If I were an evil overlord

The really surprising thing about the Iranian presidential election is not that the result was manipulated,  but that it was manipulated so ineptly.

The past few presidential elections in Iran were generally regarded to have been more or less fair,  and this time it seems that the regime was  (mistakenly,  as it turned out)  relying on the weakness of the other candidates  (selected as always by the regime itself)  to get Ahmadinejad over the line.  So perhaps we can put the regime's ham-fisted effort down to inexperience and lack of planning.  But you would think that it would be fairly obvious that you should make the announcement of the results follow the pattern established by previous elections.  It should at least look and feel as much as possible like it did on previous occasions,  yes?

Well,  the Iranian Interior Ministry apparently didn't feel the need.  In previous elections,  the results would begin trickling through slowly hours after voting finished;  this time the authorities were able to announce that more than a third of the votes had been counted within just one hour of polls closing,  showing a commanding lead for Ahmadinejad.  They allowed that lead to shrink a little in subsequent announcements  (as the rest of the votes were  "counted")  but they still ended up giving him 62.63%,  compared with 33.75% for Mousavi.  With voter turnout acknowledged even by the Interior Ministry to have been at a record high,  nearly all observers had expected that those figures would be approximately the other way around.  Instead,  the figures announced give Ahmadinejad a much greater margin of victory than he received in 2005,  when he was still relatively popular.

Surely a smaller margin of victory would have been more plausible??  Such as, say, 52.7% for Ahmadinejad?  Sure,  it would still have looked fraudulent,  but not blatantly, contemptuously and unbelievably so.  Many would have been willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.  But 62.63?  That really leaves no room for doubt at all.  Incredibly,  they didn't even allow Mousavi to get a majority in his own home town  -  the announced result seems to have been a more or less even 60+%  for the incumbent right across the country.

Why would the Interior Ministry do something so daft?  Their misguided idea seems to have been to give Ahmadinejad such a huge margin that accusations of  "irregularities"  would seem pointless.  The Ministry made a statement to that effect in their announcement of the official results,  and it was echoed by Ahmadinejad himself the following day:  "The margin between my votes and the others is too much and no one can question it."  Um,  no.  The margin is so large that EVERYONE is going to question it.  Sigh.  These people have so much to learn.

I could also mention all the ominous and all-too-obvious comments made by authority figures in the leadup to voting about how any attempts at  "revolution"  would be  "firmly dealt with";  even the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,  when casting his vote,  pointedly warned that  "nobody should think about trying to harm the state"  (or something to that effect).  But perhaps the single silliest thing the regime did was their apparent failure to announce any figure for spoiled ballots  -  it's as if they simply forgot about them completely.

The result of all this,  of course,  is that the legitimacy of the whole regime in Iran has been called into question as never before.  Even the authority of the Supreme Leader has been shaken  -  the rioting crowds are chanting slogans criticising him, which seems to be just about as radical as it ever gets in Iran.  The regime will probably survive this storm  -  the security forces appear to remain largely loyal  -  but this own goal is going to make things a lot tougher for them from now on.