Four arguments for voter fraud in Iran

Officially, there is no proof of voter fraud in Iran. But an analysis of the election results tells a different story.

As far as the Iranian regime is concerned, the controversy over the presidential election result is over. The Guardian Council announced Monday that a recount of 10 percent of the vote offered no proof of voter fraud.

The three defeated candidates had protested what they said was massive fraud; their claim was supported by hundreds of thousands of citizens who took to the streets in an unprecedented anti-government protest. All in vain, it turns out.

Even after the partial recount, incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad still carried the election with 63 percent of the vote. His main rival, former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi (34 percent), had asked for the elections to be annulled. Mousavi is now all out of official options. Guardian Council spokesman Abbas Ali Kadkhodaei said on Monday that "from today on, the file on the presidential election has been closed." What's more, Mousavi could now face charges of slander, as the president of the Guardian Council, ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, pointed out earlier.

But accusations that there was indeed voter fraud are supported by an analysis by professor Ali Ansari of the Iran Institute at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, which was published by the British think-tank Chatham House last week. Ansari compared the official Iranian election results by province with the results of the 2005 election and the 2006 census. These are the highlights.

1) In two conservative provinces voter turnout was more than 100 percent. The Guardian Council itself has confirmed that this was the case in fifty cities, but it called it non-conclusive and went on to ignore it.

2) Compared to 2005 the conservative vote was up 113 percent. This is said to be the result of the high voter turnout, suggesting that a silent conservative majority votes massively for Ahmadinejad. The results don't support this. In this scenario, the provinces with the highest voter turnout should then have shown the best result for Ahmadinejad, but this is not the case.

3) The official results show that president Ahmadinejad, in a third of all provinces, won not just all of the conservative vote but also all of the centre voters, all of the new voters and 44 percent of people who voted for reformist candidates in earlier elections.

4) In 2005, 2001 and 1997, the conservative candidates proved very unpopular in rural areas. It is a myth that people in rural areas tend to vote conservative. It is unlikely that rural provinces that didn't vote conservative in earlier elections suddenly and massively went over to Ahmadinejad.

There is another, American, report that claims to prove the opposite: that Iranian voters did in fact massively support Ahmadinejad. Researchers Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty base their finding on an opinion poll they conducted over the phone between May 11 and 20, which had Ahmadinejad beating Mousavi by 2 to 1.

But critics have pointed out that the official list of candidates wasn't announced until May 19, and the election campaign didn't get underway until May 20. Mousavi himself first appeared on television on May 22, and his campaign really kicked off only on June 3, when he got into a fierce televised debate with Ahamadinejad.

With the controversy officially out of the way, the regime will now move on to the next formal step in the electoral process: the swearing in of Ahmadinejad as the new president by the Supreme Leader, ayatollah Ali Khamenei, some time between between July 26 and August 19.