Regarding assertions that Ahmadinejad may have more support in the villages because of his regular trips to different provinces, this site quotes an informed source close to Khatami that, “Because 70 percent of the population of Iran is urban resident, the president’s trips will not have much impact on Ahmadinejad’s votes”, (February 19, 2008).
Such a look at the voting statistics negates one of the most important conclusions obtained in the 2005 presidential elections: while rural residents constitute a relatively smaller percent of the suffrage, but they can influence the outcome of the elections because of their high turnout.
This observation has been closely considered after the 2005 elections by reformist candidates and analysts. A month after the runoff voting, Mohsen Mirdamadi, the current secretary general of Jebhe Mosharekat (Participation Front) party proclaimed some important conclusions from the race: While rural residents constitute only 35 percent of the national population, it accounts for 50 percent of the votes because of its high voting turnout (ISNA news agency, July 26, 2005).
This is a decisive formula. We recall that in the first election round which eliminated Mehdi Karubi in favor of Ahmadinejad by a small margin, the former strongly complained to reformers for providing him with erroneous polling results about his popularity. Karubi’s complaints were so severe that they finally led to his separation from the other reformists altogether, and whose consequences remain till today. But the fact remains that even right then strong evidence existed to show that there was really no conspiracy against Karubi but that his campaign slogans and rhetoric (specifically the provision of 50,000 Toman per month to every citizen of the country) attracted the lower income classes which are normally not considered in national polls.
Behzad Nabavi, a leadership member of the reformist Sazeman Mojahedin Engelab organization said, after the first round of the 2005 presidential election, that in addition to overlooking the unexpected but organized interjection of the Islamic Republic Guard Corps in favor of Ahmadinejad during the final 48 hours of the elections, “another issue we had not anticipated was the votes in the rural areas and small towns because nobody had conducted any polls in these areas. Perhaps it is not possible to do it, or it may take too long to conduct it. The result was that we could not estimate Karubi’s number of votes” (ISNA news agency, June 20, 2005).
In a subsequent interview Nabavi added that this lack of estimation which kept the reformists in the dark about the number of votes that Karubi could muster, led to the surprise in the number of votes that Ahmadinejad received. “Most those who voted for Ahmadinejad came from the lower classes, the deprived groups residing on the edges of towns and residents of villages,” he said.
A comment by Mohsen Armin, another leadership member of the reformist Sazeman Mojahedin Engelab organization, throws more light on the issue.” The results of the elections and the composition of the votes indicated that the polls prior to the elections were generally correct, except for Karubi and Ahmadinejad. These two did not have high support in the polls. Karubi got votes that came from groups that were not included in the polls because normally polls are conducted using city samples,” he said (ISNA news agency, July 31, 2005).
It is clear that not all rural residents voted for the populist candidate who had made great economic promises to them. Still it was clear that the proportion of those who voted for such candidates in the provinces was larger than those in the towns. In Ahmadinejad’s case, of course, in addition to the rigging, something else helped him get more votes in distant provinces and villages which was the work of his campaigners who utilized the government network. His most important campaigners were Basij centers, mosque networks, and of course the state-run national radio and television network. One must remember that we are talking about rural areas where no newspapers are distributed, or if they are, these are the government papers of which Keyhan is one.
It was under these circumstances that following the last presidential elections, Abdollah Ramezanzadeh, the deputy of the head of the Participation Front said, “Only 4 or 5 percent of villages got even a photograph of the Front’s candidate (Mostafa Moin). Whereas, according to polls, 87 percent of rural residents said that the state-run radio and television was their primary source of information”, (Shargh newspaper, August 6, 2005). At the time, Mohsen Mirdamadi, the head of the Participation Front said, “Today there is no party presence in the provinces except the political-military group [the IRGC].” (ISNA news agency, July 26, 2005).
So the question now is whether specific statistics exist to show that there is a different campaign structure in the provinces, or a different proportion between voters in the rural areas vs. those in the urban centers as compared to 2005.
If the answer is positive, then it becomes imperative to have accurate statistics regarding the number of votes for different candidates in both urban and rural areas. These statistics will help us know the exact difference in the number of potential voters for the reformer candidate as compared to those for the president.
If the response to this question is negative, then how can one reach the conclusion that because “70 percent of the population of the country resides in urban centers,” the lower number of Ahmadinejad’s votes in the urban center indicates that he will be defeated (despite the fact that his camp would engage in rigging)? Are we aware that we have not enough knowledge of the composition of millions of voters who live in villages and that even during the Election Day we have no mechanism to inform us whether the elections in the rural areas were proper or not, all of which could bring in still more surprises? Do we realize that because the residents of these rural areas may provide 50 percent of the votes, all the campaigning we engage in may be completely futile?
