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farshad khan

i was there and was overjoyed when khatami was elected too. it does not prove fraud in 2009, in my opinion.

Peace

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Niloufar khanom,

Sorry to say that I don’t consider you as my friend, nor my enemy.

As I stated below, mardom khar nistan, khanom!

I was in Iran at the time that Khatami elected as a President of Iran with a landslide victory, so I have a firsthand experience of being in the environment at the time of election.

Considering conditions before the election and the momentum that Mousavi’s campaign obtained at that time, it was an impossible task for Ahmadinezhad to be re-elected, period!

farshad khan

no you don't owe me as i do agree with the basic conclusion: there is no conclusive proof that there was as much fraud as we had assumed, myself included. this does not prove that there was No fraud at all.

apologies for the confusion, but hope we can still be friends :) 

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Sorry Niloufar khanom.

I owe you an apology!

I was under impression that this is your own conclusion!

farshad khan

john asked for a summary and i cut and pasted the conclusion given at the end of the verbose article for him. it was not my account. am not so well informed on such things!

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Niloufar khanom,

You and everybody else know that they cheated before in parliamentary elections and cheated this time big time. I don’t want to go to paragraphs explaining what happened like what you did!

Mardom khar nistan, khanom!

The foundation of Islamic Republic is based on lie, cheating, rape, and bloodshed. If it was not because of war and patriotism of Iranians to defend their soil, there wouldn’t be any IRI now that you come to defend it in the first place.

Have a good day!

Dear John, While there is

Dear John,

While there is no direct evidence for a fraudulant election, one has to take account that you cannot put the fox in charge of the hen-house either.  Proponents point to limited election polling in which people telephoned appeared to have voted for AN.  However, you need to take two things into account here; 1. More than half (60%?) of those polled refused to answer the polltakers and hung up because they were scared of the regime backlash.  2. the others who answered the polltakers may have said so, again, because they were scared of the regime backlash.

There is other circumstantial evidence as well:

* The senior interior minister person in-charge of the elections called to congratulate Mousavi, and shortly, the decision was reversed.  Within 3 days, that person was killed in a car accident.

* Interviews with the Basijis that defected because of all the post election violence revealed that there was a conspiracy and preparations for the post-election violence.

* Mousavi and other candidates lost in their home cities/states (unheard of before).

I do not have the reference tags for the above statements, but someone can dig them up from IC or internet archives.  Judge for yourself, but the answer is clear in Iran (not the regime).

john, here is the conclusion:

No credible evidence published so far indicates that Ahmadinejad stole
Iran's 2009 presidential election – or, for that matter, that any fraud
at all occurred. The second point is important because many commentators
have grudgingly accepted Ahmadinejad's legitimacy only because his
margin was large enough that they believe he would have won even without
cheating. Nearly as telling, there appears to have been no serious
effort by Mousavi or his supporters to find such evidence. Shortly after
the election, Mousavi claimed in his newspaper (Kaleme) that 10 million
people had voted without showing proper identification, but his
complaint to the Guardian Council mentioned only 31 such voters.
Widespread ballot-box stuffing was alleged, but not a single stuffed
ballot box has been identified. Wholesale buying and selling of votes
was alleged, but Mousavi has identified only four instances, in each
case without any evidence. Thousands or millions of Mousavi votes were
said to have been thrown away, replaced by thousands or millions of
Ahmadinejad votes, but no one has identified any of the perpetrators,
nor mentioned exactly where or how this was accomplished. Vote counts
from the field, approved in writing by tens of thousands of Mousavi's
observers, were said to have been altered by the Interior Ministry in
Tehran, but no one has identified a single ballot box where this
occurred – even though the data have long been available to compare the
counts for all 45,692 ballot boxes. The silence of Mousavi's polling
station observers is especially deafening. Most or all of them may
believe that electoral fraud occurred all over Iran, but apparently each
is equally adamant that it did not occur where he spent election day.

Nor have independent critics maintained their initial enthusiasm. The
Chatham House Preliminary Analysis never advanced beyond its
self-described "preliminary" stage, despite the author's own suggestion
that his brief analysis "be followed up should the fully disaggregated
'by polling station' data be released during the ongoing dispute."
Precisely that data was released just days later (see note 1), but no
"follow up" has appeared. The response of nearly all pro-Mousavi
analysts to the published ballot-box data has been largely the same:
silence. Statisticians such as Roukema, Beber and Scacco appear to have
ignored it entirely. Even the few who have examined ballot-box-level
data – Professor Mebane, for example – have overlooked or ignored its
real significance. For the first time ever in an Iranian presidential
election, it was a simple matter to find evidence of vote-count fraud:
just compare the Interior Ministry count with the field count approved
in writing by a Mousavi observer, for any ballot box or for all of them.
It is fair to ask why no one has done this, or why they have not
published their findings if they have.

Despite the absence of evidence – or perhaps because of it – Mousavi's
demand has never changed: Don't investigate the election; just toss it
out and do it over. One wonders how Americans would have reacted if Al
Gore had demanded this in 2000. Mousavi has never explained what would
happen if a second election were held and it yielded the same result.
Would he demand another do-over, and then another, until Iran's voters
get it right? Even his most ardent supporters eventually would insist on
evidence. If eventually, why not now? It is not fair to the 24 million
Iranians who appear to have voted for Ahmadinejad – nor is it democratic
– for a government to "compromise" with a defeated candidate by
nullifying an election without a sound basis for doing so. The loser has
a right to complain about an unfair election, but the winner, and those
who voted for him, have an equal right to insist that a valid election
be respected. One side will always be disappointed with an election
result – but that is democracy, not fraud. Fraud requires evidence, not
merely surprise, disappointment and suspicion.

All of this matters outside Iran as well. One suspects that Western
leaders acknowledge Ahmadinejad's legitimacy when they talk privately
with their foreign counterparts, but many of them posture in public.
Even those officials who have been comparatively restrained in their
public statements on the election (US Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton, for example) welcome support from election-doubters for
confrontational stances they take toward Iran on other grounds.[31] Most
Western media outlets routinely refer to the election as tainted, and
many writers insist that policy toward Iran must reflect this.[32] Those
who disagree are often described as regime apologists, or naive at
best. But they are merely accepting the election result. It is time
others did too.

all u in opposition read this

Read this analysis and stop your false accusations to satisfy your egos. Although it is a very very long analysis, please read it may be in several time pieces. Instead of insulting and charging names to those who accept Ahmadinejad's fair election, give evidence, if you can, to refute it if you can't then shut up for good.

p.s. notice the role of the BBC in all of this "election fraud" propaganda? see the soruces.

Too much information

That looks interesting, but there's too much for me to read and absorb.  Does anyone have the time and skill to prepare a summary for the rest of us?