Leading up to the Iranian Elections

Iranian domestic affairs are notoriously difficult to predict. This is especially true at such an important moment in the Islamic Republic when the stakes are as high as they have ever been. Rumors, unreliable polling and opaqueness in the approval and electoral process have made this election (like most previous ones), very interesting.

I have a few expectations and predictions to share, based upon what has happened so far. Here is how I have come to these conclusions:

As I have made quite clear, I supported the Iran nuclear negotiations/JPOA/JCPOA because of the potential to influence this coming set of elections, as well as the Iranian youth in general. Empowered reformists and pragmatists/moderates, leads to more pressure for Iran domestically. This (at least temporarily) reduces its ability to be disruptive regionally and internationally (especially in Syria and the Gulf). This election is vital for hardliners as they are on the defensive from the implications of a negotiated settlement with the West. Any sort of agreement with the West goes against their core ideology, and the violation of nearly all of Khamenei's 'red lines' is indisputable.

Western hardliners have argued that the backlash against moderates and reformists by Khamenei and Iranian hardliners is from a position of strength, but this couldn't be further from the truth. This election is a chance for hardliners to take back the momentum, and the actions of the Guardian Council in rejecting various candidates, the refusal of Khamenei to overrule them, and the assorted hostile acts by the IRGC-Navy in the Gulf are all part of a larger strategy to distance Iran from the West. 

I was surprised by the numbers of reformists excluded from elections. I knew there would be a massive number of rejections, but I did not anticipate that the number would be so high. This more than anything shows the insecurity of the establishment. Rejections of moderates in addition to the previously mentioned reformists reinforces this. 

The exclusion of Hassan Khomeini, a cleric and grandson of the Islamic Republic's first Supreme Leader, is particularly troubling for democracy and reform in Iran, but I would not count him, or the reform movement out yet. 

One reason for these massive disqualifications (which is coupled with an unprecedented number of applications for these electoral races) is the complexity of rigging municipal elections on a nation-wide scale. The 2009 stolen election was much easier to manipulate because it was an election for only one position with only 2 serious candidates (4 total). The Majles has nearly 300 seats and the Assembly of Experts has 88. Because so many candidates were excluded, some of these seats have no competition (for example the provinces of Ardabil, Azerbaijan West, Bushehr, Hormuzgan, Khorasan North and Semnan), and hardliners will automatically win the seat(s) in these locations. 

While hardliners have the natural advantage as they control the bodies concerned with oversight, I would not count out the Iranian people. I expect large numbers to turn out and vote, especially for reformists and moderates. Sanctions have just been removed, and there is optimism. The challenge here is that Rouhani's efforts to repair the extensive damage of the past administration have not been entirely successful, and Iran is still struggling with inflation and budgetary issues.

The actions from the Iranian government before the elections are important. Will they cave and allow more reformists and moderates to run? There were rumors of this happening, but as of yet, it has not been confirmed. The more pragmatists are allowed to run, the further the election can swing in their favor. 

Rouhani seems to have aspirations to be the next Supreme Leader, and he knows that he will never gain this position if the hardliners handily win this election.

If there are additional plans to fix the elections I would suspect the Assembly of Experts to be around 75-80% hardliners, perhaps even more, and at least 60% of the Parliament (Majles) to be this way. I think the establishment is aware that if they go much higher, there are serious risks for another mass protest like 2009. 

The unknown for me is how badly the election has to be stolen for the Iranian public to protest en masse. 

As long as the reformist/moderate/pragmatist groups vote and expect the result to reflect their voting preferences, I would be cautiously optimistic for either a result or resulting protests. In either case, the current attitude of the Iranian state is unsustainable, and unacceptable and I see this election as key for moving towards making necessary changes.



UPDATE #1 (02/05/16): It appears as though an undetermined number of Majles candidates will now be allowed to run as the Guardian Council has reversed their decision in approximately 20-25% of cases:

Iran Guardian Council Spox Nejatollah Ebrahimian: 20-25% of previously disqualified parliamentary election candidates now qualified to run.

— Hanif Zarrabi-K. (@hanifzk) February 5, 2016

Again because of the absurd opaqueness of the system it is unclear where this decision was made and why it was made. It is believed that various high-level figures were upset with the decision to bar so many candidates. At this time however, the identities and political affiliations of the candidates are unknown, so it is just as likely that hardliners, or even moderates were approved ahead of reformists.

Who's afraid of the NSA? The Roles of Government and the Corporation

Throughout the series of NSA surveillance scandals, what has surprised me the most is the public's response. While out and about I have heard people talking politics, something that has rarely happened to me in America. Everyone cares, and everyone has an opinion. While overhearing these shockingly loud (perhaps Americanesque is the best term for this phenomenon) conversations, I have also noticed something which troubles me. People are angry with 'the government' for this perceived slight, yet at the same time are ok with voluntarily giving the exact same personal information to big corporations (Facebook, Google, Apple, etc). Why would people be afraid of the government and not of the corporation, when they are doing very similar, if not the exact same things? Who is accountable to whom?

The role of government in its citizens' lives is relatively straightforward. It exists to protect its citizens, and to provide services. Its legitimacy may be derived in a variety of ways, which is dependent on the form of the government. In America, our representative constitutional republic holds elections where we either directly or indirectly select decision makers for ourselves. The government is not out there to 'get us', it has no reason to individually seek out and destroy certain parts of our society unprovoked. All the government asks is that we participate in the democratic process, fund it by paying our taxes, and do not try to overthrow it or create civil disorder. Government's role in its citizen's lives can be quite different than this, especially when it is not a democratic institution and it does not derive its authority from a popular mandate. It is also common for government officials and legislative bodies to work to maintain or augment their power, primarily in the form of being re-elected, but occasionally by other means. However, even with this potential case of abuse of power, the persecution or repression of individuals is not a guarantee.

Contrast this with the relationship between citizens and corporations. A corporation's sole purpose is to make money for its shareholders and owners. It does usually provide some sort of service to its customers (whether this service is essential, useful or even beneficial is another matter), but its motivating factor is profits. The customer has something which the corporation wants (money), and is ACTIVELY trying to get. This is not the symbiotic (and often mutually beneficial) relationship between a government and its people. 

So why be afraid of one's government? Sure there are many examples of dictatorial regimes around the world suppressing even the most basic voting rights of its population, but this is a far cry from the domestic situation in the United States. The United States of America was not created to oppress people, or to exploit them, but to free them from the colonialism of the British. The true problem is when corporations impose their interests on elected officials or other governing bodies. By exerting their influence (whether this is through political contributions or PR campaigns), they can corrupt the role of government as steward of the people. This does NOT make a government inherently evil or malevolent, but is more than anything a reminder of the motivation of for-profit companies and the potential for abuse, especially if they work to affect political change. Before blaming 'the government', consider the other potential perpetrators who have more to gain and more reasons for acting against your interests.

Urban and Rural Voting: 2000 Presidential Election Case Study

This is a paper I wrote in early 2008. At the time it was original research, a topic that was hinted at and understood to be true, but without any real published work. A few months later, Bill Bishop's excellent 'The Big Sort' was published. This book dealt with some similar topics, but did not have the same level of detailed methodology that my paper did, and it was not as scientific in nature. 

The reason why I am posting this now is as a response to this article on the Atlantic (Cities sub-magazine). This article misstates the differences in voting as 'Democrat' vs. 'Republican', rather than a simple preference of presidential candidates. People do not vote exclusively based upon party lines, this is abundantly clear. Anyway its not worth my time to go through it line by line so just read my work.

Do Urban Voters Favor Democrats? 

A Case Study of the 2000 United States Presidential Election

Introduction:

The purpose of this project was to determine if voters living in urban areas in the 2000 United States Presidential Election were more likely to vote for the Democratic candidate Al Gore, rather than the Republican candidate, George Bush. It is a popular belief that people in the urban areas are significantly more liberal and therefore vote for the Democratic candidate rather than the Republican. 

Methods:

Election results and levels of urbanization from 639 counties in 15 states were correlated. Data from the 2000 United States Census Summary File 3 were used to assess urbanization. Urbanization was defined as a ratio of the number of urban residents in a county divided by the total number of residents of the county. The resultant ratio could then range from 0-1. The election results were manually entered from the results posted on CNN.com. Third party candidate data were removed to create a two variable system. Counties with a third party candidate earning 10% or more of the vote were excluded from this analysis. Then a ratio of votes for a particular candidate divided by the total number of votes for the county was calculated to create another column with calculated values from 0-1. These numbers were then correlated to derive a Pearson’s product-moment correlation coefficient.

The definition of an “Urban Area” or “Urban Cluster”, which together make up Urban Population, is a census block or block group that has a density of 1000 people per square mile with surrounding blocks or block groups of similar density. The difference between them is the population size, where “Urban Area” is larger than “Urban Cluster”. 

I felt that aggregating data at a countywide level would provide the most accurate measure of urbanization, and election results would correspond to this. Any aggregation level smaller than this would be either excessively time-consuming or limited in scope. Using state data would be problematic because states are physically large, populous, and varied in urbanization. Generalizing by state would be an ecological fallacy. 

For the voting data I used CNN.com. These data were mostly reported on a county-by-county basis, although in some cases such as Connecticut, the reporting system differed. It was important to use voting data which matched the geographic break down of the census data.

I decided the most effective way to measure the correlation is to create a two-variable system, one being urbanization level, and the other, candidate selection. To compare the two principle candidates necessitated eliminating data from other candidates. In most cases the percentage of the population that voted for the third party was small, but in five to ten counties this exceeded 10%. These counties were excluded to avoid skewing the results. Other counties that were excluded included counties with fewer than 4000 voters. 

There were other data management difficulties to deal with in this analysis. There are 3119 counties in the United States and so performing an analysis on that scale with would have been excessively time-consuming for this project. Additionally, in several cases the election data reported by CNN.com were on a different scale in some states than the rest of the United States. The data for several Midwestern states such as Illinois were reported by county, but also by city which created complications. 

I felt that it would be most appropriate to select states that all together had a mean level of urbanization similar to that of the entire US. Also I selected states that had a ratio of Gore to Bush votes similar to nationwide election results. Several of the states selected such as Idaho, Utah and Wyoming heavily favored George Bush, while others like California, Delaware and Maryland strongly favored Al Gore.  New Mexico and Oregon with were split almost exactly between the two candidates. The final sample included 639 counties with the number per state ranging from 3 to 109. The mean was 42.6, the median was 29 and the standard deviation was 30.98. 

Microsoft Excel was used to create a spreadsheet with columns for votes for the two candidates and calculated columns for the percent of these total votes for each of the two major candidates respectively. The urban population of each county was calculated. 

The null hypothesis was that urban voters did not differ in candidate selection from rural voters. The alternate hypothesis was that urban voters did differ in candidate selection from rural voters. Pearson’s correlation test was used to test these hypotheses

Results:

For the 639 counties there was an r-value of .22. There was a 1% chance of making a type I error. The null hypothesis was rejected with very little chance of being incorrect. To compare states to each other, r-values were calculated for these smaller data sets. The states that had significantly significant correlations were California, Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Maryland, Oregon, and Wyoming. They were all positive correlations ranging from .23-.67. 

Table 1

	Counties	% Gore	% Urban	Pearson	Statistically Significant
Alabama	67	42.47	55.44	-0.14	No
Arizona	14	47.07	88.23	-0.21	No
California	52	57.60	94.76	0.59	Yes
Colorado	35	45.65	87.07	0.37	Yes
Delaware	3	56.85	80.02	0.97	No
Georgia	109	43.80	74.33	0.35	Yes
Idaho	24	29.86	70.74	0.33	No
Indiana	87	42.04	71.24	0.23	Yes
Louisiana	63	46.05	72.76	0.26	Yes
Maryland	24	58.65	86.07	0.67	Yes
Mississippi	74	41.73	49.38	0.20	No
New Mexico	23	49.88	76.31	-0.16	No
Oregon	29	50.53	79.23	0.50	Yes
Utah	19	28.43	89.54	0.09	No
Wyoming	16	33.63	67.66	0.64	Yes
TOTAL	639	50.16	83.23	0.35	Yes

NOTE: The Pearson’s r for “TOTAL” is from a correlation of the states not the counties

Table 2

	Sample	Total US
Bush Votes	13886458	50456169
Gore Votes	13973898	50996116
Counties	639	3119
% Population Urban	83.2	80.6

Figure 1

Discussion: 

There was a statistically significant difference between the likelihood of urban voters to favor Al Gore over George Bush.  This was consistent across 8 of 15 states.  While the difference was not large, the study data provide sufficient power to say with confidence that these findings are meaningful

This study would have been improved with the inclusion of all 50 states and countywide election results. Alaska does not report their election results by county so this may be difficult. I decided that 4000 voters was a good cut off point for inclusion because of the way in which this could have skewed election results. There may be a more appropriate number to use as a cutoff point to get better results. 

The states used for this study are mainly in the West, South and Southwest. This regionally skewed data set should not be a big factor however because the ratio of voters who picked Gore and Bush in this study was very consistent with the overall national ratio. Likewise, if the level of urbanization in the states used for this study was different from the urbanization in the US, there could have been some problem. 

The data were entered manually and there so is a chance of human error. Automating the data transfer would have reduced this source of error.

There were a few instances of apparent errors in CNN’s posted data. The county voting totals in some instances did not add up to equal the totals for the state. Results for California and Georgia showed statewide totals for the winning candidate that were lower than the totals of the counties added together would indicate. This error puts the reliability of data from those states into question.

Third party candidates were not included in this study to simplify the data analysis. Ralph Nader has been blamed for giving the election to George Bush because of the high likelihood that many of those who voted for him would have voted for Al Gore instead if the election had only two candidates. These voters would have been enough to give the presidency to Al Gore. Excluding the data from this candidate may have skewed the results slightly. It is unclear if those who voted for Ralph Nader were concentrated in urban or in rural counties so the effect on the correlation between voters for Gore and an urban area is uncertain. 

The biggest possible flaw with the data used is the urbanization data. Some counties had very few residents yet had a significant number of “urban” residents. Most people would not count a county with less than 30,000 people as urban at all. The common perception of “Urban” is likely to be a little more exclusive than this. In some ways having a broader definition is good because it allows for a greater variation between the data points instead of having a lot of counties that have no urban residents. In one case there was a county with around 13,000 residents, and 15 people that lived in an “urban cluster”. 

Conclusion:

There was a statistically significant correlation between the proportion of urban voters in a county and the proportion of voters who voted for Al Gore in the 2000 Presidential election. It is not a strong correlation but it is clear and definitive. The correlation was clear and statistically significant as well in more than half of the states using a smaller data set.  The strength of these data suggests that the findings would not be changed by an analysis less limited by the possible errors identified.

  HYPERLINK "http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2000/results/president/" http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2000/results/president/ Data Accessed: 04/25/08-04/30/08

 Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont reported by township and city

 80.6% is the percent of urbanization in the United States. My sample has an urbanization percent of 83.2

 The overall percent of voters in the United States who selected George Bush in the adjusted (3^rd party candidates removed) voting percent was 49.73%. The overall percent of voters who selected Al Gore was 50.26%. In my sample the percent of voters who selected George Bush was 49.84%. The percent who selected Al Gore was 50.16%.  

 The states selected were Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming

Note on Article 115 of the Iranian Constitution

Another excerpt from my paper on Islamic Feminism in Iran in the wake of the announcement by Ayatollah Yazdi (via Thomas Erdbrink of the New York Times's Twitter page) saying that all 12 women who registered for the Iranian Presidential Elections will be disqualified.

... Article 115 of the Iranian constitution states that only a man is allowed to become president[i]. While this is somewhat problematic as the vote for president should theoretically be a democratic affair, the biggest problem is the reasoning for this ruling. Initially it was decided that the reference in the Koran that leaders should be rajol (an Arabic word meaning "man" also transliterated as rejal) meant that the president must be a man[ii]. This is problematic as rajol is often a gender-neutral term and in Arabic literature it can mean "woman", "mankind", or "personality"[iii]. Persian is more or less a genderless language and a term such as rajol can cause difficulties, as gender indicated within the word may not mean the same thing in Persian and in Arabic. Faezeh Rafsanjani the daughter of the influential former President Rafsanjani considers this law to be hypocritical as women are allowed to run other governmental departments, but not the office of the presidency[iv].

---

[i] Ahmadi, 2006, p.48

[ii] Ibid, p. 48

[iii] Ibid, p. 48

[iv] Via Ahmadi, citing Azadeh Kian-Thiébaut, “Islamist and Secular Women Unite: Iranian Women Take on the Mullahs,” Le Monde Diplomatique (November 1996), http://mondediplo.com/1996/11.

UPDATE 1: Spoken to several Arabic speakers, and consulted my Arabic dictionary and the definition of Rajol as anything other than "man" seems increasingly unlikely. The dictionary does have the plural of Rajol (rijal, rijalat) as "important men or great personalities", but to me this is an implied masculine. Rejal in Persian is "men, statesmen, distinguished men, dignitaries, personages, V.I.P.s" I am uncertain why Ahmadi has claimed this with such authority, but as she is the one with the Ph.D. and I am not, I will have to differ to her.