http://www.juancole.com/2009/06/chatham-house-study-definitively-shows.html
Informed Comment
Monday, June 22, 2009
Chatham House Study Definitively Shows Massive Ballot Fraud in Iran's Reported Results
An authoritative study from Chatham House:
http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/files/14234_iranelection0609.pdf
the renowned UK think
tank, finds that with regard to the official statistics on the recent
presidential election in Iran released by the Interior Ministry,
something is rotten in Tehran. The authors compared the provincial
returns in the 2005 and 2009 elections against the 2006 census and
found:
o In two Conservative provinces, Mazandaran and Yazd, a turnout of
more than 100% was recorded.
o At a provincial level, there is no correlation between the
increased turnout, and the swing to Ahmadinejad. This challenges
the notion that his victory was due to the massive participation
of a previously silent Conservative majority.
o In a third of all provinces, the official results would require
that Ahmadinejad took not only all former conservative voters,
and all former centrist voters, and all new voters, but also
up to 44% of former Reformist voters, despite a decade of
conflict between these two groups.
<snip>
Note that many reformists did not vote in 2005, because they had become
discouraged by the way the hard liners had blocked all their programs.
Some 10.5 million persons who did not vote in 2005 did vote in 2009. It
is highly unlikely that most of these non-voters in 2005 were
conservatives who now came out for Ahmadinejad in 2009. But to do as
well as the regime claimed, Ahmadinejad would have needed to attract
substantial numbers of these voters to himself.
<snip>
Even in East Azerbaijan, here were the numbers in 2005
Ahmadinejad: 198,417
Hard Liners 232,043
Non-voters: 684,745
Rafsanjani (pragmatic conservatives): 268,954
Reformists: 690,784
and the result in 2009:
Ahmadinejad: 1,131,111
We could say that a little over 400,000 of these votes are not
surprising, since that is the number that was hard line in 2005. But
Ahmadinejad picked up over 700,000 votes after 4 years. The non-voters
may probably mostly be counted as reformists. So again, Ahmadinejad
needed all the non-voters in 2005 to switch to him in 2009 plus a large
proportion of the Rafsanjani voters. It makes not sense. And this
outcome requires us to believe he picked up all those votes among
people who deeply disliked him 4 years ago despite running against a
favorite son from Azerbaijan! (And no, that Ahmadinejad speaks broken
Azeri would not make Azeris vote for him any more than Latinos voted in
2008 for all those Republicans who speak good Spanish.)
As I had noted earlier, the official results ask us to believe that
rural ethnic minorities (some of them Sunni!) who had long voted
reformist or for candidates of their ethnicity or region, had switched
over to Ahmadinejad. We have to believe that Mehdi Karroubi's support
fell from over 6 million to 330,000 over all, and that he, an ethnic
Lur, was defeated in Luristan by a hard line Persian Shiite. Or that
Ahmadinejad went from having 22,000 votes in largely Sunni Kurdistan to
about half a million! What, is there a new organization, "Naqshbandi
Sunni Sufis for Hard Line Shiism?" It never made any sense. People who
said it did make sense did not know what a Naqshbandi is. (Quick, ask
them before they can look it up at wikipedia).
I was careful in my initial discussion of why I thought the numbers
looked phony to say that catching history on the run is tough; and I
later characterized myself as a mere social historian (i.e. not a
pollster or statistician). But this study bears out most of my analysis
with the exception that the authors dispute any rural bias toward
Ahmadinejad. I think they are too categorical in this regard, however.
When people, including myself, said that rural people liked
Ahmadinejad, we meant Shiites living in Persian-speaking villages on
the Iranian plateau, in fair proximity to cities such as Isfahan,
Tehran and Shiraz. We weren't talking about Turkmen or Kurds (both
Sunnis), or about Lurs (everyone suspected Karroubi would get that
vote). I suspect that some of those to whom we referred as rural are
being categorized as living in 'small towns' by the Chatham House
authors. But field workers even in the Shiite, Persian-speaking
villages point out that they often encounter anti-Ahmadinejad
sentiments there, as well.
But that is neither here nor there. The numbers do not add up. You
can't have more voters than there are people. You can't have a complete
liberal and pragmatic-conservative swing behind hard liners who make
their lives miserable.
The election was stolen. It is there in black and white. Those of us
who know Iran, could see it plain as the nose on our faces, even if we
could not quantify our reasons as elegantly as Chatham House.
posted by Juan Cole @ 6/22/2009 12:30:00 AM