As I understand the procedure, they should not have made the Friday announcement.
However, the fact that they made an announcement Friday when they shouldn't have doesn't affect what the result was. And, they had a plausible motivation for the Friday announcement: the opposition had already declared victory - before any votes were counted at all - and was already mobilizing protests against a "stolen election" based on their own expectations - and the government had already tallied enough votes to know what the overall result would be. A similar thing happened in the past in Venezuela. The government wasn't supposed to announce a result until the CNE did, but the opposition had already announced a result (they weren't supposed to do that either - I don't know what the law in Iran is governing the actions of the opposition on this) and was already claiming any result different from theirs was fraud so the government said their hand was forced and announced their result. It's not a justification, but it is an explanation. On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 8:10 PM, Doug Henwood<[email protected]> wrote: > > On Jun 30, 2009, at 7:59 PM, Robert Naiman wrote: > >> 'A 65-year old monitor in charge of a station at a mosque in the >> modest, middle-class Yousefabad neighborhood of Tehran told local >> journalists: “Compared to previous elections, we had a huge turnout. >> Two years ago we had barely 400 votes at our station. This time, more >> than 2,000 voted. We closed the station and started counting the >> votes. By midnight we were done. Mousavi had 1,600 votes, Ahmadinejad >> approximately 300, and Karroubi and Rezaei each had around 150 or 200. >> We were in the process of filling out the forms and signing them when >> the announcement came that Ahmadinejad had won with two thirds of the >> votes!”' >> >> Indicating that indeed, at least in this case, the vote was counted >> locally, as it is supposed to be by law. >> >> Note that on Friday night, the government did not announce that all >> the ballots had been counted. It made a projection based on a partial >> tally. There is no inherent contradiction between the government's >> Friday night announcement and a report that this polling place had not >> yet reported its results. > > This is the most credulous nonsense. I'm really shocked that you're writing > this sort of thing, Robert. The conclusion that most readers would draw from > this passage is that the results were already cooked by the Interior > Ministry. What other government in the world projects final results from > partial tallies as if it were a TV network? > > Doug_______________________________________________ > pen-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l > -- Robert Naiman Just Foreign Policy www.justforeignpolicy.org [email protected] _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
