10 protesters were killed and more
than 100 were injured and many of them were arrested.

In separate announcements, the supreme leader, the
president, the speaker of the parliament and the foreign minister accused the
foreign countries especially Britain and The United States for supporting the
protests and waging a “velvet revolution” in Iran. They also accused foreign
media such as BBC and CNN for exaggerating about the protests and encouraging
people for violent actions. According to BBC website, the Iranian government
sends noise signals to interfere with BBC satellite broadcasting. The Government
also threatened to expel the western diplomats whose countries are intervening
in Iran’s internal affair. In the latest diplomatic clash between Iran and
Britain, Iran expelled two British diplomats from Tehran on Tuesday, 23th. In
return, Britain also expelled two Iranian diplomats from London.

[1] http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wmebane/note20jun2009.pdf

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/20/AR2009062000004.html

[1] http://www.newsweek.com/id/200960

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