Imaginary Numbers in Iran's Election

How do you create a phony 11 million-vote lead? That was the question that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei posed to the Iranian electorate on Friday in one of his rare political addresses. The answer he was hoping to hear was that you don't, that the very size of the victory margin should be enough to kill off any allegations of fraud. Well, it turns out that one way to create a phony 11 million-vote lead is by having more votes than voters.

Last week, Iran's Guardian Council responded to the widespread allegations of fraud by starting a partial recount of the ballots. Now the council acknowledges that 50 cities, with more than 3 million votes counted, had more votes cast than registered voters living there. Incredibly, the follow-up to this was to blame the discrepancy not on fraud or even inaccurate counting, but on zealous voters -- so taken with sitting President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that they traveled from district to district to cast additional ballots.

Via the Washington Post, a spokesman for the Guardian Council had this to say: "Some districts are intertwined geographically and population-wise, so people vote in different districts. Our preliminary follow-up shows that there hasn't been any major fraud. In fact, maybe it's better to say there has been no fraud at all."

This latest argument -- sure, it's fraud, but, it's only a little fraud -- would be ridiculous, were it not coupled with increasingly ominous warnings to the protesters that have been filling Iran's streets since the election results were first announced.

In his Friday statement, the Ayatollah warned of "bloodshed and chaos" if the protests continued, a warning that was echoed as the results of the recount became public. Despite the threats, though, reports of protests, injuries, and, indeed, deaths continue to spread in Iran.