Twitter Revolution or 'Sit Down and Shut Up?'

With all that is going on in Iran, especially being covered by blogs and social networks it's time to get the Political Warrior back up and running. Starting this summer and through the school year check this blog for current event posts related to the content of AP American Government and Politics and Comparative Government and Politics.

Here's my collection of various accounts of the world watching events in Iran following the declared re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on June 12:

Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right blog, for which he made a name during last fall's US election, has posted a number of interesting items about the Iranian election.

"The Ayatollah's Flawed Logic"
"Iranian Leadership Split On Response"
"Karroubi's Unlucky 7's?"
"Unconvincing (to me) Use of Benford's Law to Demonstrate Election Fraud in Iran"
"Ahmadinejad's Rural Votes"
"If He Did It"
"Recount in Iran?"
"Polling Predicted Intimidation -- and Not Necessarily Ahmadinejad's Victory"
"Iran Does Have Some Fishy Numbers"
"Iranian Election Results by Province"
"Statistical Report Purporting to Show Rigged Iranian Election Is Flawed"
"Polling and Voting in Iran's Friday Election"

The Ayatollah's Flawed Logic

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/8108938.stm

As reported by the BBC:

Responding to allegations of electoral fraud, the ayatollah insisted the Islamic Republic would not cheat.

"There is 11 million votes difference," the ayatollah said. "How one can rig 11 million votes?"

This particular argument is not unique to the Ayatollah. It has also been used by some Western observers such as Flynt Leverett (emphasis mine):

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Still many people, including in Washington, have expressed skepticism as to the validity of the results.

Leverett: I am a little surprised by the margin, too. But that makes me more comfortable about the overall validity of the election. Look at the irregularities Mousavi is citing now: that they ran out of ballot paper in some polling precincts, that they did not keep some polls open long enough. There is no way such things could change the overall outcome which is clearly in favor of Ahmadinejad. If you compare this to the flaws of the presidential election in Florida in 2000, it seems very insignificant.

Leverett and Ayatollah are arguing from an ironically Western conception of how to rig an election. In the United States, it is actually rather difficult to steal an election: because of our federalist system, elections are monitored and voting totals are reported by hundreds or thousands of individual officials at the state, county, and precinct levels. There is therefore a rather substantial marginal cost to stealing additional votes: you have to recruit some number of additional people into the conspiracy, and hope they don't rat you out or leave some kind of paper trail that makes obvious your intention. It is probably not that difficult to find a few corrupt (but competent) stooges who will help you out, but for each additional vote that you want to steal, you have to go lower down the food pyramid, soliciting the help of people who are less loyal and might undermine your plan.
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Do you Twitter? If you do U may be a better international news correspondent than those working for ABC or the BBC.

From the Brookings Institute:

When Parisians stormed the Bastille in 1789, political communications centered primarily on newspapers and face-to-face conversations. News-gathering was localized, and it took weeks for political developments to spread around the world.

Now, political protest has shifted to the Internet. The role of Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter in recent Iranian street demonstrations shows the power of digital technologies. Because of their decentralized nature, these tools empower grass-roots activists and help them bypass government authorities.

www.brookings.edu/opinions/2009/0622_technology_west.aspx

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If you are a Tweet, here's where you can follow events in Iran:

Follow Iran Demonstrations on Twitter

This is a teaching tool, as if you follow this now, you'll be ahead of the AP game come next Spring. At the same time, if the old chart of Iranian government is no longer legitimate to the Iranian people, we may be watching much more than a curricular change:

This comes in an unsigned analysis from Al Jazeera.

Get out your Iranian government organization chart (or look at the one from the BBC) and find where the men discussed here are positioned. I think that will help explain much about how the political system in Iran is working right now.

Supreme leader under pressure

Iranians have taken to the streets in the wake of the country's disputed elections, but behind the public face of the election protests lies a deeper power struggle.

In the corridors of power, analysts see a battle between Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the reformist former president.

Khamenei had publicly endorsed Mahmoud Ahmadeinejad, the incumbent president, whose resounding election victory over Mir Hossein Mousavi, his main rival, prompted a wave of protests and allegations of voter fraud.

Rafsanjani, on the other hand, has been a vocal critic of the president.

One of Iran's richest men, Rafsanjani, like Mousavi, is also one of the old guard of the 1979 Iranian revolution.

"It [the election dispute] represents the conflict between two schools of thought in Iran," Mahjoob Zweiri, a professor in Middle East politics at the University of Jordan, told Al Jazeera.

"The first one, which is represented by the supreme leader, says Iran should stay a revolutionary state, and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani wants the state to move on - to become a modern state, a pragmatic state..."

The supreme leader's decision-making powers are said to be absolute, but Iran's Assembly of Experts also wield considerable political clout.

Rafsanjani is chairman of the 86-member body, which appoints the supreme leader and monitors his performance.

It seems unlikely that Rafsanjani would move to oust Khamenei, but the assembly could - in theory, at least - remove the supreme leader from office, if his actions are deemed un-Islamic or if he is unable to carry out his sworn duties...

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Finally, throughout history it seems as through there is always a symbol of a rebellion. Twenty-years ago it was Tank Boy in Tiannamen Square (we'll blog about how the Chinese government dealt with dissent earlier this summer, later this week), now it is Neda, a young woman who was brutally killed....seen by the world on YouTube. Twenty-years ago, Tank Boy lived but hundreds of others died in China. But back to the brutality on Tehran streets.

You are warned that the video at the bottom of the link is graphic:

Her name is Neda, which means "voice" in Farsi, and her death has become the central rallying cry of the Iranian rebellion.

The fresh-faced teenage girl killed by what appears to be a single sniper shot on the streets of Tehran Saturday is now a potent symbol for Iran's pro-democracy protesters.

Her shocking and quick death in the arms of her howling father was captured on closeup video, posted to Facebook and came to life on computer screens across the globe.

"RIP Neda, the world cries seeing your last breath," was one of a flood of messages on Twitter.

"They killed Neda, but not her voice," read another. "Neda is everyone's sister, everyone's daughter, everyone's voice for freedom," said a third.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world/2009/06/21/2009-06-21_neda_young_girl_killed_in_iran.html#ixzz0JJMnYALb&D

www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world/2009/06/21/2009-06-21_neda_young_girl_killed_in_iran.html

Post here your thoughts on what will the end game for Iran protesters will be. Also, do you Twitter? What do you think of social network sites serving as news reporting agents? Welcome or Welcome Back to the Political Warrior.



But this is simply not the case in Iran. All votes are counted are reported by the Interior Ministry. There is no other source of information. There are no election monitors. Nor does the fraud alleged involve any sort of physical process (e.g. stuffing ballot boxes). It is simply a matter of changing numbers on a spreadsheet. Under these conditions, it is essentially no more difficult to steal a thousand votes than one, a million than a thousand, or 11 million than one million.

The only constraints, rather, are perceptual: certain vote totals might be more or less likely to trigger protests and unrest. It is probably easy to identify those voting margins that are most likely to trigger unrest: one would be to claim to have won the election (or secured enough votes to avoid a run-off) by exactly one vote; the other would be to claim to have won the election with 100 percent of the vote. In the former case, you would almost certainly wind up being subject to a recount, and any one report of irregularities could undermine your claim. In the latter, your claim would a laughable on its face, and every single Iranian who had voted against you would know that his vote had been stolen and would take to the streets.

It is less clear the margin of victory that minimizes the risk of unrest. But one can posit a curve that looks something like this:



I'd imagine there's a fairly broad sweet spot somewhere between about 55 percent of the vote and 75. Totals below 55 percent might trigger piecemeal scrutiny of irregularities and/or otherwise embolden your opponents, either of which could ultimately cost you the "victory". A claim to having won more than 75 percent of the vote would stretch credibility in an ethnically diverse country where there is clearly a lot of political disagreement; you'd have gotten too greedy. Ahmadinejad's claim to have won 63 percent of the vote falls somewhere in this sweet spot. That doesn't mean he stole the election -- but it also doesn't mean that he didn't.