And we expected anything different from a government run by religious leaders?

Incompetent leadership funded by the power-hungry and supported by the easily misinformed and uneducated. It's almost like watching Bush "win" his elections.

Did anyone expect this to go any other way, REALLY?

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei isn't about to let go of his powers, which surely would have happened had Mousavi been elected. In fact, I have no doubt that even if Mousavi had won, he probably would have been assassinated. We all know that!

Unfortunately, the people who voted for Hossein will not let it go, and they shouldn't, but this is probably the beginning of havoc, when the streets of Teheran, and the rest of Iran, will be flooded with the blood of many innocents for a long time to come.

More on fraud at my blog. The most recent post is especially important because Nate Silver has (wrongly, I think) declared the famous 45-degree chart legitimate through a misleading comparison with randomized final election results in the U.S. Partial, real-time are not randomized and (obviously) not final; Nate's demonstration flattens out the regional and temporal discontinuities you'd expect to see in results as they happen to come in.

One might want to speculate a bit further as to how much the discontent will fade. It seems that Mousavi is taking quite a gamble and that he won't have his head broken too, ---permanently. Such a gamble might be a 'win-win' situation for the discontented. Either the authorities silence Mousavi or let him 'stir the pot.'

This is the second Iranian Revolution. Iranians are on average very well educated and believe it or not rather westernized....these election results will not stand. My guess is that the real results are the total opposite of what was reported.

I doubt the cops and revolutionary guard will break heads indiscriminately when no one really knows who will actually be in power a few months down the road. My guess is that the army and police will eventually stand down, once they see the overwhelming majority of Iranians supporting the opposition.

"it's probably less important to ask whether there were irregularities, and more important to consider why Iranian officials did such a bad job executing the fraud."

I'm sure Thomas Friedman and the Weekly Standard and TNR and NYT would agree.

Cole's story relies on what? - claims by *Mousavi's spokesman abroad* and speculation that Ahmadinejad's people didn't make contingency plans for his losing (even though the polls were close).

And Mr. Cole's speculation doesn't answer Mr. Benen's question; if you were fixing an election and could ostensibly pulls levers anywhere in the country, why you would skew the results so blantently in the districts where Mousavi would most assuredly do well - his hometown - when doing it elsewhere would arouse less suspicion and be as effective.

Someone might do that if they wanted to make it LOOK unequivocally like a fraudulent election.

"The questions surrounding the election, however, undermine the legitimacy of the regime -- and that's more of an irreparable problem that grows more serious over time."

Yes, such a pity that. When's the next humanitarian bombing to spread democracy (only in the Muslim world, of course)?

...why Iranian officials did such a bad job executing the fraud.

Now you know why we went to war in the Middle East. Karl Rove didn't want the mullahs stealing his secrets...

It's possibile the Ministry decided that, if they couldn't report the actual results, they'd make the fraud obvious.

"As the real numbers started coming into the Interior Ministry late on Friday, it became clear that Mousavi was winning."

Even if this was substantiated as true, it would depend which part of the country the vote tallies were coming in from first.

A rather meaningless extrapolation.

The ministry must have informed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who has had a feud with Mousavi for over 30 years, who found this outcome unsupportable. And, apparently, he and other top leaders had been so confident of an Ahmadinejad win that they had made no contingency plans for what to do if he looked as though he would lose.

Hmmm, so if something should happen to incapacitate Khamenei, I can think of a former Supreme Leader of our own country who we could loan out. Sounds like he would fit right in.

BTW, the photo of Khamenei on Wikipedia creepily reminds me of Cheney.

Someone might do that if they wanted to make it LOOK unequivocally like a fraudulent election.

I find it hard to conceive of any scenario in which someone with that much control over the polls would choose to frame their opponent for fraud. How could that be preferable to simply ensuring victory for your own candidate? I'd say it's far more likely that a poorly disguised fraud is simply the result of shoddy coordination.

The saddest aspect of all this, at least for me, comes from a quote I read from an Iranian who said that he would "...never vote in Iran again."

In 2000, it would seem that some election weirdness happened in the USA.

In 2004 the goons had the election in the bag (we were at war remember!).

Is 2009 in Iran similar to our 2008, the year we said ENOUGH?

I certainly felt screwed these past 8 years. I can't imagine what's going on in Iran right now.

The election results may not be reversible, but the unrest will not go quietly into the desert night.

Please look at this, absolutely amazing....if you wondered how they did it....
http://tehranbureau.com/2009/06/13/faulty-election-data/

Depressing but not terribly surprising. It would have been grimly amusing to hear the Bush White House denounce this election after their own, uh, rocky road to power. I've often heard that Ahmadinejad was Iran's Bush, and thus a stolen election is only to be expected...

When you steal an election, you generally don't put out a careful plan and issue written orders. It's done with verbal orders or even a sort of wink-wink nudge-nudge to let the lieutenants in the field know what needs to be done. In such a situation it's easy to imagine the low level functionaries getting carried away and trying to deliver a land-slide for their boss. Caro in his book on LBJ discusses how elections were stolen in Texas just the opposite of what apparently was done in Iraq; vote totals were held back from loyal districts till it was clear just how many votes you needed to steal to win a close race.