Part 19: A Fradulent Election

Figure 5.1 Provinces carried by Azeri candidate Mohsen Mehralizadeh in light green and those carried by Mehdi Karroubi in red during the 2005 Presidential Election. In the 2009 presidential election, Mir Hossein Mousavi would only win one of the light green provinces and Karroubi would win no provinces.

While my point is not to prove definitively that the election was fraudulent, it is important to note some reasons why many Iranians themselves viewed the election as completely illegitimate. According to the official results, Ahmadinejad received 63% of the vote to Mousavi’s 34% with Rezei getting 2% and Karroubi just 1%. By getting more than 50% of the vote, Ahmadinejad avoided a runoff which would have continued the campaign. Given the momentum of Mousavi’s campaign, this lopsided victory seemed intrinsically wrong and specific irregularities would reinforce this image.

The first major discrepancy was the fact that Mousavi who is an ethnic Azari, originally from the northwest of Iran, lost in the largest Azari province of East Azerbaijan to Ahmadinejad. Azaeris have traditionally voted for even minor candidates of the same ethnic group, and the fact that Mousavi lost in this province seems highly unlikely. For example in the 2005 election, Mohsen Mehralizadeh ran as a minor reformist candidate garnering just 4% of the vote nationally in the first round. Yet as an ethnic Azari, he received 29% of the vote in East Azerbaijan to Ahmadinejad’s 15% and won the other two predominantly Azari provinces. The fact that such a minor Azari candidate could dominate the region in 2005 would mean that almost everyone expected Mousavi to once again carry the region.

Another reason for skepticism was Karroubi’s unusually low vote totals even among his own ethnic group of the Lurs. While Mousavi certainly became the main candidates of reformist voters, Karroubi still had a constituency within the movement. Karroubi garnered over 5 million votes in the 2005 elections while his official vote total for 2009 was just 333,635 votes. Moreover, Karroubi is also an ethnic Lur meaning that he, like Mousavi among the Azaris, has a natural base among the Lurs of Western Iran. In 2005, Karroubi received 440,247 just in the main Lur province of Lorestan which is more than the total number of votes he got in 2009 in all of Iran. Moreover in 2009, his official vote total in Lorestan decreased to 44,036 which seems highly unlikely given his performance in 2005.

Figure 5.1 is a map of the provinces of Iran with the light green indicating the three provinces the Azari candidate Mehralizadeh carried in the first round of voting in the 2005 presidential election. The red represents the provinces Karroubi carried in the same election which shows his strength in the West of the country. In the 2009 presidential election, Mousavi would only win one of the Azeri provinces and only one other province in the rest of the country. Karroubi would carry no provinces in the whole country since his vote total was less than 10% of what it was in 2005. Clearly such irregularities would lead many in Iran to believe the election was completely fraudulent.