Chatham House/St Andrew’s University report casts serious doubt on Iranian victory claims

Chatham House has published a paper titled Preliminary Analysis of the Voting Figures in Iran’s 2009 Presidential Election (available here as a pdf document).

Written by Professor Ali Ansari, Daniel Berman and Thomas Rintoul of the Institute of Iranian Studies, St Andrew’s University the report casts serious doubts on the plausibility of the claimed victory and demonstrates irregularities in the official results.

According to the press release (I just can’t work out how to copy salient ponts from the pdf document!) the official statistics indicate that:

• claims that Ahmadinejad swept the board in rural provinces flies in the face of previous results

• The plausibility of Mr Ahmadinejad's claimed victory is called into question by figures that show that in several provinces he would have had to attract the votes of all new voters, all the votes of his former centrist opponent, and up to 44% of those who voted for reformist candidates in 2005.

• Irregularities are found in conservative Mazandaran and Yazd provinces where votes cast exceeded the number of eligible voters.

Professor Ali Ansari said: 'The analysis shows that the scale of the swing to Ahmadinejad would have had to have been extraordinary to achieve the stated result'. Thomas Rintoul said: 'The claimed results in minority provinces are particularity extreme, the numbers from Ilam, Lorestan and Hormozegan almost defy belief'."

This is just a summary of the executive summary. The whole paper is well worth reading. It certainly does confirm suspicions that the election was rigged an a gigantic scale