Throwing the Spread

Two things seem plain about Iran's Presidential election. The first is that there was substantial fraud in the casting, counting, and recording of votes in favor of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the incumbent and preferred candidate of the clerical elite who control much of the real apparatus of government. The second is that, despite the fraud, he nevertheless represented the preference of the majority, albeit a slimmer-than-claimed majority, of Iranians, while support for the more moderate and reformist opposition was concentrated in and perhaps limited to Tehran. To make a perfectly crude judgment based on the limited information as yet available, it appears that Mr. Ahmadinejad's lead early in the contest was simply not big enough for the comfort of the conservative establishment, and that the fraud didn't ultimately give him a victory so much as it attempted to give him a more commanding one.

Our living experience with voter fraud in American Presidential elections, whether Jack Kennedy in Illinois or George Bush in Florida, has been limited to very close elections in which the result of the contest was directly affected by the various voting hijinks involved, where the winner was determined by votes not cast but counted or votes not counted but cast. The Iranian situation is something else entirely, and it's worth contemplating the hypothetical: what if it were conclusively shown that Ahmadinejad both legitimately won the election and cheated his way to a greater margin of victory? What course of action, following such discovery, would represent the greater thwarting of the popular will? Would removing him from office not disenfranchise a legitimate majority? Would maintaining him in office not represent an intolerable violation of the rule of law and a rejection of the principle that elections must be not only free, but fair? Isn't the principle of fairness in democracy after all more complex than merely respecting the whims and preferences of the majority regardless the marginal affects of plots, subterfuges, hacks and cheats? Or is that not true? Is any election which can reasonably be said to represent the will of a majority (or even substantial plurality?) a fair election?

These questions are mostly rhetorical and in any case moot. I do feel for those Iranians who had hoped to steer their country toward a more cosmopolitan and tolerant society--their social vision obviously has my sympathy. I abhor the superstition, crass populism, and the false nostalgia of conservativism, including that of the tenacious Mr. Ahmadinejad. But their elections have helped to demonstrate just how fraught are the claims of democracy and its proponents, who reflexively stake out a position that democratic governments are not only procedurally superior, but more importantly are the only truly moral systems of government.

UPDATE: Here is some relevant polling info and the pollsters opining in the WaPo.