Word: ahmadinejad
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...Take your own pen with you, because at the ballot box they may hand out pens whose ink turns invisible after a while," was one of many mass mobile text messages circulated by the opposition in the tense run-up. "Wouldn't that equally affect Ahmadinejad votes?" asked one confused voter, 19-year-old Farid Shobeiri, who had shown up in Tehran's Vanak Square to show his support for the President's main rival, Mir-Hossein Mousavi. "Of course they'll only distribute those pens in clearly pro-Mousavi stations in north Tehran," was the matter-of-fact response...
...Karroubi was pitted against Ahmadinejad once before, in 2005. While votes were being tallied, he claims, he took a two-hour nap and "awoke to see 1 million votes shifted." In the end, Ahmadinejad made it to the second round by only about 640,000 votes over Karroubi. "Last time, I took a nap after my morning prayer. This time, I'll stay up and read the Koran," Karroubi said smugly to a gathering of reporters three days before the election. (See the top 10 Ahmadinejad-isms...
...press conference earlier in the week, Kamran Daneshjoo, the head of Ahmadinejad's election committee, said the government was expecting a record voter turnout by the country's 46.2 million eligible voters and added that "it makes no difference to us which of the candidates becomes President." Daneshjoo said the government was interested only in holding "morally clean" elections and that according to the law, representatives of the Interior Ministry and the Guardian Council would ensure fairness...
...everyone is buying it. "All bodies executing the elections are uniformly pro-Ahmadinejad," protested former Interior Minister Ali-Akbar Mohtashamipour, who currently heads the Mousavi campaign's election-supervision committee, at a press conference on Wednesday. "Of course, no interference in the votes can take place except in favor of their own candidate," he said. Mohtashamipour also expressed concerns that Ahmadinejad had received a fatwa to slander some of the Islamic republic's stalwarts, like Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, in televised debates in recent weeks, implying that he could attain further sanctions from hard-line clerics to meddle with votes...
...most observers agree that election results are likely to be meddled with only to a certain extent. "If voter participation is really high, in other words, if the margin of votes between, say, Ahmadinejad and Mousavi is big, interference will not yield decisive results," says Mohammad-Ali Abtahi, a member of Karroubi's central campaign committee. There are 45,713 polling booths across Iran today, and the candidates - Ahmedinejad, Mousavi, Karroubi and former Revolutionary Guard commander Mohsen Rezai - can post one observer at each of the polling booths. Once the votes are counted and recorded at the stations, under...