The presidential election in Iran is over,
and Hassan Rouhani has been selected to a second term. Already there are strong allegations of fraud and
vote-rigging, especially from the camp loyal to Iranian supreme leader Ali
Khamenei.
The vote-rigging industry in Iran under
the mullahs' rule has been a very long-lasting practice. One of the most
common methods is simply to multiply the true number of all the votes for all
candidates, to legitimize the collective process for the better good of the
entire regime apparatus.
The mullahs are also known to print a
large number of voting slips, far more than enough, and place them in ballot
boxes at a variety of pit stops. This is, again, aimed at depicting a
canvas of very large voter participation.
The most important example was unveiled by
former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi in 2009, when he said the Interior
Ministry had printed an extra 22 to 32 million voting slips. Moreover, a
certain entity in the Interior Ministry, known as the "Vote Compiling
Room," is where any and all types of statistics are literally materialized.
Of course, this was back in 2009. In this year's election, eight years down
the road, the "printing" phenomenon escalated to an enormous scale.
According to reports published by state media, the number of ballots
printed for this year's vote was over 200 million.
The semi-official Tasnim news agency,
affiliated with Iran's Revolutionary Guards Quds Force, unveiled these numbers
while specifying that the number of eligible voters in Iran was 56,410,234.
It is worth noting that 200 million voting
papers were printed for three rounds of elections, all held on May 19:
-
presidential election
-
city and village council elections
-
midterm parliamentary elections
For the first two, 56 million voting
papers was needed. However, for the midterm parliamentary elections held
in only four provinces, there was no need for another 60 to 70 million voting
papers – especially since the constituencies were related to one city and a few
towns:
1) Maraghe and Ajab Sheer (northwest
Iran), population 314,000
2) Ahar and Harees (northwest Iran),
population 192,000
3) City of Isfahan (central Iran),
population around 1.6 million
4) Bandar Lange, Bestak, and Parsiyan
(southern Iran), population less than 200,000
The total number of eligible voters in
these four constituencies is less than 2.5 million people.
This brings us to the conclusion that
these three different elections did not need anything more than 150 to 160
million voting slips. The question is, what does this make of the 40
million extra voting slips printed? Where did they end up?
Needless to say, according to the Interior
Ministry's own official numbers, in all the years of Iran being ruled by the
mullahs, 25 to 49 percent of eligible voters have refused to cast their
ballots. Again, this is according to the Interior Ministry's numbers.
Rest assured that the truth is far higher.
While Iran claimed that 73 percent of the
eligible voters turned out for this year's presidential election, of the 2.5
million Iranians living abroad, only 6 percent cast their ballots, according to
the Interior Ministry.
Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Tehran's former
mayor and a presidential candidate, said this regime represents only 4 percent
of Iran's population. Considering the vote-engineering seen in this
round, we can reach a reasonable conclusion that only 6 to 7 percent of the
Iranian populace actually cast their votes on May 19.
And as the elections have come to an end,
popular protests across the country have intensified. Many Iranians have
invested in the Caspian housing firm, only to see their money plundered.
This has sparked a string of protests across the country.
Of
course, considering the intense political disputes among this regime's various
factions, more light will be shed on the entire scope of the vote-rigging
process practiced in this year's elections.
This
is the true nature of a regime that represents only a single-digit percentage
of the Iranian people.
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