Where are you? How many votes? How many human tabulators?
Well, there is a finite number of people that were assigned to count the ballots. If your example is any guide, we should be able to divide the number of ballots in your election by the number of tabulators to determine how many would be required in a country the size of Iran. Then, we compare that number of tabulators with the number reported for the Iranian election. If they are wildly divergent, I would say that is an indication of fraud.
How are you going to find out how many tabulators Iran used?
According to Elections Canada, in last fall’s general election we had ~14 million votes cast at ~65000 polling stations, which works out to 215 ballots/station on average. I don’t know how many Elections volunteers there are at each station, but as you can see it’s not an overwhelming task to count the ballots, even at polling stations with significantly above average numbers.
The evidence is the actions of the regime. Take down or delay most communications, get rid of foreign reporters, claim the results were divinely inspired, even if they were announced hours before any conclusive counts could have been completed. Then attack non-violent marchers.
There are statistical sites, like 358.com, which show the unlikeliness of the results, but even a 1 percent chance can occur, very, very, occasionally.
So you have to make your own judgment after you’ve read the the statistical analysis, after you’ve learned how tyrants in the past have manipulated elections, and how you judge the motivations of the actors involved.
There isn’t any hard evidence either way. How would there be, if it was the government itself who was in on skewing the election and who is in on covering it up? From what I understand this was basically a case of last minute ballot box stuffing (which is why several voting stations are reporting more votes than there are actual registered voters).
It’s not like the Iranian’s are putting their raw data out electronically for foreign independent confirmation, ehe?
Yes…though the problem here is, how do you trust the pre-election poll numbers? How were THEY tabulated, exactly? From what representative sample? Before the election (in which they had something like an over 80% turn out, which says something right there), there was a lot of people indicating that Mousavi was in fact running ahead…but, again, it’s not like there is any access to the raw (and independently gathered) data for us to look through, nothing about the methodology used in the polls, etc.
I think that the protesters are sick of the old system, and that this is was the last straw. Even a sham election gives one the illusion of participation…until them make a sham of the sham, so to speak. So, now the fuse is lit. My guess is this isn’t even about Mousavi or Ahmedinejad anymore, but that’s just a guess.
No hard evidence one way or the other. It’s all pure speculation, and depends on which blog you have been reading or which you believe. This is what happens when you have a real, honest to Allah repressive regime and a totally opaque election system and process controlled by the government and not open to any kind of independent analysis or checks. You really can steal (or manipulate) an election at will and no one can really know the facts when you have such a set up.
Nah, it’s just a statistical clump, well within expected deviation.
No, you didn’t. You didn’t give an answer to the OP’s question. The OP asked “What is the evidence for each claim?” You answered the question “Was the election stolen?”
Granted, the question you answered was contained in the title of the OP. But one who had read the body of the OP would have understood that the OP’s title was misleading.
Man, are they ever in a rotten spot of bother. I gather a very large part of the population of Iran are tired of rigorously Islamic rule. But their parents generation was so sick of the Shah, they went to the opposite extreme, and instituted a constitution with checks and balances only between the clerics and the clerics.
A Supreme Leader with enough Executive Privilege to give Karl Rove midnight wood. An election council that assures that the ballot will be a contest between the very, very conservative party and the totally authoritarian party. It would be like having a choice between “Batshit” Bachmann and Sarah, Gomer Palin’s evil twin.
In trying to erase any taint of the Shah’s rule, they made any sort of change nearly impossible as far as legal, political means are concerned. And the worst of it is it was pretty darned democratic, they royally screwed every pooch in the pound, its the mullah’s country and everybody else just lives there. And that’s the system they voted for, they locked themselves in, threw the key outside and nailed their feet to the floor for good measure.
Which seems to mean that legal and peaceable means of progress are useless. Its very nearly impossible for me to advocate violent revoution, thats worse than throwing out the baby with the bathwater, that’s boiling the baby in the bathwater.
About the only thing that could help is if everybody peers into that abyss, shits themselves, and a wild, raging flood of sanity breaks out across the nation, the powerful compromise away their autocracy in the name of reason and common sense.
You know, at the end of the day, the notion that this election was not hijacked is the intellectual equivalent (not yet the moral equivalent) of denying the Holocaust, or that 2 plus 2 equals 4. The way one argues about it determines whether it is the former, or the latter.
A long postby Juan Cole about a detailed study on the Iranian election by Chatham House: a leading British think tank, which finds strong evidence of electoral fraud.
In 1880, there was a race for Sheriff in Pima County, Arizona. Ike Clanton and Johnny Ringo of OK Corral fame were district elections officials of a district that had 50 eligible voters. The district went 103-1 for the Democratic candidate, making him Sheriff. So Tombstone has Chicago beat.
I’m not sure I’d say that this isn’t a “good answer”. It’s honest, at the very least. And to “what evidence do we have either way?”, “none whatsoever” is a perfectly legitimate answer. But it is contradicted by others here who claim to have evidence.
This strikes me as overly pessimistic. Iran isn’t North Korea, and information does get in and out. Will we ever have proof of what happened? Possibly not. Will we ever have evidence? Surely at least some reliable information will get out.
Interesting, but as even it says, the report was completely unconfirmed. In times like these, speculation and rumor fly rampant, and something as serious as this should have a little more to back it up. Surely if this guy really did publish “real” numbers and if he really were murdered, there will be more than “unconfirmed reports” sooner rather than later.
By the way, guys, as this is my first foray into GD (unintended, yet), I should add: I am not defending the Iranian regime, and to a certain extent I’m engaged in devil’s advocacy. I’m not a fan of repressive regimes of any nature, and certainly not ones in which the repression is founded on religion. However, I value truth above all else and I’m seeing a lot of people willing to believe that the election was stolen based on rather flimsy evidence.
Cite, please?
Perhaps Iran’s constitution lays out the rules for elections, and (like ours) has no provision for “do-overs”?
I may be a rube noob, but as a believer in a free and independent press I rarely listen to state-owned media.
Here’s the problem I have with theories of stolen elections. I don’t know how the electoral system works in Iran but it doesn’t seem unreasonable to assume that it shares similarities with the American system and in fact any voting system in a large democracy. In a nation of millions of voters, you simply can’t have all the ballots go through a single bottleneck. Instead, elections are conducted at a precinct level, with the totals for each precinct being tabulated and forwarded to higher authorities for aggregation. These precinct-level totals are published, and the correct values for each precinct are known to several people at each precinct, including (in the U.S, at least) poll-watchers representing both parties. The only way for the higher authorities to rig the election would be for them to publish false precinct-level totals, and the folks at the precinct would be in a position to notice. It’s a difficult system to game. Corrupt precinct-level officials can report erroneous results, but they can only marginally affect the overall outcome. Corrupt state-level officials can report erroneous totals, but this could be easily caught. Corrupting a national election would require a lot of conspirators.
Which isn’t to say it can’t happen… or that it isn’t much easier to rig local elections. But I’m highly skeptical and would require solid proof to believe it.
It’s certainly the case that a lot of Iranian people believe that they were cheated. But the fact that a large number of people believe a proposition has little correlation to its truth. A nationwide vote-fixing conspiracy would leave numerous people in possession of documentary evidence.
In the aforementioned blog post [note: blog has been abandoned for years], I pointed out numerous flaws with the study’s methodology… but even if their methodology were flawless and none of the potential sources of bias I pointed out were valid, a close look at their data show that it reveals a mean number of deaths of 98,000… plus or minus 92%. Yeah, their 95% confidence interval covered a whopping 92%. That is, in a word, bullshit. That’s not a statistical estimate, that’s a wild-ass guess. The fact that the study was reported widely in the media with headlines such as “Study puts civilian toll in Iraq at over 100,000” and “100,000 Civilian Deaths Estimated in Iraq” reveals the political motivation behind this perversion of academia, and I repeat that the editors of The Lancet ought to be ashamed of themselves for publishing.
You are mistaken, but that’s okay. You have free will whether you believe it or not.
How then is my argument a non sequitur? The fact is that any outcome of an election is not inconsistent with the possible outcomes of a free and fair election.
Jerk that knee much?
I’m still waiting to hear “the facts”; I will judge after I do whether they confuse me.
Pardon me for wanting evidence before joining those who believe in overthrowing the announced result of an allegedly democratic election. For the record, having lost relatives during the Holocaust I do not deny it, and as for whethe 2 plus 2 equals 4, it depends on exactly what you mean by “2”, “plus”, “equals”, and “4”.
So then you shouldn’t believe any claims that come from the Iranian press and broadcast services.
And yet, that is unreasonable. In Iran there is one agency counting votes: the state. Candidates may have watchers at the polls, or they may have that privilege refused for any reason or none at all. In short, it is equally easy for Ayatollah Khameini’s minions at the Ministry of Elections to give Ahmadinejad 10 million more votes as 10 more. Cite.
That’s both completely false and absurd. If you have more votes than voters, that is completely inconsistent with any outcome of a fair election.