The recent surge in popular enthusiasm for Ahmadinejad’s main rival, Mir Hussein Mousavi, has increased the likelihood that the president’s neo-conservative backers will resort to rigging the election results. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive]. Some public opinion surveys released before the last day of campaigning on June 10 showed that Mousavi is near, or perhaps has even surpassed, the incumbent.
Under Iran’s tangled, quasi-democratic system, however, voters do not have the final say in elections. The ultimate responsibility for the outcomes of elections falls to two unelected entities -- The Guardian Council and the Interior Ministry -- that are not directly responsible to the Iranian people. Both institutions are packed with Ahmadinejad partisans. Both also have a track record of meddling in elections.
In the 1999 parliamentary elections, for example, the Guardian Council annulled about 700,000 votes cast by Tehran residents in order to ensure the election of a favored hardliner candidate. And in the 2005 presidential election, the council, acting in tandem with the Revolutionary Guards Corps, reportedly engineered irregularities -- including voter-intimidation and ballot-stuffing -- that enabled a then-obscure hardliner, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to win the presidency.
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