An Obvious Smoking Gun in Iran

Iran's Guardian Council has ruled out an annulment of the controversial Iranian presidential election, but the debate about the credibility of the official results will not go away any time soon. Detailed analyses, such as a recent Chatham House study, raise serious doubts about the results, although until now they have produced no "smoking gun." But the smoking gun is in fact the election process itself. Iran's election laws are so short of minimal guarantees of transparency that any less-than-plausible results are bound to provoke a lack public confidence. There is no remedy now to a process that was so opaque that it could have been manipulated at any stage. The only solution is to hold new Iranian elections, with basic transparency safeguards.

From the outset, Iranian elections have been flawed. They are administered by the Interior Ministry and supervised by the Guardian Council - two institutions that lack independence and impartiality. The right to freely stand in elections is often violated, because numerous candidates are rejected by the Guardian Council.

Beyond these shortcomings, in the aftermath of the recent elections, human rights have been widely abused - student activists and street protestors have been killed, opposition leaders hindered from appearing in public rallies, and peaceful demonstrations broken up.

As far as transparency is concerned, Iranian election laws omit basic safeguards, necessary in any tense and conflict-prone election. A key feature of a transparent election is that all parties are provided with official result sheets of polling stations that can later be compared in case of dispute. These also need to be immediately displayed at polling stations so that both the public and the media can take note. When the results of various polling stations are added together at higher levels of the election administration, representatives of candidates should be permitted to be present and able to sign the official result sheets or register an official complaint. The aggregated results should then be immediately publicly displayed and placed on the internet.

Nothing of this nature is required in Iranian election laws.