Results of the 2009 Iranian presidential election
[7][need quotation to verify] Mousavi urged his supporters to reject what he saw as "blatant violations" of democracy and its replacement by "the rule of authoritarianism and tyranny."
People who stood in long lines and knew well who they voted for were utterly surprised by the magicians working at the television and radio broadcasting".
[2]Ken Ballen is president of Terror Free Tomorrow: the Center for Public Opinion, a nonprofit institute that researches attitudes toward extremism.
Patrick Doherty is deputy director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation Washington-based think tank chaired by Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
On June 15 in the Washington Post, they reported the results of their May 11–20 poll based on 1001 nationwide Iranian voter interviews (in all 30 provinces) with a 3.1% margin of error.
They also said: "Before other countries, including the United States, jump to the conclusion that the Iranian presidential elections were fraudulent, with the grave consequences such charges could bring, they should consider all independent information.
[11] Another anomaly, according to British-based researcher Ali Alizadeh, is that a large turnout did not favor the opposition, since in elections, both in Iran and abroad, "those who usually don’t vote, i.e. the silent majority, only come out when they want to change the status quo.
[16][17] On June 18, a letter was presented by Iranian filmmakers Marjane Satrapi (director of the critically Acclaimed Film Persepolis) and has since been widely circulated with Mousavi supporters.
The letter was allegedly written by Interior Minister Sadegh Mahsouli to Ayatollah Khamenei on June 13 (a day after the elections), states the fraud and lists the authentic vote count.
Sadegh Mahsouli[18][19] Abbas Barzegar, reporting for The Guardian, has described the Western reaction to the election results as evidence of wishful thinking.
Western journalists, Barzegar argues, have been reporting primarily from the wealthier areas of the greater cities, ignoring the wide support Ahmadinejad enjoys in poor and rural communities.
According to Cole, this analysis ignored the social development that has taken place in Iran over the last decade, the large pro-reform election victories in 1997 and 2001 (prior to the reformist voter boycott of 2005), and the fact that the concern of the electorate today is "about culture wars, not class.
"[24] The Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has stated that the votes are "beyond question" due to the overwhelming size of the lead for Ahmadinejad.
"[26] The Guardian Council of Iran has rejected this argument claiming that representatives of all candidates were present at most ballot boxes and during the process of counting votes, despite this not being constitutionally required.
[28][29] On June 15, Silver posted regional results that he had received from a student of Iranian Studies at the University of St Andrews, who had translated them from the original Persian.
On June 21, Chatham House and Institute of Iranian Studies of the University of St. Andrews released a report noting several anomalies in the election results.
[32] The findings of the Chatham House report itself have been disputed by Reza Esfandiari and Yousef Bozorgmehr who maintain that it is fundamentally flawed and that the election data does comport to a natural outcome, allowing for some possible fraud at the local level.
Other experts,[33] such as Joseph Deckert, Mikhail Myagkov and Peter C. Ordeshook[34] from University of Oregon and California Institute of Technology, argue that fraud can move data in direction of satisfying that law.
"[35] Analysis of the first digits of vote counts for all candidates, at the district level, was performed by Boudewijn Roukema, a cosmologist at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Poland.
[36] Roukema, using bootstrap simulations, notes that there are significantly more vote totals for Karoubi beginning with the digit "7" than would be expected by Benford's Law.
Mebane argues that ballot box stuffing, or some analogous artificial augmentation of Ahmadinejad's vote counts, is the simplest way to explain these patterns.
[37] Columbia University Ph.D. candidates Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco have released an analysis concluding that the patterns of the last two digits of the election results contain characteristics of human manipulation.
