I'm a space girl without a race.

[skywalker]

Reuters:

A poll of Iran's electorate three weeks before its election showed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad leading by a 2-to-1 ratio, greater than the announced results of the contested vote, the pollsters said on Monday.

The poll showed Ahmadinejad's disputed victory, which has sparked riots and demonstrations since it was announced, might reflect the will of the people and "is not the product of widespread fraud," pollsters Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty said in a column in The Washington Post.

... "While Western news reports from Tehran in the days leading up to the voting portrayed an Iranian public enthusiastic about Ahmadinejad's principal opponent ... our scientific sampling from across all 30 of Iran's provinces showed Ahmadinejad well ahead," the pollsters said.

Thirty-four percent of those polled said they would vote for Ahmadinejad while 14 percent preferred Mousavi and 27 percent were undecided.

"The breadth of Ahmadinejad's support was apparent in our pre-election survey," the pollsters said, rejecting arguments the poll might have reflected a fearful reluctance to give honest answers.

... The poll also found nearly four in five Iranians wanted to change the system to give them the right to elect Iran's supreme leader, not currently subject to popular vote, they said. Iranians chose free elections and a free press as their most important priorities.

"These were hardly 'politically correct' responses to voice publicly in a largely authoritarian society," the pollsters said.

"The fact may simply be that the re-election of President Ahmadinejad is what the Iranian people wanted."

Interview with Pollsters @ WaPo via The Guardian:

Conducted by telephone from a neighbouring country, field work was carried out in Farsi by a polling company whose work in the region for ABC News and the BBC has received an Emmy award. Our polling was funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

... Yet the baseline distributions we found then mirror the results reported by the Iranian authorities, indicating the possibility that the vote is not the product of widespread fraud.

Comments

[inarticulate]

My point was that people aren't aware (and definitely weren't when it happened in the past) and it's not about the candidates and who's better. It's about the fact that this sort of thing does happen and is happening and going in to play god over a government (again) isn't going to do anyone any favors, US included.

I have no appropriate icons on this journal

[parfacy]

As someone who's not American, but who is immediately affected by the consequences of the US interfering in Iran, I'm really worried. I remain optimistic, but I'm hoping it doesn't come to that.

Re: I have no appropriate icons on this journal

[inarticulate]

As someone who is American, I hope it doesn't, either! And I hope if it DOES come to that, it's not America that responds. The UN, maybe, as suggested downthread (though honestly, I have no idea, so take that with a grain of salt), but I'm very doubtful of our government's ability to pull off anything helpful at this point, regardless of intention. Which doesn't mean that we as ordinary citizens shouldn't be educating ourselves-- because we definitely should.