Sarkozy says Iran election a 'fraud'

[peoli]

Source: AlJazeera.com

As the landslide victory of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran's disputed election provoked unrest, French President Nicolas Sarkozy denounces the result of Friday's vote as a "fraud."

"The extent of the fraud is proportional to the violent reaction," Sarkozy said Tuesday. "It is a tragedy, but it is not negative to have a real-opinion movement that tries to break its chains."


Read more: http://aljazeera.com/news/articles/34/Sarkozy_says_Iran_election_a_fraud_.html

[dipsydoodle]

1. Sarkozy said Tuesday

and today is............

[twitomy]

2. Well, I we have at least one world leader with

cojones to call a spade a spade. Good on him..

[AverageJoe5]

3. How does Sarkozy know the election was a fraud?

How does Sarkozy know it was a fraud? Did he count all the 46 million votes that were cast, so that he knows how many votes each of the candidates received? Or, did he talk to all the 46 million Iranians who voted to determine how they voted?

[twitomy]

4. There are more than plenty of indicators that point to fraud..

For instance, having the millions of ballots hand counted at near miracoulous speed, which is quite unlike previous elections, the lopsided nature of the totals, and the fact that opposition candidates lost in their home areas by large margins....

Oh and BTW, I dont think those who thought Bushg stole the election both time ever talked
to the 100+ million Americans who voted either...Zeessch what a lame argument...

[surrealAmerican]

5. He may have information we don't ...

... and if so we'd all like to know what that information is.

... and welcome to DU.

[AverageJoe5]

6. Fast vote count & losing in home towns

Perhaps they had many more people counting the votes in this election than they did in previous elections - hence the record speed at which the votes were counted.

On the issue of a candidate losing in his "home town": Here in the USA, Al Gore lost his home state in the 2000 election. And, if I remember correctly, Walter Mondale lost his home state in the 1984 election; I believe McGovern also lost his home state in the 1972 election.

[tocqueville]

8. another proof

by MUHAMMAD SAHIMI in Los Angeles | 13 June 2009

Iran’s Interior Ministry has declared President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner of yesterday’s election. This has been rejected by all the three opponents of Mr. Ahmadinejad, Messrs Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mahdi Karroubi, and Mohsen Rezaaee.



The best evidence for the validity of the arguments of the three opponents of the President for rejecting the results declared by the Interior Ministry is the data the Ministry itself has issued. In the chart below, compiled based on the data released by the Ministry and announced by Iran’s national television, a perfect linear relation between the votes received by the President and Mir Hossein Mousavi has been maintained, and the President’s vote is always half of the President’s. The vertical axis (y) shows Mr. Mousavi’s votes, and the horizontal (x) the President’s. R^2 shows the correlation coefficient: the closer it is to 1.0, the more perfect is the fit, and it is 0.9995, as close to 1.0 as possible for any type of data.

Statistically and mathematically, it is impossible to maintain such perfect linear relations between the votes of any two candidates in any election — and at all stages of vote counting. This is particularly true about Iran, a large country with a variety of ethnic groups who usually vote for a candidate who is ethnically one of their own. For example, in the present elections, Mr. Mousavi is an Azeri and speaks Turkish. The Azeries make up 1/4 of all the eligible voters in Iran and in his trips to Azerbaijan province, where most of the Azeri population lives, Mr. Mousavi had been greeted by huge rallies in support of his campaign. Likewise, Mr. Karroubi, the other reformist candidate, is a Lor. But according to the data released by Iran’s Interior Ministry, in both cases, Mr. Ahmadinejad has far outdone both candidates in their own provinces of birth and among their own ethnic populations.

http://tehranbureau.com/2009/06/13/faulty-election-data/

[twitomy]

10. Wow...they obviously need more practice in stealing elections

so that its not so obvious...Bush could make a fortune consulting on that.

And it amazes me there are those here who call themselves progressives that would defend the status quo religious nutjobs who regulary hang gays and stone adulterers...

[Zavulon]

12. If I remember correctly,

Mondale's home state was the only one he won in 1984.

I would bet Sarkozy's right, though.

[tocqueville]

7. if it's not a fraud, what is it ?

In Iran, the ayatollahs can manually count millions of hand-scrawled ballots in hours. It's really amazing. The announcement Saturday that 40 million votes had been counted in less than a day.

It took dozens of counting teams 10 days to conduct a hand recount of Palm Beach County's 462,000 ballots after the disputed 2000 presidential election. Even on a typical election night, with the best counting technology known to man - and if it's not the best, just wait; it will change - the county has been known to take all night to arrive at a tally.

Iran's ballots aren't run through machines. They're hand-counted. Right there at more than 60,000 polling places in cities as large as Tehran and in regions as remote as South Khorasan. Iran even has 35 voting stations in the United States. All those votes are recorded on something called a Form 22, according to Mehdi Khalaji, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

The forms are kept secret and sent to the Interior Ministry, where they are tallied and published on something known as a Form 28. A new computer system sped the form-filing in urban areas. While that approach doesn't sound even as speedy as the now-disgraced Votomatic machine-read punch cards from 2000, apparently, they are. Ninety minutes after the election, the AP reported, the Interior Ministry announced the results from 5 million votes.

And this most excellent system produced a final result the next morning, when supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei proclaimed that Ahmadinejad not only had won the hotly contested race over Hossein Mousavi but had won it by a margin large enough to avert a runoff. The supreme leader declared the results a "divine assessment." Ah. That explains it.

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/opinion/content/opinion/epaper/2009/06/17/a10a_engelhardtcol_0618.html

[EFerrari]

9. The lack of transparency is enough to reject the results, no matter who won or lost.

[eowyn_of_rohan]

11. Where was he in 2000 & 2004...

why didn't any world leaders speak up against our fraud-filled elections? (rhetorical question)
:eyes: :puke: