[Devilboy]

That's what I don't understand: Weeks before the election several polls (including ones by Western newspapers) predicted a 2 to 1 win for Ahmadinejad. These predictions were all fairly uncontroversial as far as I could tell.

Now suddenly everywhere I look there's stories about young photogenic Iranians getting shot at while protesting the election results. I keep hearing about claims that the election was rigged but so far I've not seen anything concrete.

The only way I can make sense of this is by assuming infowar / agent provocateur / other covert tactics employed by the USA. Iran has been a thorn in the side of America's middle-eastern foreign interests for a long time, and poking holes in it's democratic process is an important step.

I can't even visit Reddit at the moment, every second story is about Americans getting angry at Ahmadinejad.

[siavosh]

i think the reason some people are throwing around the cia/black-ops hypothesis is that all they've ever heard about iran is in the last couple years. which basically meant pursuit of nuclear weapons and a holocaust denying Ahmadinejad. but i think it might help to put the whole thing in a broader context.

what we're seeing right now is another chapter of the iranian revolution. it's been a long story that it started in '79. and these protests themselves are morphing from simply an electoral protest to one that is a continuation of the student protests during khatami's presidency a decade ago.

america has had zero to no presence in iran, much less any tangible way of 'destabalizing' the regime. the money the cia has been throwing at this problem for the last decade has been at things like VOA (voice of america radio broadcasts inside iran) or tacit moral support for minority separatists in iran.

this is not to deny that the west has huge stakes on the outcomes of this, as evidenced by the US government's intervention with the twitter downtime thing and the significant media coverage, or maybe even fake twittering and blogging.

but given the choice of whether an autocratic paranoid regime has rigged the vote to suppress its young population OR a secret cia operation is pulling the levers of what by all accounts seems like an organic grass roots social uprising--i choose the former.

[ellyagg]

Sorry, did I miss something? Protesters are being shot and killed in Iran, right? American progressives haven't deluded themselves to the point where they think this is just as likely to happen in today's America as it is in Iran, have they?

[berntb]

>[polls predicted Ahmadinejad victory]

I've seen the argument that people in Iran tend to not have "unpopular" opinions if asked in polls. (I don't know if the population would have been that nervous, considering that only four candidates were allowed out of more than 400.)

Anyway, the opposition party seemed to have a good few last weeks of campaign. Also, there are some bad smells... the uniquely short time to publish results, the way different minorities switched totally from the previous election, etc.

In non-democracies, there are lots of conspiracy theories. (As the joke goes, the population live in a conspiracy theory!) So maybe there weren't outright cheating and the election was "fair", but I'd rather buy a bridge than bet money on that.

[earl]

All of the election polls that I'd seen predicting a 2-1 win also had 40-60 percent of the respondents not responding. That they all broke for Ahmadinejad seems... unlikely.

[bilbo0s]

Hello,

I am putting together information on the Iranian elections for a report I am doing on the political risks of international investment. The information that I have collected thus far indicated that the highest rate of non respondents in the indicated polls was 43%. That was the rate for the Washington Post poll. Would it be possible for you to share the polling data with me for the polls with non respondent rates higher than 43%. That data would be EXTREMELY helpful to me.

[Devilboy]

If 40% were undecided (leaving 40% / 20%), that still means that at least three quarters of all the undecideds had to vote against Ahmadinejad for him to lose.

I've not seen any polls with 60% undecideds.