Monday, June 15, 2009

Events in Iran

Blogger Andrew Sullivan is providing the best ongoing live coverage of the horrendous events in Iran, including some specifics about how the election was rigged:

Robert Tait, the Guardian's former Tehran correspondent, has been poring over leaked reports of the official results, allegedly leaked by disaffected officials. He and our diplomatic editor Julian Borger write: "The figures have been accompanied by claims from interior ministry sources that fake statistics were fed into a software program and then distributed to vote counts among polling stations to produce a plausible outcome. The same sources have also claimed that the interior ministry's statements announcing the results were prepared before Friday night's count." 

Such claims are being reported on websites that Iran is frantically trying to block, according to our blogs editor, Kevin Anderson. He explains the cat-and-mouse game between the authorities and internet users...

...One close friend of mine worked as election official in Shiraz. He says they received 70 ballot boxes, in which 40 of them were with broken seals. The answer to the question of “why the seals are open?” was that the boxes move in the car during transit, so the seals came off. He says the votes in the 40 open boxes were all for Ahmadinejad and Mousavi was leading in the rest of the 30 boxes.


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