Too Little, Too Late

3. No guarantee that ballots are left untampered prior to a recount. When the Guardian Council offered a recount of "disputed ballot boxes" last week, opposition candidates were far from satisfied. Establishing whether the official results reflect the will of the voters would require an arduous process of locating every ballot box, reopening them, recounting the ballots in the presence of candidate representatives, creating new tally sheets, posting them publicly, providing copies to the representatives, and including candidate representatives at each step of the tabulation process. Even if this remedy was ordered and those steps were followed to the letter, the fact that the ballot boxes have been under government control since June 12, without independent security or observation, would justify suspicion. The possibility of ballot box tampering would undermine confidence in a recount. And given the margin of victory in the official results, a partial recount would be unlikely to affect the official outcome.

4. Minimum conditions for a new election. Unfortunately, even if the candidates' demands for a new election were met, there is no guarantee that a second go-round would be any better. A host of minimum standards would be needed to honor the will of the Iranian people.

In advance of a rerun, for example, Iran would need to determine who would be on the ballot. As the system stands, the Guardian Council rules on which candidates are deemed fit to run. If a new vote was considered a runoff, the top-two vote getters in the first round would face off. But because the official result was not close enough to require a second round, the Guardian Council could arbitrarily deny top opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi a place on the ballot in a rerun. This is possible despite international principles confirming his right to stand for election.

If Mousavi and perhaps others were to participate in a new election, the country would have to ensure the security of the candidates and their supporters from intimidation and violence. The Basij militia, associated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, actively sided with the incumbent before the last vote. Militia members reportedly fired from the roof of their headquarters on June 15, killing at least eight people and wounding others. They have since clubbed street protesters. There are reports of additional deaths and hundreds of politically motivated arrests since electoral protests began. Freedom of political expression would also have to be secured. The government is interfering with cellphone service, text messaging, and other communications used to pass political messages and calls for peaceful meetings and demonstrations (though Iranians have so far outmaneuvered many governmental blocks). Meanwhile, the Iranian media is vilifying the opposition and the protesters, and the government has set foreign journalists packing -- either for home or lockdown.

A rerun of election day would bring a whole new set of challenges. Candidate agents, nonpartisan monitors, international observers, and the media would all need to be allowed at each step of voting, counting, and results tabulation.

Short of such changes, a new election could well fail to meet the aspirations of the hundreds of thousands of Iranians who have come to the streets in protest. And short of a credible vote, the one thing that the government cannot win is the legitimacy conferred by its people.

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