All the regime’s efforts were poured into a campaign on the importance of voting. The theme was that the Americans would likely attack if there wasn’t a large turnout to show that the people didn’t want to be bombed.
Signs went up at intersections all around cities falsely quoting Western news organizations as saying Washington was hoping no one would vote so it could justify an attack.
This was a new tactic unseen ever before in an Iranian election.
The posters measured about two meters high and one meter wide. They carried the logos of news outlets one does not expect to see cited in the Islamic Republic, such as The Washington Post, the Voice of America, Radio Farda, The Independent of London and Le Monde of Paris. Each poster carried an invented quote attributed to a Western news operation and suggesting that the West might use a low turnout as a justification for attacking Iran.
Text messages were also sent to cellphones, saying, for example, “Going to the polls means showing that the people are united. And, if we are united, no one will attack us.”
A blog posting contained a photo of another text message: “Radio Farda: America can attack Iran only if the turnout in the election is less than 50 percent.”
The same quote which Radio Farda denied it ever made appears on one of the signs posted along the streets.
State television carried combat footage from the 1980-88 war, followed by an appearance by a war veteran saying, “Any vote cast at the ballot box is a punch in the eye of the enemy.”
The regime has also appealed to nationalist emotions. One poster plastered around the capital shows a photo of Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, the young nuclear scientist killed in a bombing in January, a crime the government blames on Israel. The poster carries the slogan: “The martyrs’ eyes are on your vote.”
The regime has always put a heavy emphasis on turnout, saying a large number of voters demonstrates support for the regime. It isn’t clear why the regime has put this emphasis on turnout for three decades. Turnout has ranged wildly and has often been high and often been low. But the regime surely knows no foreign countries have ever said a low turnout proves the regime is hated.
The government predicted the turnout would soar and be around 65 percent for last Friday’s vote. Very conveniently, it announced after the vote that the turnout was 64.2 percent. That compared with 57 percent and 51 percent in the last two Majlis elections in 2008 and 2004 respectively.
In the capital of Tehran, a hotbed of opposition to the regime, the ministry said the voter turnout was 48 percent, more than half again as large as the lowly 30 percent turnout four years ago. Few Tehranis could believe that.
Whether those numbers were true or not could not be proven. But the government undermined its own claims by telling foreign reporters they could not walk around and check out polling places on their own. They were bussed to 12 selected polling stations where they found lots of voters.
The opposition, however, produced a dozen photos of polling places bereft of voters. Still, people with experience in voting processes pointed out that even a busy voting station can be empty of voters for periods during the day.
The best indicator of a low turnout was the government’s unwillingness to allow foreign reporters to visit polling places of their own choosing. Despite that, the Fars news agency reported, “The American and European reporters who came to Iran to cover the ninth parliamentary elections were astonished by the high level of public participation at the polling stations.” The Iran Times did not find any such comment in any of the news articles it surveyed.
A Washington Post reporter ducked his official minder and toured Tehran polling stations. He concluded that the turnout “was higher than expected.”
He talked to voters and asked why they had chosen to go to the polls. “Some said they hoped substantial participation would head off more international sanctions or even war with the West,” indicating the regime campaign had worked. “Others said they just wanted to show support for Iran’s Islamic leaders. Some said they wanted a stamp in their identity card to prove they voted to help them get jobs and other perks.” It is widely believed in Iran that government offices will not help a citizen whose internal passport shows they failed to vote.
Agence France Presse said it questioned voters and found that the economy was “the overriding preoccupation,” not the threat of war.
Shopkeeper Amir Toneka-boni, 40, said, “I want this election to curb inflation. Look, it costs a lot to buy groceries.”
Javaher Eslami, a 77-year-old housewife, said, “My kids have no jobs. I want the next Majlis to help the young with better employment opportunities.”
Mohammad-Ali Parvaz-Davani, an 18-year-old student casting his first ballot, said the deputies in the next Majlis “should be brave and say what the real problems are and try to solve unemployment and fix the economy to the best of their ability.”
One of the surprises of the day was that former President Mohammad Khatami voted at an obscure polling station 70 kilometers from Tehran in the mountainous constituency of Damavand and Firuzkuh. Khat-ami had announced weeks ago that reformists should not vote unless the government freed all political prisoners and allowed for an open and transparent elections.
The reformist Kaleme website confirmed Khatami had vote and quoted him as saying he would later give a public explanation of his rationale.
The most common view has been that the turnout should be quite low even without a reformist boycott because the election offered very little choice. All around the world, turnout is usually high when choices are stark and low when the choice is limited. Karim Sadjajdpour, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace in the United States, said the choices Iranian voters had this year ranged “from pitch black to dark grey,” not exactly an inducement to take the time to vote.
In every Iranian election, the government always asserts that the polls are packed. This year, as in past years, it repeatedly extended the polling hours to accommodate what it claimed were hordes of voters lined up at the polls. The polls opened nationwide at 8 a.m. and were due to close at 6 p.m. But the closing hour was repeatedly extended an hour until finally closing at 11 p.m.
New York-based Human Rights Watch denounced the election as “grossly unfair.” Its criticism was based on the absence of a wider range of political opinion on the ballot. First, it noted that the Council of Guardians had disqualified more than a fifth of those who registered to be candidates “based on vague and ill-defined criteria.” Second, it noted that many opposition figures were prevented from running by being put under arrest.
Supreme Leader Ali Kha-menehi has made several speeches in the past two weeks encouraging the public to vote and asserting that “the hegem-onistic bloc” has launched “a massive propaganda effort to depress the Iranian people’s turnout.” The regime has failed to cite any specifics, however.
Two days before the election, Khamenehi told a crowd: “We should resist and make the enemies more envious of our will and to let them understand that they cannot confront us.” The ballot, he said, “will be a slap in the face of the enemies of the people.”
Khamenehi tried to make any turnout in Iran look good by stating that only 30 percent of the American people vote for president. Actually, the voter turnout in US presidential elections has generally been in the mid-50-percentile range. In only one election has the turnout been below 50 percent; that was 49 percent in the 1996 election in which Bill Clinton was re-elected over Bob Dole.
One reason it is difficult to get a feel for the turnout in Iran as well as for he honesty of the election is that the government has forbidden any foreign election observers to attend the balloting. The Council of Guardians issued the ban, saying the presence of foreign observers would be “an insult“ to the Iranian people.
It is rare these days to find a country seeking to hold honest elections that will be respected around the world that does not invite election observers from foreign organizations. But Abbas-Ali Kadkhodai, the spokesman for the Council of Guardians, turned that topsy-turvy, saying, “The argument of foreign supervision can be brought up for the regions and countries where people cannot their fates themselves.”
The election organization also refuses to publish the results of the voting at the level of the individual polling station where ballots are counted and the local residents know the outcome. The smallest level of aggregation is the district, of which there are more than 300. Each district contains on average about 150 polling places. Without publication of the results at the individual polling station, however, there is no way to double-check that the published district figures are honest. But this is not a new development. The government has never published results at the level of the individual polling station, even under the Khatami Administration.
Former President Ali-Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani cast his ballot in Tehran and had one of the more interesting remarks made to reporters: “If the election outcome turns out to be what the people cast in the ballot boxes, God willing, we will have a good Majlis.”
