(Updated) Iran Vote: Fraud or Journos' Wishful Thinking?

Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet at 10:38 AM on June 13, 2009.

Update: Stephen Zunes says the election was indeed stolen. He makes some important points, so give it a read.

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Most of what I'm reading on the Iranian elections today is so thoroughly filtered through a Western prism that it offers little in the way of context to help understand Iran's domestic political culture. 

News reports acknowledge that the economy and charges of corruption were crucially important issues, but only as an afterthought -- in the final graphs. References to Israel, relations with the U.S. and comparisons between Mousavi and Obama's calls for "change" are front and center.

I don't want to add to the cacophony of ill-informed analysis. But I'm skeptical -- pending more evidence -- of claims that the election was rigged. I agree with Abbas Barzegar, reporting from Tehran:

Of course, the rather real possibility of voter fraud exists and one must wait in the coming weeks to see how these allegations unfold. But one should recall that in three decades of presidential elections, the accusations of rigging have rarely been levied against the vote count. Elections here are typically controlled by banning candidates from the start or closing opposition newspapers in advance.

In this election moreover, there were two separate governmental election monitors in addition to observers from each camp to prevent mass voter fraud. The sentimental implausibility of Ahmadinejad's victory that Mousavi's supporters set forth as the evidence of state corruption must be met by the equal implausibility that such widespread corruption could take place under clear daylight. So, until hard evidence emerges that can substantiate the claims of the opposition camp we need to look to other reasons to explain why so many are stunned by the day's events.

Mousavi obviously represents the hopes and aspirations of millions of Iranians, and there are numerous reports of riots and police crack-downs. But conflicting claims of victory are not uncommon in elections (although typically when the results are tighter than this 63-34 outcome). Yet, the media seem quite eager to push the Mousavi camp's claims of massive fraud.

I think, in large part, that's due to the fact that the results were so far from reporters' expectations -- it was supposed to be tight, and turned out to be a blow-out. But why did they think it would be such a close result in the first place (Iranian polling is notoriously unreliable)?

I was watching Christiane Amanpour on CNN, and she said something to the effect that all of "the anecdotal evidence" gathered by journalists reporting from Tehran -- a cosmopolitan and therefore unrepresentative  sample of the larger electorate -- indicated that Mousavi had very wide support, much higher than he might have.

Barzegar adds to this point:

Since I arrived, few here doubted that the incumbent firebrand President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad would win. My airport cab driver reminded me that the president had visited every province twice in the last four years – "Iran isn't Tehran," he said. Even when I asked Mousavi supporters if their man could really carry more than capital, their responses were filled with an Obamasque provisional optimism – "Yes we can", "I hope so", "If you vote." So the question occupying the international media, "How did Mousavi lose?" seems to be less a problem of the Iranian election commission and more a matter of bad perception rooted in the stubborn refusal to understand the role of religion in Iran.

Since I arrived, few here doubted that the incumbent firebrand President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad would win. My airport cab driver reminded me that the president had visited every province twice in the last four years – "Iran isn't Tehran," he said. Even when I asked Mousavi supporters if their man could really carry more than capital, their responses were filled with an Obamasque provisional optimism – "Yes we can", "I hope so", "If you vote." So the question occupying the international media, "How did Mousavi lose?" seems to be less a problem of the Iranian election commission and more a matter of bad perception rooted in the stubborn refusal to understand the role of religion in Iran...

As far as international media coverage is concerned, it seems that wishful thinking got the better of credible reporting. It is true that Mousavi supporters jammed Tehran traffic for hours every night over the last week, though it was rarely mentioned that they did so only in the northern well-to-do neighborhoods of the capital. Women did relax their head covers and young men did dance in the street.

On Monday night at least 100,000 of the former prime minister's supporters set up a human chain across Tehran. But, hours before I had attended a mass rally for the incumbent president that got little to no coverage in the western press because, on account of the crowds, he never made it inside the hall to give his speech. Minimal estimates from that gathering have been placed at 600,000 (enthusiasts say a million). From the roof I watched as the veiled women and bearded men of all ages poured like lava.

But the failure to properly gauge Iran's affairs is hardly a new phenomenon ...

For over a week the same social impulses of anti-corruption, populism, and religious piety that led to the revolution have been on the streets available to anyone who wanted to report on them. Ahmedinejad, for most in the country, embodies those ideals. Since he came into office he has refused to wear a suit, refused to move out of the home he inherited from his father, and has refused to tone down the rhetoric he uses against those he accuses of betraying the nation. When he openly accused his towering rival, Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanji, a lion of the revolution himself, of parasitical corruption and compared his betrayal to the alleged deception against the Prophet Muhammad that led to the Sunni-Shia split 1,400 years ago, he unleashed a popular impulse that has held the imagination of the masses here for generations. That Rafsanji defended himself through Mousavi's newspaper meant the end for the reformists...

Perhaps from the start Mousavi was destined to fail as he hoped to combine the articulate energies of the liberal upper class with the business interests of the bazaar merchants. The Facebook campaigns and text-messaging were perfectly irrelevant for the rural and working classes who struggle to make a day's ends meet, much less have the time to review the week's blogs in an internet cafe. Although Mousavi tried to appeal to such classes by addressing the problems of inflation and poverty, they voted otherwise.

In the future, observers would do us a favour by taking a deeper look into Iranian society, giving us a more accurate picture of the very organic religious structures of the country, and dispensing with the narrative of liberal inevitability. It is the religious aspects of enigmatic Persia that helped put an 80-year-old exiled ascetic at the head of state 30 years ago, then the charismatic cleric Khatami in office 12 years ago, the honest son of a blacksmith – Ahmedinejad – four years ago, and the same yesterday.

Others disagree with Barzegar's analysis. But the take-away, for me at least, is that these reports need to be read with a hefty grain of salt.

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.