I say reportedly because, as far as I’m aware, most of the news we’re hearing is coming from the Iran state-run press.  On a quick note before I start, if there was ever a poster child for reasons to reject U.S. media bailouts, this would be it.

Anyway, the supposed news is that incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is leading the vote count, by a huge amount.  CNN’s latest report says 65.7% of the vote for the uber-conservative president versus 31.4% for his closest challenger, reformist Mir Hossein Moussavi.  Unfortunately, these numbers have changed little since I started tracking them this afternoon, and unless some hugely populous areas have given all their votes to Moussavi, I don’t foresee it changing by the time all the votes are in.

That is, of course, if the election hasn’t been rigged.

Now, I understand the incumbency factor in elections is usually strong, in the U.S. at least.  That’s why incumbent politicians nearly always get re-elected, unless there’ve made some massive screwup, or a prominent figure in their party has become very unpopular.  However, and maybe this is showing my naivety of Iranian politics, but 65% is massive.  The only explanations for such a lead are: 1) Ahmadinejad is more popular than widely believed in the West, 2) A lot of people have stayed home, or 3) It’s been rigged.  You simply don’t see these kinds of numbers in any functioning democracy.  For which Iran, considering its theocratic nature, “functioning democracy” is a matter of question, not fact.

If you take the numbers provided by the state media as gospel, it makes you wonder exactly what’s going on in Iran.  I don’t believe for a second that Ahmadinejad is as popular as he was in 2005.  His country is in economic turmoil, with oil profits having plummeted with the onset of all the trouble.  We’ve seen what’s happened in the U.S. and Europe, where liberal and conservative politicans respectively have swept elections all across the board.  At least partially this is due to voters blaming the “other guy” (or gal).  All that in countries that don’t base most of their economies off an increasingly scarce natural resource.  The idea that Ahmadinejad could have gone from weathering criticism from his constituents over dropping oil revenues and thus dropping economic conditions, only to pull off a landslide, is absurd.

To my mind, that leaves only options 2 and 3.  Yet, and again I can only go on the official word (which might be disputable), 70% of voters have turned out.  Keep in mind that this is more voters than turned out for the U.S. elections in November, which was about 62%.  So, the idea that a lot of voters protested the election is also absurd, assuming the official numbers are true.  Normally I might say that demographics might affect the vote.  For example if younger voters (a key Moussavi group) failed to get out, that would turn the election in Ahmadinejad’s favor, but reports I’ve read indicate this also isn’t the case.  So either the reports are wrong, or the youth support for Moussavi wasn’t that strong.

Or…

We find ourselves at the last option.  For this, I’ve going to wait to see what the election observers say.  I don’t expect the world’s cleanest election out of Iran, but if international observers say it was mostly fair, any accusations of rigging will be slashed at the knees.  However, with all the things I outlined above, it’s awfully tempting to think this.

So, I’m going to wait for all the votes to be in and for observers to chime in on the state of the actual election day before going further on this.  We shall see, but I’m not getting my hopes up for a last minute magical burst forward for Moussavi.