IRAN RISES

Mohammad Reza Nasab Abdollahi, a blogger and reporter from Shiraz,¹ wrote in his weblog on Wednesday, while publishing pictures of the ballot boxes found in the building, that the governor of Fars, after the reporters noticed these ballot boxes, asked them not to mention them in their reports. He declared these ballot boxes “national documents.”

After the pictures of these ballot boxes were published, the official government press, IRNA, after having published interviews one after the other with the governor of Fars, the military commander of Shiraz, and the president of the Center for National Documents for Fars Province, began publishing conflicting explanations about them.

The governor of Fars, without mentioning his recommending to the Shiraz reporters not to publish news about the discovery of these four ballot boxes, said that these ballot boxes were to be considered national documents and for this reason were being kept in the library.

Mohammad Reza Rezazadeh’s statement was made while, in accordance with the Electoral Law, all ballot boxes must be turned over the the local government or governor’s office after the number of votes are counted and a report is filed in the presence of representatives of the candidates, officers and supervisors of the Guardian Council, and the person in charge of the ballot box under the supervision of executive bodies, and then the governor would transfer it to the governor’s office and the Ministry of the Interior, and after the end of all these stages of the elections and responses to protests and complaints, be finally destroyed.

Contradictory Excuses, Judicial Threats

The military commander of Shiraz, for his part, on the Wednesday after the ballot boxes were found, claimed that “The ballot boxes found in the Documents Section and the Shiraz Central Library are from past elections and have absolutely no relationship with the tenth elections for the presidency.”

[Guardian Council staff legal expert Dr.] Ebrahim Azizi called the publication of pictures of these ballot boxes a “provocation” and told a government reporter, “Unfortunately some individuals, have made a provocation on this matter without having precisely investigated and researched, while these ballot boxes have been kept in that place in accordance with the orders of the Ministery of the Interior.” He added, “According to the Ministry of the Interior’s orders, after the results were announced and with the passing of a certain period of time and after the used ballots taken had been destroyed, three ballot boxes and their contents and sealed, were transfered as national documents to the Center for National Documents.”

He did not explain that if these boxes were being kept as national documents, why they were stuck in a building  which was being funded and still under construction.

The military commander, for his part, said, “The ballot boxes in the Center for Documentation and the Shiraz Central Library belong to various past electoral cycles, such as that of the Assembly of Experts for the Leader, the Islamic Consultative Assembly [the Majlis], and the City and Village Councils, and have no relationship with the tenth elections for the presidency.”

IRNA, the government press agency, said on Wednesday afternoon published, for the third time, an interview with Ali Akbar Safipur, the manager of the Documentation Center and the Fars National Library and quoted his claim that keeping the ballot boxes in the half-constructed Shiraz Central Library was based on a decision by the Islamic Consultative Assembly [Majlis]. In an answer to a question about why the ballot boxes in the Shiraz Documentation Center were sealed, said, “According to the law, samples of the ballot boxes of every election which is held in this country are to be kept in the country’s Doucmentation Organization and it is on this basis that, after this electoral cycle, and after the legal steps had been taken, the boxes have been turned over the the Documentation Center with their contents, sealed.”

On the question of why the ballot boxes were found in the library building which was under construction, he said that improvements  to the Shiraz Documents Library storage facilities are in the process of being completed and many of the documents have been transferred to these facilities, including the four ballot boxes which have been discovered. He said that one of these ballot boxes  were from the third electoral cycle for the City Council, but as for the other three, he claimed that in general they belonged to “previous election.”

The story of these abandoned ballot boxes broke after the photographs published by the government news agency IRNA about the “recount” of votes by the Guardian Council had found a widespread response in public opinion. It was in those pictures that many unfolded ballots could be seen. The disgrace suffered from the undesired publication of these pictures by IRNA got the Guardian Council’s spokesman to claim, in a press conference held on Tuesday, that “Whether or not ballots are folded or not folded or their being new cannot be an indication of an infraction.”

The day before, too, Majlis representative and brother of [unsuccessful candidate Mohsen Reza'i] Omidvar Reza’i exposed the fact that “seventy or eighty percent of the votes had been written with the same pen and in the same handwriting and put in different ballot boxes” in an interview with Khabar. Omidvar Reza’i's statement was supported a little later, after the publication of pictures taken by the government press agency IRNA of the recount of votes and the content of these pictures — which included several votes which had been written in similar handwriting.

As for Guardian Council spokesman Abbas Ali Kakhoda’i, in reaction to the publication of these documents and referring directly to Omidvar Reza’i's statments about the similar handwriting, he called for a legal confrontation with those who exposed the documents of electoral fraud. He said, “That sort is precisely whom the Judicial Branch must deal with and confront those who have concocted such a blot.”

Notes
1This blogger became a celebrity when he was arrested in 2005. Reporters Sans Frontiers adopted his case.

The three pictures from the blog nasabonline.blogfa.com: