Unfolded ballots nonsense

For those of you who have written to ask me about the whole "unfolded ballots" nonsense  as "evidence" of fraud in the Iranian elections, I just want to say do a LITTLE BIT of research on your own before you believe things so easily. For example check out Jeremy Hammond's expose here.

Take the first claim, that the ballots are unfolded. The implication is that the Guardian Council  simply fabricated these ballots for the purpose of the recount. The election was only three weeks ago. There would be no reason for the paper not to be “fresh” and “crisp” after three weeks of sitting in a box. But the ballots do appear to be unfolded. But as we’ve also seen, the slot in the ballot box is perfectly big enough to accommodate an unfolded ballot. It could equally well be that these ballots simply were not folded by the individuals who cast them.

In the second image, again, it appears there are no folds in the ballots. It’s possible it’s just difficult to see because of the ribbon tied around the center of each, which would likely be where the fold is if people folded their ballot in half. If there indeed are no folds, it may just be people didn’t fold them. They didn’t “have to” as claimed by The Lede and Pitney’s anonymous writer.

But look again at the third photo, which both say show unfolded ballots. The first thing to observe is that these ballots are rolled up. So even if they were folded, it would be difficult to see the folds. The second thing to observe is that some of the ballots clearly were folded.

And then use your brains. Do you REALLY think that a single person (all the ballots supposed had the "same handwriting") sat down an falsified millions of ballots, and distributed them in thousands of vote counting stations across the large country (Iran is the 18th largest nation on Earth) as a way to cheat? T

he very claim itself is laughable because the people who insist that there was voting fraud also claim that the fraud occurred not when the ballots were counted, but when the Interior Ministry simply decided to substitute their own numbers for the supposedly "real" ones (they even produced a supposed secret letter to Khameini from the Interior Ministry to "verify" this allegation) -- so there would be no need to falsify ballots according to this theory of election fraud in Iran.

FOr god's sake at lease stick to one conspiracy theory instead of contradictory ones. In the meantime see more photos of the ballot counting here.

Comments

[Pirouz]

Curious. Why are some ballots batched in rolls, while others are batched flat and tied together with ribbon? The photos suggest that counting procedures are left to the discretion of the poll workers. It also suggests a laborious process.

It's really too bad the Iranian presidential election didn't have impartial, international and domestic observers like the kind used during the last election held in Lebanon. We use them here in the United States, too.

I actually voted in the Iranian election, from here in northern California. For credentials, I used my deceased father's 40 year-old Iranian passport, which included a photo and listing of me as a teenager. It worked!

[Cyrus Responds: I think the counted ones are rolled up, the uncounted ones are folded I guess. But in any case each candidate had representatives present during the counting. Considering the state of affairs, I don't think there are "impartial" anyones dealing with Iran. Even if they really are impartial, they won't be perceived as such. It would be natural for intelligence agencies to seek to influence their impartiality. In the real world, there is no Santa Claus.]