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.
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 
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.
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 
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 
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.