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Out of boredom, I thought it would be fun to keep track of the various claims about how the elections in Iran were supposedly stolen or fraudulent, versus their counter-arguments - please add to the list if you can, since I haven't been keeping track of all the claims and counter-claims:
CLAIM 1: MOUSAVI LOST IN HIS HOME DISTRICT - SUSPICIOUSLY.
"It is claimed that Ahmadinejad won the city of Tabriz with 57%. His main opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, is an Azeri from Azerbaijan province, of which Tabriz is the capital. Mousavi, according to such polls as exist in Iran and widespread anecdotal evidence, did better in cities and is popular in Azerbaijan. Certainly, his rallies there were very well attended. So for an Azeri urban center to go so heavily for Ahmadinejad just makes no sense." (Juan Cole)
COUNTER-CLAIM:
"But Ahmadinejad himself speaks Azeri quite fluently as a consequence of his eight years serving as a popular and successful official in two Azeri-majority provinces; during the campaign, he artfully quoted Azeri and Turkish poetry — in the original — in messages designed to appeal to Iran’s Azeri community. (And we should not forget that the supreme leader is Azeri.) The notion that Mousavi was somehow assured of victory in Azeri-majority provinces is simply not grounded in reality." (Leveretts)
CLAIM 2: AHMADINEJAD WON IN TEHRAN - SUSPICIOUSLY.
"Ahmadinejad is claimed to have taken Tehran by over 50%. Again, he is not popular in the cities, even, as he claims, in the poor neighborhoods, in part because his policies have produced high inflation and high unemployment." (Juan Cole)
COUNTER-CLAIM:
Ahmadinejad was the mayor of Tehran and won there in 2005 too.
CLAIM 3: THE STRAIGHT-LINE GRAPH
"Ahmadinejad's numbers were fairly standard across Iran's provinces. In past elections there have been substantial ethnic and provincial variations." (Juan Cole)
"Statistically and mathematically, it is impossible to maintain such perfect linear relations between the votes of any two candidates in any election — and at all stages of vote counting. This is particularly true about Iran, a large country with a variety of ethnic groups who usually vote for a candidate who is ethnically one of their own." (Tehran Bureau)
"They didn't even attempt to disguise the fraud. Which, to me, tells me they panicked. This graph is a red flag to Iran and the world." (Andrew SUllivan)
COUNTER-CLAIM
The apparently extremely strong relationship is mostly an artifact of the exceptionally simple fact that as you count more votes, both candidates' totals will tend to increase. (Fivethirtyeight.com)
[T]hese figures, though they may seem eerily consistent at first glance, are actually just what we would expect. That's the nature of large batches of data, governed by what's called the Law of Large Numbers: Averages of widely varying quantities can, and usually do, yield results that look almost perfectly uniform. Given enough data, the outliers tend to cancel one another out. (Jordan Ellenberg)
CLAIM 4: SECURITY CRACK-DOWN
"If Ahmadinejad had really won, then why the crack down on dissidents, cutting off international communications and filtering Facebook? "
COUNTER-CLAIM:
This is more of a rhetorical question than an argument. Perfectly valid reasons exist for security measures following a hotly-disputed election especially when you add in the tense international situation, what with talk of "regime change" and all. Add rioting to the mix too.
CLAIM 5: AHMADINEJAD's BAD ECONOMIC POLICIES
Ahmadinejad is responsible for bad economic policies that have driven up inflation, increased unemployment, increased poverty, and so people could not have possibly voted for him.
COUNTER-CLAIM:
"The belief that Iran suffers from dire economic conditions is one of four myths circulating about Iran's macroeconomic performance. Iran's economy has actually performed well in aggregate terms, with a moderate rate of growth in the last ten to fifteen years, including healthy GDP and per capita growth in investment. In the last three years, Iran's actual growth rate has averaged 5.8 percent." (Kelly Campbell, U.S. Institute of Peace)
"Lucky for Mr. Ahmadinejad, there are good reasons to doubt that poverty has been on the rise...Another comparison, based on the absolute poverty lines defined on the basis of the $2 per day standard, shows the opposite: that poverty rates have declined slightly during 2005-06." (Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, Brookings Institute)
"There is no shortages of complaints one can have about Iran’s economy (high youth unemployment, high inflation, and stagnant productivity, to name a few) , but a low standard of living is not one of them. "(Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, Brookings Institute)
"The International Monetary Fund projects that Iran’s economy will actually grow modestly this year (when the economies of most Gulf Arab states are in recession). A significant number of Iranians — including the religiously pious, lower-income groups, civil servants and pensioners — appear to believe that Ahmadinejad’s policies have benefited them. And, while many Iranians complain about inflation, the TFT poll found that most Iranian voters do not hold Ahmadinejad responsible." (Leveretts)
(I would add to this: I'm no economist but I think inflation rates go up because of increased government spending under Ahmadinejad in part as a result of benefits and subsidies that went mostly to the poor -- something for which he was widely criticized by economists in Iran.)
CLAIM 6: COUNTING VOTES IMPOSSIBLE IN SHORT TIME
It is impossible to have counted all the votes in the short time between the closing of the polls and the announcement of Ahmadinejad's victory.
COUNTER-CLAIM:
All the votes don't have to be counted -- it is sufficient that a statistically-significant portion of them are counted, and the counting can occur in multiple locations in order to speed up the process.
etc.
Posted by JNOUBIYEH at 1:28 PM 0
Labels: Iranian elections
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