--- On Mon, 6/15/09, Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com> wrote:
> From: Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Juan Cole: preliminary reactions to the Iranian vote totals
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Monday, June 15, 2009, 10:23 AM
>
> On Jun 15, 2009, at 7:28 AM, JC Helary wrote:
>
> >
> >> Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com>
> writes:
> >
> >>> Will someone of the mullah-apologists on this
> list please explain how
> >>> more than 35 million paper ballots can be hand
> counted--right down to
> >>> the last vote-- in a few hours.
> >
> > That is very common practive in France where, until
> 1996 when I was there -I don't know if it is still the case,
> all the ballots were paper ballots and were hand counted
> within 2~3 hours of the closing of the polls.
> >
> In a country with a professional civil service, a long
> tradition of honest elections, in an open process, by a huge
> number of impartial counters--and then the final results
> take days to be published.
>
> > No magic there [Iran].
> >
> Just bare-faced fraud.
>
[WS:] I have no opinion whether Iran's election was fraud, but I think it is quite possible to count votes by hand and report them just hours after the polls close.
In all likelihood, vote counting is an ongoing process - it starts shortly after the voting begins in the morning and continues throughout the day. Furthermore, in all likelihood there are several individuals involved in tallying votes at each polling station. So if there are 10-20 thousand votes cast at each station - it does not strike me as a big deal that a few individuals can tally them during the course of the day and report the results to the central office by phone as they are tallying them.
So it is quite feasible that the central office can report the results few hours after closing of the polls. Whether they report the results actually reported by the polling stations is another story - but the fact that manually tallied voted are reported a few hours after polls closing is not a sufficient reason to suspect fraud.
Wojtek