[Foundation-l] Iran?

[Ray Saintonge]

Robert Rohde wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 2:07 PM, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>   
>>  While there may very well have been widespread fraud, that alone
>> wouldn't be enough to explain away a 29 percentage point spread.  A
>> strong line of national security scare-mongering is always good source
>> of votes in the less educated parts of a country. We hear a lot about
>> what is happening in Tehran, but very little about the rest of the country.
>>     
> It's easy to explain any margin you want when there are no monitors, no
> reporting of local tallies, and vote aggregation is controlled by a small
> group in one government agency.  It's basically a matter of changing numbers
> in a spreadsheet.
>
> Regardless of what actually happened, it is pretty clear that the process of
> voting in Iran lacks the fundamental transparency necessary to provide
> confidence in the results.
Sure, transparency is a problem, but its absence alone does not imply 
fraud.  It hurts the Iranian authorities even more if the vote count is 
accurate because nobody believes them. 

Ec