After Iran’s Interior Ministry claimed 41 million voters took to the polls in last Friday’s presidential election, President Hassan Rouhani in his May 22 press conference went one step further in claiming 45 million casted their ballots. Ever since, various cases of fraud, vote rigging and embarrassing measures to portray the polling stations as very crowded have caused even more embarrassment for this façade.
A college student is seen in a video clip standing outside a polling station saying: “I have gone in 10 times. They don’t give us any room to stay in… They filled 20 to 30 busses and brought all the people here… and took them inside. I don’t personally want to vote. I’ve just come because of my university. They said your ID has to be stamped to get your degree. That’s it! I don’t want to vote for anybody, all my friends are here, too (with similar cases).”
All the young people at the site answered, “All of us here just want our IDs stamped.” (link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ2Vmbhatpg)
Another video clip from Shar Ghanj,a village near the city of Birjand, northeast Iran, a number of locals are seen saying the authorities printed 399 ballots for our village with a population of 30, meaning 13.5 times more than the village population.
“We went to the governorate and said they brought 399 people from outside of the village, saying this is fraud. He said it is none of your business,” one of the locals said: “They presented forged numbers of our village. If you ask anyone they’ll say seven families live in this village. Then how can 400 people be voting while there is only seven families?” another local asked.
(link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylDqqUTCUqI)
The scope of this vote rigging and purchasing people’s votes has reached the point that the regime’s Interior Minister says with the utmost audacity that providing lunch and dinner for elections is quite typical.
“When an individual delivers a speech they invite a number of people. Then 100 people go to their election headquarters for dinner. Does this mean they sold their votes? Everyone knows hospitality obliges them to provide lunch for those people,” Rahmani Fazli said.
The brouhaha raised by the Iranian regime in claiming vast numbers of Iranians abroad took part in this farce election is yet another deceptive measure by this regime that failed to deliver.
Despite all the fraud and vote rigging, only 6.5% of eligible voters turned out to vote outside Iran, according to statistics provided by the Interior Ministry. Of course, the true numbers are even lower.
Secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran
May 24, 2017