Too Little, Too Late

Since the Iranian election on June 12, onlookers have called for a recount to assess whether incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad actually won, as the election commission reported he had. It's certainly true that the results are suspicious on the face of it. One example is the large portion of results available in an extraordinarily short period of time, given the fact that voters had to handwrite a candidate's name on the ballot and that the counting had to reconcile the number of ballot stubs with the ballots.

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But a recount is not the answer. Iranian's electoral system is so fundamentally flawed that using the votes tabulated over the past two weeks won't tell us anything. In fact, even starting from scratch and redoing the election process all over again, without major structural reforms, probably wouldn't produce an accurate result. Only if Iran honors the principles for democratic elections laid out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the country is a party, will there be sufficient progress toward achieving public confidence. In the meantime, there are a host of big problems that are causing the Iranian electoral system to fall short of even minimal standards -- and keeping Iranians in the dark about which elected officials to trust.

1. Lack of transparency at the polls. Transparency and checks, provided by candidate representatives (poll watchers), nonpartisan domestic election monitors, and international observers, are the keys to electoral integrity and public trust in polling operations. These safeguards are largely absent in Iran. Instead, the country's more than 45,000 polling centers were staffed by electoral officials under the purview of the Interior Ministry -- a part of the incumbent government. The election process as a whole is monitored by the Central Supervisory Committee established by the Guardian Council, Iran's most powerful body. That council includes six theologians chosen by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and six jurists chosen by Iran's parliament. Because Khamenei has sided with Ahmadinejad, concerns about the impartiality of the election overseers are certainly understandable.

As for independent observers, there were few. Candidates in Iran are allowed to appoint representatives to witness polling station procedures and lodge written complaints about the conduct of the voting. But not this time, reports indicate. The opposition claims that their representatives were turned away at many polling centers, and nonpartisan Iranian election monitors were not permitted, even though such monitors are recognized worldwide as a good means to reassure voters about election conduct. Nor were international election observers from established organizations present for the June 12 election.

2. Results determined in secret. In recent years, many countries have begun posting their official tallies for the public and the candidates so that anyone might unofficially tabulate results. In the latest Iranian election, no such copy of the official tally sheet was up for scrutiny, neither for the public nor for the candidates' representatives. The results from the thousands of polling centers in Iran were added together in secret, with no candidate witnesses present. Hence, there was no independent confirmation of the official electoral outcome.

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