2009 Iranian presidential election

Ahmadinejad became President of Iran after the 2005 election. The losing candidates at that time claimed irregularities at the polls, but the charges were not investigated. His victory had surprised most observers of the campaign. The voting for the 2009 election was scheduled for 12 June 2009 and ended up being extended until midnight that day because the turnout was unexpectedly high. Voting ended up proceeding four hours longer than originally scheduled. All Iranian citizens of age 18 and up are eligible to vote. Both the Iranian Center for Statistics and the Iranian Ministry of the Interior stated that there were around 46.2 million eligible voters. ==Candidates==

On 20 May 2009, the Guardian Council officially announced a list of approved candidates, while rejecting a number of registered nominees. Only four candidates were approved by the Guardian Council, out of the 476 men and women who had applied to seek the presidency of Iran in the 2009 election. Approved candidates ;Conservatives • Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, incumbent • Mohsen Rezaee, former Commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and current secretary of the Expediency Council. Supported by the Islamic Society of Engineers ;Reformists • Mehdi Karroubi, former Speaker of the Majlis • Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the last Prime Minister of Iran (Campaign) File:Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with chafiye.jpg|Mahmoud Ahmadinejad File:Mir-Hossein Mousavi.jpg|Mir-Hossein Mousavi File:محسن رضایی.jpg|Mohsen Rezaee File:Karubi in zanjan.jpg|Mehdi Karoubi Rejected candidates ;Conservatives • Rafat Bayat, female Majlis representative from Zanjan ;Independents • Akbar Alami, former Majlis representative from Tabriz • Ghasem Sholeh-Saadi, former Majlis representative Withdrawn candidates • Mohammad Khatami, former President of Iran, endorsed Mousavi. (See article on Khatami presidential campaign for details.) Declined candidates The following people were said to be possible candidates in the election, but did not register within the five days allowed for registration. Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, former president and chairman of the Assembly of Experts, would have been over 75 years old on the election day and therefore ineligible to run by election law. ;Conservatives • Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Mayor of Tehran • Ali Larijani, speaker of the Majlis • Ali Akbar Velayati, Minister of Foreign Affairs 1981–97 ;Reformists • Mohammad Reza Aref, former First Vice President • Masoumeh Ebtekar • Abdollah Nouri, former Minister of Interior, former Speaker of Tehran City Council ==Campaign==

Background The incumbent was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Iranian reform movement attempted to unite behind a single candidate; former president Mohammad Khatami was the leading opponent to Ahmadinejad in some opinion polls, until he withdrew and endorsed former prime minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Former Speaker of the Majlis Mehdi Karroubi, another Reformist, was also running; as was the former commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Mohsen Rezaee, a conservative with a reputation for political pragmatism. The Telegraph described the campaign as "unusually open by Iranian standards, but also highly acrimonious". Debates about the economy played the biggest role in the campaign, with the global economic recession looming in peoples' minds. calling for an end to the regime's 'Vice Police'. The BBC stated about Mousavi: "[i]n foreign affairs, he seems to be offering little change on major issues". Mousavi adopted the traditional Islamic color of green as his campaign theme. Young male supporters wore green ribbons tied around their wrists and young female supporters wore green headscarves. Activists used the term 'change' as their primary slogan, chanting "green change for Iran", "together for change" and "vote for change". Each debate lasted for around one and a half hours. During the debate on 3 June between President Ahmadinejad and reformist rival, former prime minister Mousavi, Ahmadinejad made accusations regarding former presidents Mohammad Khatami and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and the Iranian revolution. Rafsanjani responded to these charges on 9 June in an open letter to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei requesting that he stepped in to rebuke Ahmadinejad for his comments at the debate. Endorsements Polling The opinion polls within Iran were considered unreliable. A number of polls conducted between relatively small voting groups, like university students and workers, were reported as election propaganda. More general polls reported in the media did not state the polling organization nor the basic facts about the methodology. The results showed a high variance and depend heavily on who was reporting the poll. The director of Ayandeh, Abbas Abdi, spent several years in prison. Mousavi's and Karroubi's campaign posters in Tehran claimed that a high turnout would reduce Ahmadinejad's chance of winning the election. An independent poll, conducted by Terror Free Tomorrow: The Center for Public Opinion, a nonprofit institute that researches attitudes toward extremism, found that Ahmadinejad was leading by a margin of 2 to 1. 34% said they would vote for Ahmadinejad, 14% favored Mousavi, 2% favored Karroubi, 1% favored Rezaee and 27% were undecided. The poll was taken from 11 to 20 May. The poll was carried out by a company whose work for ABC News and the BBC in the Middle East has received an Emmy award. Polling itself was funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Writing in The Washington Post, pollsters Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty have used this to suggest that Ahmadinejad's apparent victory might reflect the will of the Iranian people. The poll was quoted by Reuters, Khaleej Times and Jim Muir of BBC News. However, the Irish Times, while quoting the poll, also pointed out that it was taken three weeks before the election, and electoral campaigning in Iran is only allowed for a period of 30 days prior to the election date, which means this poll was conducted only one week into the campaigning. Another critic of the poll, Mansoor Moaddel, pointed out that of "1,731 people contacted [by the poll], well over half either refused to participate (42.2%) or did not indicate a preferred candidate (15.6%)." For comparison, the average response rate in US for such telephonic surveys does not exceed 30%, while the minimum response rate for an opinion poll to be considered scientific by many leading academic journals is 50%. A post-election national poll was conducted in late August and early September 2009 by the American polling agency, World Public Opinion, which is affiliated with the University of Maryland. Of the initial 46% respondents of the poll, 27% did not state their chosen candidate, 55% said that they had voted for Ahmadinejad. Both Mr Karroubi and Mr Rezai received minimal support. 87% of respondents replied that they had voted compared to 85% according to the official figures, which is within the margin of error provided. Also, the survey found that 62% of Iranians had "strong confidence" in the election result whilst 64% expressed a similar feeling towards the incumbent president. This finding almost exactly matches up with the proportion of the vote that Ahmadinejad received. Polls by Western Organizations Polls by Iranian Organizations ==Conduct==

over a four-hour period. The upper picture shows Rezaee with 633,048 votes at 09:47; the lower shows the same candidate with 587,913 votes at 13:53 later that day. Mohsen Rezaee's official website published the screenshots and stated that never during the vote-counting in Iran had the counted votes of candidates dropped. Pre-election violence On 1 June, a campaign office of Ahmadinejad's primary opponent, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, was torched. The office was located in the city of Qom. No group claimed responsibility for the attack. At the same time, it was reported that an assassination had been attempted against former president Mohammad Khatami by means of a bomb placed on an aircraft he was to board. Blocking of communications Mobile phone communications were interrupted in Tehran on election day and the BBC has stated that "heavy electronic jamming" was being used to halt their broadcasts. On 23 May 2009, the Iranian government temporarily blocked access to Facebook across the country. Gulf News reported that this move was a response to the use of Facebook by candidates running against Ahmadinejad. PC World reported that Mousavi's Facebook page had more than 6,600 supporters. Access was restored by 26 May 2009. Alleged vote rigging or coup attempt The New York Times quoted an unnamed employee of the Interior Ministry claiming that "the government had been preparing its fraud for weeks, purging anyone of doubtful loyalty and importing pliable staff members from around the country." The New Yorker stated that "dissident employees of the Interior Ministry... have reportedly issued an open letter" saying that the election was stolen. On 21 June 2009, a spokesman from the Guardian Council (an organ of the Iranian government) stated the number of votes cast exceeded the number of eligible voters in no more than 50 cities. The Council argued this was a normal phenomenon, which had also taken place in previous elections, as people are not obliged to vote where they had been born/registered. On 18 June, Iranian film makers Marjane Satrapi and Mohsen Makhmalbaf appeared before Green Party members in the European Parliament to present a document allegedly received from a member of the Iranian electoral commission claiming that Mir-Hossein Mousavi had actually won the election, and that the conservative incumbent Mahmoud Ahmedinejad had received only 12% of the vote. ==Result==

Analysis According to Reza Esfandiari and Yousef Bozorgmehr, the election data is consistent with a natural outcome in a statistical sense, allowing for some possible fraud at the local level. Mohtashami, former interior minister of Iran, who was in the election monitoring committee of Mousavi's campaign claimed that according to official censuses, the number of counted votes in 70 municipalities were more than the number of eligible voters who lived in those regions. In all those cities Ahmadinejad won by 80% to 90%. However, "excess votes" have been common in all Iranian elections partly due to the way eligible voters are counted. For example, the Interior Ministry based its calculation of eligible voters on birth certificate registrations. Iranians do not register to vote and hundreds of thousands regularly vote outside their own regions. Shemiran, which had the highest excess voter turnout (13 times the number of eligible voters), overwhelmingly voted for Mousavi. On 17 June, Tabnak, the news agency close to defeated candidate Mohsen Rezaee whose official vote tally was 678,240 votes in the election, stated that "Mohsen Rezaee, until yesterday afternoon, found evidence that proves at least 900,000 Iranians, who had sent in their national ID card numbers, voted for [him]." However, there is no way of independently verifying whether those who disclosed their ID numbers had actually voted for Rezaee. BBC Iranian affairs analyst Sadeq Saba found abnormalities in the way results were announced. Instead of results by province, the "results came in blocks of millions of votes," with very little difference between the blocks in the percentages going to each candidate. This suggested that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did equally well in rural and urban areas, while his three opponents did equally badly in their home regions and provinces as in the rest of the country. This contradicted "all precedent in Iranian politics", where Ahmadinejad had been very popular in rural areas and unpopular in the big cities, where ethnic minorities had favoured anti-establishment candidates, and where candidates had tended to carry their home provinces. Another anomaly, according to British-based researcher Ali Alizadeh, is that a large turnout did not favour the opposition, since in elections, both in Iran and abroad, "those who usually don't vote, i.e. the silent majority, only come out when they want to change the status quo." According to modern Middle Eastern and South Asian historian Juan Cole, there were several anomalies in the election results. Official reports gave Ahmadinejad 50% of the vote in Tabriz despite the fact that this was the capital of Mousavi's home province, Eastern Azerbaijan, where Mousavi's rallies were well attended and which has traditionally given good turnouts for even "minor presidential candidates" who came from the province. Ahmadinejad also won Tehran province by over 50%, but crucially lost to Mousavi in the actual city of Tehran and was also soundly beaten in the affluent suburb of Shemiran to the north of the capital. Statistical analyses of the official election results were published in Journal of Applied Statistics, an online note, in blogs and in The Washington Post. ==Aftermath==

Protests Clashes broke out between police and groups protesting the election results from early morning on Saturday onward. Initially, the protests were largely peaceful. However, as time passed, they became increasingly violent. Some protesters began to get violent after the results of the election were announced. Angry crowds in Tehran broke into shops, tore down signs, and smashed windows. Civil unrest took place as protesters set fire to tyres outside the Interior Ministry building and others formed a human chain of around 300 people to close off a major Tehran street. The demonstrations grew bigger and more heated than the 1999 student protests. Two hundred people protested outside Iran's embassy in London on 13 June. Ynet stated that "tens of thousands" protested on 13 June. That day, protests had been organized in front of the Iranian embassies in Turkey, Berlin, Rome, Sydney, Vienna In response to the reformist protests, tens of thousands of people rallied in Tehran on 14 June to support the victory of Ahmadinejad. On 15 June, Mousavi rallied, with anywhere from hundreds of thousands Competing rallies for Mousavi and for Ahmadinejad took place on 16 June. The pro-Ahmadinejad protesters, chanting the phrases "Death to America!" and "Death to Israel!", outnumbered their opponents, but they did not match the numbers of opponents who had protested the day before. Reports from the state media and elsewhere stated on 16 June that seven people have died in all of the protests so far. However, The Times quoted a Rasoul Akram Hospital nurse that day who asserted that 28 people have suffered from "bullet wounds" and eight have died so far. Over half a million reformist Iranians marched silently from Haft-e-Tir Square to Vali Asr Square on 17 June. That day, the Iranian opposition group, "Human Rights Activists News Agency", stated that 32 people had died protesting during the events of 24 and 25 June. Government actions Arrests On the weekend of 13 and 14 June, in a series of raids across Tehran, the government arrested over 170 people, according to police officials. Among them were prominent reformist politicians, including MIRO founder Behzad Nabavi, IIPF leader Mohsen Mirdamadi, and former president Mohammad Khatami's brother Mohammad-Reza Khatami, who was later released. Also arrested were Mostafa Tajzadeh and Mohsen Aminzadeh, whom the IRNA said were involved in orchestrating protests on 13 June. Iranian journalist Mashallah Shamsolvaezin claimed that Mousavi was put under house arrest, although officials denied this. An estimated 200 people were detained after clashes with students at Tehran university, although many were later released. A judiciary spokesman said they had not been arrested but that they were summoned, "warned not to increase tension," and later released. Intelligence minister Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Ejehei linked some arrests to terrorism supported from outside Iran, stating that "more than 20 explosive consignments were discovered". On 16 June, Reuters reported that former vice-president Mohammad-Ali Abtahi and former presidential advisor Saeed Hajjarian had been arrested. Human rights lawyer Abdolfattah Soltani, who had been demanding a recount of all votes, was also arrested on the Tuesday according to Shirin Ebadi, who said that security officials had posed as clients. Over 100 students were arrested after security forces fired tear gas at protesters at Shiraz university on the same day. He was held overnight in Evin Prison before being released and returning to hospital, where according to Human Rights Watch he remained under guard. In Tabriz, other Freedom Movement activists and eight members of the IIPF were arrested, with reports of at least 100 civic figures' arrests. In Isfahan province, prosecutor-general Mohammadreza Habibi warned that dissidents could face execution under Islamic law. Censorship allegations According to the Telegraph, on 14 June "Iran's regime was doing its utmost to choke off the flow of news from its capital." Reporters from the Italian public television broadcaster RAI stated that one of its interpreters was beaten with clubs by riot police and the officers then confiscated the cameraman's tapes. Meanwhile, the director of BBC World Service accused the Iranian Government of jamming its broadcasts to the country. Peter Horrocks said audiences in Iran, the Middle East and Europe had been affected by an electronic block on satellites used to broadcast the BBC Persian Television signal to Iran, adding: "It seems to be part of a pattern of behaviour by the Iranian authorities to limit the reporting of the aftermath of the disputed election". Al Jazeera English leveled allegations of direct media censorship by the Iranian government, stating that "some of the newspapers have been given notices to change their editorials or their main headlines". NBC News offices in Tehran were raided, with cameras and other equipment confiscated. ABC News reporter Jim Sciutto also has had material taken. People from the German public broadcasters ZDF and ARD have been harassed as well, with men carrying batons and knives reportedly storming the ARD's Tehran office. A BBC corporate official has referred to the network's conflict with the regime as 'electronic warfare'. On 13 June 2009, when thousands of opposition supporters clashed with the police, Facebook was filtered again. Some news websites were also blocked by the Iranian authorities. Mobile phone services including text messaging also stopped or became very difficult to use. as were ones with The Guardian. In response to the crackdown, anti-regime activists have repeatedly taken down Ahmadinejad's and Khamenei's websites. According to CNN, the United States State Department has worked with Twitter to expand the website's access in Iran. Scapegoats The Iranian government blamed the unrest on a variety of targets, including the Baháʼí Faith who served as "canaries in the coal mine of Iran's theocracy" as Iran's largest religious minority by their state sanctioned persecution and as "scapegoats". Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel, a Member of Parliament (and previously the Speaker of Parliament) even claimed that BBC stands for Baháʼí Broadcasting Company and made other allegations of Baháʼí involvement with outside parties like the Israeli, British and American governments, though some claim that these accusations had little to do with the religion and rather seemed to be a part of an Islamic repertoire of what a heresy is supposed to look like, and are "categorically rejected" by the Baháʼís. Iranian political reactions , Russia • Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei initially urged the country to unite behind Ahmadinejad, labeling a victory by him as a "divine assessment." Referring to Mousavi's appeal letter about the irregularities, Khamenei said "the Guardian Council has been emphasized to carry out investigation into this letter carefully," and probe allegations of Ahmadinejad cheating. • Former Interior Minister Sadeq Mahsouli said that he had not received any "written complaint" about election fraud or irregularities. He also remarked that the vote proceeded in a way that "ruled out the possibility of cheating." • Chairman of the Assembly of Experts Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was reported to have called a meeting of the Assembly, as they had the constitutional power to elect and dismiss the Supreme Leader. • Incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in a live address on state run television on 13 June, called the election "completely free" and the outcome "a great victory" for Iran. He also said, "[t]oday, the people of Iran have inspired other nations and disappointed their ill-wishers... propaganda facilities outside Iran and sometimes inside Iran were totally mobilized against our people." Ahmadinejad praised the country's youth as well, but made no direct mention of the protests. • Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the main opposition candidate, issued a statement saying, "I'm warning that I won't surrender to this manipulation." Mousavi lodged an official appeal against the result to the Guardian Council on 14 June. • Reformist cleric Mehdi Karroubi, another opposition candidate, echoed Mousavi's demand for the election to be cancelled. He said, "I am announcing again that the elections should not be allowed and the results have no legitimacy or social standing... Therefore, I do not consider Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of the republic." • Mohsen Rezai, on 17 June, gave an ultimatum to Interior Ministry to release details of the results by that day, otherwise, he would call for a new election. However, on 24 July he withdrew formal complaints filed with the Guardian Council, saying that "The [current] political, social and security situation has entered a sensitive and decisive phase, which is more important than the election." • Gholam Ali Haddad Adel, a former Iranian parliamentary speaker, called on Mousavi to concede defeat, saying that then "everyone will benefit". On 17 June, he was arrested and transferred to prison. • The Iranian national football team wore green wristbands in support for Mousavi in a World Cup qualifier against South Korea. • According to three Iranian newspapers 105 of 290 members of the Iranian Parliament invited to attend a 24 June victory party for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad attended the event, suggesting, according to the American The New York Times newspaper, "a deep divide within the political elite over the election and its aftermath." • In his 19 June address to the nation after Friday prayers, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei defended the reputations of Hashemi Rafsanjani and Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri despite the fact that "Never before have I mentioned people by name in the Friday prayer sermons" adding that "The live televised debates were a positive step, but these (accusations against fellow candidates) should be removed. After the debates, I had a talk with the president because I knew he would listen to me." This amounted to a criticism of Ahmadinejad, who had made accusations against Nateq-Nouri's family during the debate and accused Rafsanjani of being "corrupt" and whom he had called "the main puppet master." International reactions Many western countries expressed doubt about the result and/or reacted in favour of protestors. Other countries, namely Brazil and some other Asian countries, amongst others, welcomed the result. ==See also==