Word: vote
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Even as recently as six months ago, many in Iran were ambivalent about voting in this election. "Why should I bother to vote when my vote isn't respected?" a shopkeeper in eastern Tehran said to me. His wife, he said, was already hectoring him to vote. "She thinks it will make a difference. She'll probably make me in the end." Given the inertia and skepticism that reigned just a few months ago, the sudden energizing of public sentiment in the three weeks preceding the election was extraordinary. Seemingly overnight, Iranians sloughed their cynicism and began to follow...
Relatives and friends that I never expected to vote decided to participate. From Tabriz to Tehran to Mashhad, from Bonn to London to Virginia, they waited in long lines at polling stations, determined not to let the country slide further into penury and isolation, not to let 2005 repeat itself. I was thrilled when some friends e-mailed to say I had helped encourage them to vote. I recently published a memoir of life in Iran under Ahmadinejad, invoking in detail how destructive it was to boycott elections. I wrote about the day I was led off to a police...
Despite this, I never for a moment imagined the regime would fix the vote. Others were less sanguine. The thousands of Iranians who were following the run-up to the vote on Facebook fretted about whether the vote would be clean. Each day brought with it a panicked spread of messages about anticipated vote-tampering: take your own pen to the ballot box, Ahmadinejad's supporters are spreading pens whose ink will evaporate after a few hours; don't listen to anyone who tells you that supporters of Mir-Hossein Mousavi are supposed to vote at schools...
...nuclear negotiations under another Ahmadinejad government, has been shameful. If it hadn't been for the extraordinarily high turnout in Friday's election, the fraudulent result would not have been such a watershed moment for Iran. That Iranians buried their cynicism and turned out in such record numbers to vote is what makes this such a bleak and precarious moment for the nation. Any vestige of legitimacy that the government might have had in many Iranians' eyes is now irrevocably lost. Iran is now on par with nations like Egypt and Syria, where leaders are elected...
...hard-line takeover in Iran, an illegitimate coup d'état, we need to seriously consider the possibility that there has been a popular hard-line takeover, an electoral mandate for Ahmadinejad and his policies. One of the only reliable, Western polls conducted in the run-up to the vote gave the election to Ahmadinejad - by higher percentages than the 63% he actually received. The poll even predicted that Mousavi would lose in his hometown of Tabriz, a result that many skeptics have viewed as clear evidence of fraud. The poll was taken all across Iran, not just the well...