In response to Iran’s powerful Guardian Council’s proposal to set up a special body to recount the ballots of the June 12th presidential election, presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi stressed that the violations were so serious that there was no solution other than nullifying the elections altogether.
Mousavi’s remarks come as a response to the statement by the spokesperson of the Guardian Council which regulates national elections in Iran which said that a special group would be created to investigate the election and recount 10 percent of the votes, while also inviting the protesting candidates to send their representatives to be present during the recount.
In his letter, Mousavi wrote, “limiting the complaints over the violations in the elections to a recount of ten percent of the boxes cannot satisfy public opinion,” concluding that the extent of the violations and unlawful actions regarding it were so extensive that there was no solution except to annul the elections and hold fresh one.
Referencing article 33 of the presidential election law, he reiterated that the violations in the elections had “affected the outcome of the vote”. In his written statement, Mousavi also pointed his finger at the authorities responsible for the elections and wrote that since the violations involved members of the Guardian Council, the body could not act as an “impartial arbitrator” in the issue.
“Some members of this body had not been impartial over the election [as is required by law]and had publicly taken a position on it. Also, even before the election results were announced, some had announced their positions on the vote,” Mousavi’s statement read. “In order to open a way to investigate this issue through a national arbitration group, I propose that the issue be relegated to an independent body accepted to all candidates and supported by those senior clerics of Qom (marjae taghlid) who have been pursing a resolution of the issue.”
Mousavi’s statement lists the violations of the election under four categories. Among the violations are lack of assurance that the ballot boxes were empty when they were opened for voting on Election Day, the loss of many boxes where ballot votes were cast, the withdrawal of the ballot boxes from the precincts in the absence of election monitors. The statement also quotes the announcement of Iran’s Ministry of Interior – which is also responsible for implementing the elections – that in over 170 voting precincts people’s participation had ranged from 95 to 140 percent of the registered votes, thus going over the number of permissible votes. Other violations listed are that more than 12 million voting ballots had been printed over the number of registered voters as indicated by the government’s own statistics, that another 2.5 million un-numbered ballots had been printed on the orders of one of the members of the Guardian Council just a day before the election, and that in many precincts government officials had closed the voting precincts before the end of the voting period on the day thus denying people their right to vote.
Special Board
Iran’s Guardian Council announced on Friday that in order win the trust of the protesting presidential candidates, it would set up a special board to review the election process and recount 10 percent of the cast votes.
Abbas-Ali Kadkhodai, the spokesperson of the Guardian Council announced the members of this special board to be former foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati, former Majlis speaker GholamAli Haddad Adel, a former vice-president and attorney Goodarz Eftekhar Jahromi, former Minister of Intelligence and Attorney General Dori Najafabadi, Mohammad Hassan Abutorabifard, and Mohammad Mohsen Rahimian.
Some observers have said that since four of the six proposed individuals for this board by the Guardian Council had publicly made supportive statements regarding the elections, they did not qualify to be members if the body was to remain impartial.
Haddad, who is currently also the head of the Majlis Cultural committee, is a known supporter of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the election. Velayati, who is also currently the advisor to the supreme leader of Iran, has been critical of Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi for their protests over the election accusing them of acting in violation of their oath of allegiance to velayat faghih (i.e. the supreme leader). Abutorabifard is the current deputy speaker of the Majlis had said two days after the elections that the integrity of the election was irrefutable to everybody. Rahimian, who is ayatollah Khamenei’s representative in the Martyrs Foundation (Bonyad Shahid) also made indirect critical remarks about reformist candidates when he said “Instead of pursuing their issues through legal channels, those who had lost the elections had embarked on other ways which provided enemies to take advantage of the events.”