Fallout from the Iranian Elections: The Protests and the Crackdowns
 

In wake of the recent Iranian elections, wherein current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won with 62% of the vote (running against 3 other candidates), sparked a massive protest in Iran, where supporters of Mir Hossein Moussavi, Ahmadinejad's most popular rival, claim that the election results were fixed. In fact, Moussavi's website supposed posted the "true" election results, which claims that Moussavi won with 57% of the vote. I have a link to the his site, but it's in Arabic, so I can't verify the numbers off of that page, I'm just going off of a translation form someone on another forum I go to.

What isn't in question is that the protest was huge.

http://i.friendfeed.com/48d860fd22ba...9bcca1a6ea44ee
http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitpic/phot...2FvJCXtJ6go%3D

The government response was harsh. There are reports that Universities, hotbeds for support for Moussavi, was attacked by militia loyal to Ahmadinejad. Twitter Change_For_Iran links to some photographic proof Warning: Some pictures at the link are graphic in nature.

This site has photos from throughout the day. Be warned that several of the pictures near the bottom of the page are graphic.

For a good part of the day, the only way to follow this story was on Facebook or Twitter, as the Iranian government has cracked on down media outlets, including jamming satellite transmissions in a attempt to muzzle the international media. Of course, that didn't work. The protesters have been using Facebook and Twitter to organize themselves, so much so that Twitter rescheduled a maintenance downtime so that it happened in the middle of the night Iranian time. Searching #iranelection on Twitter will get you a lot of results, but according to the forum I got this information from, this is one of the most reliable Twitters at the event, and many of this comments have since been verified by professional news reports.

Of course, now there is plenty of media coverage of the event, and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has called for a investigation into the election. However, Khamenei has already declared that the results are valid, and the council he called upon to investigation the claims...the Guardian Council, I believe...is half-populated by people selected by Khamenei, so it's uncertain if any serious investigation will actually take place.

Moussavi has called for a general strike to happen throughout Iran tomorrow, according to Twitter.

Lots of pictures here
Recording of one of the protests.
fivethirtyeight breaks down some "fishy" results.
MSNBC reports that election results were announced "in a matter of hours", which some are calling suspicious seeming as election officials would of had to count almost 40 million paper ballots in those few hours.

Long story short: There's some serious stuff going down in Iran right now. Several news stories I've seen have compared the events of today with the Iranian Revolution and Tienanmen Square. Most newsites I've visited have this as their headline story, so you might want to hunt down information for yourself since, admittedly, a lot of my information is unconfirmed from Twitter.

Thanks for posting this, I was wondering when it was going to pop up. From CBS radio I heard the protest grew from a couple hundred, to a couple thousand, to a hundred thousand, to those pictures you have there. "This business will get out of control. It'll get out of control and we'll be lucky to live through it."

Am I the only one who thinks the voter fraud could be a good thing? If the contender were voted into office normally, there wouldn't be as much change in policy as there will be after this massive revolt. The Supreme Rulers are seeing their system of power challenged on the world stage. They will be forced to change their ways, or we will have another Tienanmen Square. I'm left wondering if, after the dust settles, and if Ahmastealinyourelection is overthrown/voted out, will we have obtained closer ties with the Iranian people through Fark/Twitter/4chan helping them out with proxies and such. Or maybe none of this will matter at all in the end.

The revolution will be digitized.

I'm curious as to if there is any proof that the election was actually rigged or not. Does anyone have any sources on that, suprisingly I can't find much at my local news outlets.

Nope. That's the problem. The only thing they can use as proof is the fact that they announced the results within two hours of the polls closing. Maybe It's just because I'm an American, but I don't think any country can count that many votes in 2 hours.

No proof, just very, very strong reasons for suspicion. Like "The other guy was polling even or ahead, and then Ahmajenidad rolls out with 62% of the vote" reasons for suspicion.

Plus I guess in the immediate wake of the thing Iran moved really quick to shut down news services and internet outlets and anyone else who might have put out a dissenting viewpoint.

The biggest suspicion comes for the fact a few days were scheduled for vote tallying and the result came out in 2 hours and this is with a turnout bigger than expected. Also there was a big increase in mobile voting stations in this election- far more than most analysts thought were necessary, and these stations don't have proper oversight from all parties. There were rumours of intimidation out here.
In addition lots of the phone networks were shut down on the day, alongside internet, and Mousavi was told not to leave his house for rallies because his presence could be seen as campaigning. All these things are quite suspicious.
There are also the polls but polls have been that wrong before- it's uncommon but it does happen. Seems a little suspicious though.

Yeah usually when the guy that wants to stay in power practically shuts down the country, locks and arrests many of those opposing him, and wins the vote in his opposition's provinces with 65-85% margins, well...

I mean where there's smoke there's fire.

P. much.

Really the standout is how sloppy the rigging was. I mean Jesus, a 52% win based on huge support in known loyal regions; that would be so much work to put together? Maybe follow that up with like some conciliatory token language about working together with the reformists, followed by completely fucking them over at every legislative opportunity?

There's gotta be ways to steal an election that don't make you look like Snidely Whiplash twirling his moustache and running around with a giant bag labelled FAKE-ASS VOTES.

It seems pretty restrained compared to historical vote rigging.
Stalin used to win over 100% of the vote in certain areas, Van Thieu once got more votes than people who turned out.
The classic story is with Ngo Din Diem who was told on the eve of an election by an American advisor "I don't want to look in the paper tommorow and see you have won 98.5% of the vote". He recieved 98.4% of the vote.
There is something about vote-rigging that inspires extravagance in the rigger, perhaps to make absolutely sure they can't lose.

See this is what you get when you cut off from America. They can't even cheat properly.