The Silver Ribbon

NGO POLLS SUPPORT IRANIAN PEOPLES’ ELECTION CHOICE
[By Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty -- Washington Post -- June 15, 2009]
Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/14/AR2009061401757.html
Re-posted: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/jun/15/iran-election-polling
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The election results in Iran may reflect the will of the Iranian people.
Many experts are claiming that the margin of victory for incumbent
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the result of fraud or manipulation, but
our nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the
vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by more than a 2-to-1 margin -- greater
than his actual apparent margin of victory in the June 12 election.

While Western news reports from Tehran in days leading up to the vote
portrayed an Iranian public enthusiastic about Ahmadinejad's principal
opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, our scientific sampling from all 30 of
Iran's provinces showed Ahmadinejad well ahead.

Independent and uncensored nationwide surveys of Iran are rare. Typically,
pre-election polls there are either conducted or monitored by the
government and are notoriously untrustworthy. By contrast, the poll
undertaken by our non-profit organizations from May 11 to May 20 was the
third in a series over the past two years. Conducted by telephone from a
neighboring country, field work was carried out in Farsi by a polling
company whose work in the region for ABC News and the BBC has received an
Emmy Award.

The breadth of Ahmadinejad's support was apparent in our pre-election
survey. During the campaign, for instance, Mousavi emphasized his identity
as an Azeri, the second-largest ethnic group in Iran after Persians, to woo
Azeri voters, yet our survey indicated that Azeris nevertheless favored
Ahmadinejad.

Much commentary has portrayed Iranian youth and the Internet as harbingers
of change in this election. But our poll found that only a third of
Iranians even have access to the Internet, while 18-to-24-year-olds
comprised the strongest generational voting bloc for Ahmadinejad.

The only demographic groups in which our survey found Mousavi leading or
competitive with Ahmadinejad were university students and graduates, and
the highest-income Iranians. When our poll was taken, almost a third of
Iranians were still undecided. Yet the baseline distributions we found then
mirror the results reported by the Iranian authorities, indicating the
possibility that the vote was a result of widespread fraud.

Some might argue that the professed support for Ahmadinejad we found simply
reflected respondents' fears of giving honest answers to pollsters. Yet the
integrity of our results is confirmed by the politically risky responses
Iranians were willing to give to a host of questions. For instance, nearly
four in five Iranians -- including most Ahmadinejad supporters -- said they
wanted to change the political system to give them the right to elect
Iran's supreme leader, who is not currently subject to popular vote.
Similarly, Iranians chose free elections and a free press as the most
important priorities for their government, virtually tied with improving
the national economy. These were hardly "politically correct" responses to
voice publicly in a largely authoritarian society.

In all three of our surveys over the past two years, more than 70 percent
of Iranians also expressed support for providing full access to weapons
inspectors and a guarantee that Iran will not develop or possess nuclear
weapons, in return for outside aid and investment. And 77 percent of
Iranians favored normal relations and trade with the United States, another
result consistent with our previous findings.

Iranians view their support for a more democratic system and normal
relations with the United States as consonant with their support for
Ahmadinejad. They do not want him to continue his hard-line policies.
Rather, Iranians apparently see Ahmadinejad as their toughest negotiator,
the person best positioned to bring home a favorable deal.

Allegations of fraud and electoral manipulation can only serve to further
isolate Iran and are likely to increase its belligerence and intransigence
against the outside world. Before other countries, including the United
States, jump to the conclusion that the Iranian presidential elections were
fraudulent -- with the grave consequences such charges could bring -- they
should consider all independent information. The fact may simply be that
the re-election of President Ahmadinejad is what the Iranian people
actually wanted.

(Ken Ballen is president of Terror Free Tomorrow: The Center for Public
Opinion, a non-profit institute that researches attitudes toward extremism.
Patrick Doherty is deputy director of the American Strategy Program at the
New America Foundation. The groups' May 11-20 polling consisted of 1,001
interviews across Iran and had a 3.1 percentage point margin of error.)