The ballots are perforated into two slips. First part includes the voters details including full name, fathers name, national ID number and so on. The officials check your ID and fill this part out before tearing off your half of the ballot (second part) for you to write down the name of your candidate and cast your vote. The first part is then kept by the official for future reference and in case of fraud investigation.
In this video the guy first goes through the second half of the ballots then fills out the personal details of the alleged voters in what appears to be the first half of the ballot as the other guy reads them out. I also heard the name of one of the candidates, Mohsen Rezai, 40 seconds into the clip. The context was unclear but it indicates that the clip in fact is related to this election.
This seems to have taken place in a relaxed environment which given the fairly quick announcement of the election results I assume took place before the election. The kid in the background towards the end of the video is talking about ice-cream!
And another piece of useful information is that a good majority of major voting stations are in mosques which happen to be where the Basij militia is based and they are pretty much in charge of everything there and needless to say they are fanatic supporters of Ahmadinejad. I was involved a few years ago as an independent monitor in a voting station that was a major mosque in Tehran and the process was laughable and shameful at the same time.
Fraud was widespread. I myself found a stack of blank ballots on the street on my way back home from that very voting station and returned it to the station. They wanted to annul that station but after some dispute and phone calls it was accepted. It pretty much highlights the fact that it is not the voters but the ones who count the votes who dictate the results. The process is highly inefficient and leaves plenty of room for both error and fraud.
Free Flow of Information for whom?
10 years ago
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