More votes than people in Iran

Left: Guardian Council spokesman Abbas-Ali Kadkhodaei (PressTV)

Iran's Guardian Council has admitted that the number of votes collected in 50 cities surpass the number of the people eligible to cast ballot in those areas.

We heard this one before, and if it's true...well, there can only be one reason...

Council spokesman Abbas-Ali Kadkhodaei, who was speaking on the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) Channel 2 on Sunday, made the remarks in response to complaints filed by Mohsen Rezaei, a defeated candidate in the June 12 presidential election.

"Statistics provided by Mohsen Rezaei in which he claims more than 100% of those eligible have cast their ballot in 170 cities are not accurate, the incident has happened in only 50 cities," Kadkhodaei said.

However, he said that although the vote tally affected by such an irregularity is over 3 million, "it has yet to be determined whether the amount is decisive in the election results."

Three of the four candidates contesting in last Friday's presidential election cried foul, once the Interior Ministry announced the results, according to which incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner with almost two-thirds of the vote.

Rezaei, along with Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, reported more than 646 "irregularities" in the electoral process and submitted their complaints to the body responsible for overseeing the election: the Guardian Council.

Mousavi and Karroubi have called on the council to nullify Friday's vote and hold a new election. This is while President Ahmadinejad and his Interior Minister Sadeq Mahsouli have rejected any possibility of fraud, saying that the election was free and fair.

Moussavi reportedly is telling protesters: "The country belongs to you. The revolution and the system is your heritage."

Meanwhile, an analysis of the elections by academics in the U.K. further add to doubts about the authenticity of the results.

Below is a report published by London-based The Times.

Claims that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election was rigged have been bolstered by an analysis of the official results by British academics In the conservative provinces of Mazandaran and Yazd, the number of votes cast exceeded the number of eligible voters, the survey by researchers from the University of St Andrews and Chatham House, the London think-tank, found.

• Four more provinces recorded turnouts close to 100%.

• To achieve the official results in 10 of the 30 provinces, the ultra-conservative President must have carried all the new voters who did not cast ballots in 2005, all the votes that went to his centrist rival Ali Akbar Hasemi Rafsanjani and up to 44% of the votes that went to reformist candidates.

• Those provinces include ones dominated by ethnic minorities who seldom if ever vote conservative. “The numbers from Ilam, Lorestan and Hormozgan almost defy belief,” said Thomas Rintoul, one of the researchers.

• Lorestan is home to Medhi Karoubi, the most liberal of the four candidates, who won 440,247 votes (55%) there in 2005. Official figures suggest he won only 44,036 (4.6%) this time.

• “The analysis shows that the scale of the swing to Ahmadinejad would have had to have been extraordinary to achieve the stated result,” said Ali Ansari, Professor of Iranian Studies at St Andrews.

• The figures also challenge the notion that Mr Ahmadinejad’s victory was due to the massive participation of a previously silent conservative majority and that he was particularly popular in rural areas.

I bet Ahmadinejad's usual ear-to-ear smile is slowly fading. Perhaps now he'll stop attributing the violence on Tehran streets to "traffic violations"...though given his self-deluding skills, I doubt it.

So what if Iran were to hold new elections and Ahmadinejad wins "again," will the protesters rest?

Source: BNO News, PressTV, TimesOnline