During the summer, mainstream US press reports that mentioned Iran's June election often quoted someone who would refer to them as "fraudulent elections". Most editorials and opinion pieces followed the same practice, despite the fact that as time passed, significant evidence was not being produced that the election results did not reflect the preferences of the Iranian people.
More recently, I've been seeing the election referred to as "disputed". It is difficult to call that unfair, though Barack Obama's US citizenship is also disputed, possibly by about the same proportion of the population as only 10% of Iranians do not consider Ahmadinejad the legitimate president of Iran according to a WorldPublicOpinion.org poll.
Yesterday, for the first time I saw a new formulation in a Washington Post article about the Revolutionary Guards by Thomas Erdbrink.
The Guard's expanded economic role is mirrored by a greater role in politics and security since the disputed presidential election in June, which the government says was won by incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a landslide but which the opposition says was stolen.What I find interesting is that Ahmadinejad and his supporters still say he won in a landslide but the opposition does not any more say the election was stolen. By the end of the summer the opposition has been saying "nobody knows who won", "Mousavi may have won" or funniest, "by now, it doesn't matter who won".
Evidence of fraud just never panned out. Mousavi's extremely early and disruptive claims that there was certainly fraud so people should take to the streets before evidence could be gathered and evaluated seem now to have been a poorly-made decision. His new claim, and that of his supporters, is that the process should be more transparent. The votes are counted mostly by trusted local figures such as teachers all over the country in the same polling locations where the ballots are cast. The results are published so the people who do the counting can read them and verify their result. The process is actually pretty transparent already. Far more transparent than computer voting machines in the United States, but in theory any election could be more transparent. Mousavi's current claim that more transparency is needed is far from an assertion that the election was stolen.
By now Erdbrink may be the only person left who believes there are people still saying the election was stolen.
