I have followed CNN’s coverage of the demonstrations since Monday. The only known poll, according to CNN, had Ahmadinejad well ahead of Green party candidate Mousavi just a couple weeks prior to the election.
However, scrutiny of the data posted at Terror Free Tomorrow (
www.terrorfreetomorrow.org) fails to support Ballen and Doherty’s interpretations. Their findings, from a telephone survey conducted four weeks before the election, are based on the responses of only 57.8% of the 1,731 people who were successfully contacted by telephone from outside of Iran. Among these, 34% said they would vote for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, 14% for Mir Hussein Mousavi, 2% for Mehdi Karoubi, 1% for Mohsen Rezaie, and 27% did not know. (These figures add up only to 78% in the Ballen report.) In other words, of 1,731 people contacted, well over half either refused to participate (42.2%) or did not indicate a preferred candidate (15.6%) While we cannot guess at the political preferences of this nonresponding/ noncommitting group, we do know from these data that just 19.7% of all those contacted indicated they planned to vote for Ahmadinejad. This polling figure is very low for an incumbent – particularly for a self-described populist candidate – and cannot be responsibly interpreted as representing a clear harbinger of election victory.
....
How then do we explain Balen and Doherty’s legitimization of the declaration from Iran’s Interior Ministry that Ahmadinejad prevailed with 63.62% of the votes? The absurdity of the government’s election engineering is that none of the candidates managed to get more than a fraction of the votes even in their hometowns.
Our op-ed published on Monday has drawn much attention -- and misunderstanding. Our nonprofit organizations conducted the only independent and transparent nationwide public opinion survey in Iran before the June 12 vote. The poll found that Ahmadinejad was leading his nearest opponent, the more reform-minded candidate Mir Hossein Moussavi, by a more than 2-to-1 margin, with almost a third undecided.
and
Nearly 80 percent want the right to vote for all their leaders, including the all-powerful supreme leader, while nearly 90 percent chose free elections and a free press as the most important goals they have for their government -- virtually tied with the top priority of improving the Iranian economy.
And here is the most important fact of all: More than 86 percent of those who told us they support Ahmadinejad also choose free elections and a free press as their most important priorities for their leaders. In other words, in our survey, Ahmadinejad supporters back real democratic reforms in Iran as much as supporters of the more avowedly reform candidate Moussavi.
for Ahmadinejad to have won by such a margin he would have had to pick up something like 70-80% at least of undecideds, which is i understand almost statistically impossible.
538 a lot of analysis there.
now some of this may indeed be people attempting to see what they want to see in the data and situation, but that particular polls credibility as an indicator of the election results is definately suspect. nor does it i think it tallies with the actual announced results (announced within a couple of hours of the count starting i might add)
notwithtanding all that, the peotest dont seem to want to take down the islamic system in Iran, rather reform it. the protesters appear highly religious, it appears to be a reafirmation of some of the ideals of the 79 revolution, and a demand to fulfil its promise.
79, whatever else it was and resulted from it was a revolution from tyranny.
