We do not know if the Iranian election was rigged. Sorry. Notwithstanding Ahmadinejad's two middle names, el diablo and Dictator, we still don't know if the election was rigged. Historian Juan Cole demurs, citing six pieces of evidence that supposedly point to fraud. None of them are remotely close to definitive. Most of them take ethnicity to be an utterly determining factor in elections. More importantly, they don't deal with the numbers.
Nate Silver, the number-cruncher and poll-analyst du jour, debunks a widely-circulating statistical analysis deployed by Cole. More recently, Cole has been blubbering about a poll that he claims supports the fraud thesis. Unfortunately, it does no such thing. Cole is hardly alone. Stalinist blogger Al Giordano writes, "it is certainly plausible that Ahmadinejad's supposed victory is merely an invention based on cooked numbers," his twaddling fingers betraying his intentions (Al, when you write "supposed," you're making a value judgment, even while the rest of your sentence tries to avoid doing so).
So what's the real story here? As Richard Seymour reports,
I think it's a consensus on the liberal-left in the US and UK that the Iranian elections were fixed. If they are right, we are watching a bloodless coup turn into a bloody one, as protesters have been beaten and are now being shot at and killed by cops. One of Mousavi's supporters alleges he was told that a coup was coming. If they are not right, we are still faced with a state busily beating and killing the opposition. The Iranian state is still detaining 'reformist' MPs, censoring newspapers, shutting down access to social networking sites (although people are still finding ways to Twitter), and behaving as if for all the world it had every reason to act guiltily. It is not inherently implausible that Ahmadinejad got 63% of the vote, and it has to be shown that there was a fix. The fact that Ahmadinejad used state oil revenues to fund programmes for the poor can be approved or derided, but it arguably gave large numbers of people an interest in voting for Ahmadinejad against his more explicitly neoliberal rival. It gave him a base among some of the working class and bazaaris. Still, it is hardly implausible either that some vote-rigging went on, if only to make the win decisive enough to avoid a run-off.
Anyone seriously interested in following the vote could do worse than head over to his site.
But there's another point: hundreds of thousands--perhaps millions--of Iranian Mousavi supporters are out in the street, agitating for reform. They are politicized. They think their votes weren't counted. They know that they are banned from demonstrating. And they know that the Islamic Republic has authorized the use of live ammunition (there have already been civilian deaths, which may lead to further strengthening of the movement).
An energized populace in Iran, willing to defy illegitimate state edicts, can only lead to good, fraud or no fraud.
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