Prior to previous elections, the regime eased up, in what was generally assumed to be an effort to encourage higher turnout. The regime sees a large turnout by voters as an endorsement of the state’s legitimacy.
But after three decades of a generally open environment before an election, all that has now changed.
In the past three weeks, the Islamic Republic has arrested more than a dozen journalists, bloggers, opposition supporters, labor organizers and rights activists, intensifying a crackdown on freedom of expression ahead of the March 2 Majlis elections. But the wave of arrests has not been reported in the media. Some think the regime wants news of the crackdown to spread only through the grapevine in hopes that will increase the level of fear.
Three website developers were also sentenced to death last month “for spreading corruption on earth.” Each had languished in jail for years, so the timing of their sentences, just weeks before the polls, was seen as a political threat to others and not a coincidental series of court actions.
What’s more, those being rounded up and carted off to jail seem unthreatening, so many analysts say the arrests and sentences appear aimed consciously at fostering a climate 
of fear, rather than just stifling the free flow of information before the election.
The March balloting will be the first nationwide vote since June 2009 when President Ahmadi-nejad’s re-election was challenged in the streets. The regime’s crackdown is presumably aimed at forestalling any repetition.
To some, the wave of arrests and sentences most significantly highlights regime paranoia.
Take the case of Parastoo Dokouhaki, a blogger and one-time women’s rights activist in her 30s. But her blog hasn’t said much about the upcoming elections and she is not raging at the regime.
Yet she has been held in solitary confinement in Tehran’s Evin prison 
since January 15 when security agents stormed her home. Because of harsh restrictions on the media, she had not been involved in journalism in recent years and was not even politically active.
Dokouhaki was also visibly depressed over her father’s death a few months earlier and was receiving treatment for a serious illness. On December 31, in her last posting on her blog, Zan Nevesht (Woman Writer), she wrote that time was not 
easing her grief for her father. Exposure to the “painful process” of his “long sickness and death” has “left me vulnerable”, she wrote. “I am dying bit by bit.… I am sick,… I am deeply depressed,… I don’t have any motivation for creating even small goals.”
Two days after her arrest, Marzieh Rasouli, a music and literary critic for reformist newspapers, was hauled off to Evin. She was a journalist, but never politically active.
Within hours, a photojournalist, Sahameddin Bourghani, the son of a prominent reformist former parliamentarian, was also detained. He was the press director at the Culture Ministry under the presidency of Mohammad Khatami.
Shahram Manouchehri, who worked for reformist publications and dailies, was arrested last week.
Among others arrested last month were: Simin Nematollahi, who wrote for a website covering news about Sufis; Mohammad Soleymaniya, the head of a social networking site; Said Madani, a civil rights activist and former professor who edited a quarterly journal on social welfare issues; Fatemeh Kheradmand, a freelance writer on health and social issues; and Ehsan Houshmandzadeh, a researcher on ethnic issues.
Activists said what they found most striking was that none of these people had been grinding out provocative commentaries or doing anything to promote dissent in the streets.
Human-rights groups have also highlighted the plight of three website developers on death row, the most prominent of whom is Saeed Malekpour, an Iranian-born resident of Canada. He was arrested in 2008 while visiting his dying father. Held for a year in solitary confinement without access to lawyers, he was found guilty of promoting adult websites and “agitation against the regime”.
Malekpour, 36, has denied the charges and said he was subjected to “physical and psychological torture” in detention. After an international campaign, his death sentence was overturned last summer but reinstated by Iran’s Supreme Court last month.
Amnesty International said that by confirming Malekpour’s sentence “after an unfair trial, the Iranian authorities are sending a message to Iranians not to freely express their views, or even to help others to do so, including on the Internet.”
The other website developers to be condemned last month to die are Vahid Asghari and Ahmad-Reza Hashempour. And the Human Rights Activists News Agency reported Sunday that Mehdi Alizadeh, described as a 30-year-old satirist from Mashhad, had just been condemned to death for ties to “an obscene and anti-religious” website.
The US State Department issued a statement last Thursday condemning the crackdown. “We are deeply concerned by the alarming increase in the Iranian regime’s efforts to extinguish all forms of free expression and limit its citizens’ access to information in the lead-up to the March parliamentary elections,” said the statement from spokeswoman Victoria Nuland. “The international community has repeatedly raised its concerns regarding Iran’s human rights record, calling on it to abide by its commitments to protect the rights of all its citizens and uphold the rule of law.”
The New York-based Committee to protect journalists said none of the web specialists condemned to die had conducted any anti-regime actions, but the regime appeared to fear their professional ability to build websites.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch announced Tuesday that the regime has summoned four labor organizers during January to begin serving sentences that had been imposed last year. HRW named them as Ali-Reza Akhavan, a Tehran labor leader, Mohammad Jarrahi and Shahrokh Zamani from Tabriz, and Shays Amani from Sanandaj in Kurdistan province.
Before previous elections, the authorities eased up on the media to encourage high voter participation. Not so this time.
Sadeq Sabaa, head of the BBC’s Persian service, said, “This is the first election in three decades that the regime is actually increasing suppression before the vote.”
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists described Iran as “the world’s worst jailer” of journalists, with 42 behind bars in December—before the latest crackdown was revved up.
Many believe others were detained last month, but their cases have not come to light because the authorities threatened their families and ordered them to remain silent.
The last previous crackdown on dissenters was last February, after the Arab spring had started and leaders of Tunisia and Egypt had been brought down. The regime then presumably sought to scare dissidents out of trying to replicate the Arab Spring in Tehran.