On Monday night, as thousands of military, police and para-military agents filled the streets of Tehran and other major cities in Iran as a precautionary measure, the conservative chairman of Iran’s powerful Guardian Council, ayatollah Ahmad Janati wrote a letter to the Ministry of Interior certifying the results of the June 12th presidential election that had been challenged since the day.
Janati’s letter was read out at 9pm Monday night from the country’s state-run national television. In his letter, the cleric rejected the claims of electoral fraud and violations raised by the three other presidential candidates, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karoubi, and Mohsen Rezaei. “Minor violations had taken place in the elections, but they can be disregarded,” the letter read, stressing that “The Guardian Council has finally confirmed the results of the presidential election according to article 79 of the Election Law after rejecting the complaints and objections.”
The leader of the Islamic republic had earlier and before the final certification and approval of the Guardian Council which is legally tasked to confirm the election results, publicly put his stamp of approval on the initial results of the election on June 13 and 19th. This lead to uproar and massive countrywide bloody protests, which in turn lead to a warning that he issued over the continuation of the turmoil and asked everyone to end the matter.
New Evidence on Violations
The officially defeated candidates Mir-Hossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karoubi and Mohsen Rezaei wrote separate letters to officials and presented their evidence and documentation to prove their claims of wide violations in the elections. One of the issues was that according to an announcement of the Ministry of Interior there was a 95 to 140 turnout in 170 election precincts around the country!
The spokesperson Abbas-Ali Kadkhodai later confirmed the issue but said this had happened on about 50 cities, and not over a 100 as reported earlier.
Among the new documents and evidence that was presented by Mohsen Rezaei’s brother, Omidvar Rezaei, who is himself a member of the national assembly, the Majlis, is that “through the unofficial recount” it became evident that “a single clear handwriting had been used on 70 to 80 percent of the cast ballot slips in favor of one specific candidate.”
According to Omidvar, “It was agreed that the high-level statistics of the Guardian Council and the Ministry of Interior for the votes would be sent to us because a comparison would have helped us in the recount confirmations. Since we were not given this information, we have been unable to pursue our protests.”
In a related report, Tabnak website, which is close to Mohsen Rezaei, published the final government result of the election votes in 38 cities on Monday which showed that Mousavi, Karoubi and Rezaei each received zero votes while incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad received 100 percent of the votes.
