Iranian President Ahmadinejad might have pulled off a coup. A lot has been circulating how change reformist Mir Hossein Mousavi was robbed of his election victory. John Cole has a good rundown of the evidence supporting a stolen election theory and here are his thoughts as to how it happened:
"As the real numbers started coming into the Interior Ministry late on Friday, it became clear that Mousavi was winning. Mousavi's spokesman abroad, filmmaker Mohsen Makhbalbaf, alleges that the ministry even contacted Mousavi's camp and said it would begin preparing the population for this victory.
The ministry must have informed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who has had a feud with Mousavi for over 30 years, who found this outcome unsupportable. And, apparently, he and other top leaders had been so confident of an Ahmadinejad win that they had made no contingency plans for what to do if he looked as though he would lose.
They therefore sent blanket instructions to the Electoral Commission to falsify the vote counts."
Ahmadinejad won with over 60% of the vote with a record 85% turnout. Ahmadinejad just needed 50% to win or there would have been a runoff. So in order to prevent a Mousavi win or runoff, election officials started falsifying the vote counts. In their zeal to change the events they overdid it giving Ahmadinejad an implausible 61%. With 60% of the population under 30 and the under 30's wanting change, there is no way that Ahmadinejad got 61%.
The people need to take to the streets over this. It looks like they might be doing just that.
