Tehran municpals continued some more
The by-election results for the constituencfor Ahvaz and Bam to the 7th Majlis are out. Shabib Jouijari was elected with 72,803 votes out of 406,808 in Ahvaz, and Moussa Ghazanfar-Abadi was elected with 108,186 votes out of 153,845. I don't know anything about either of these two men, or the political divisions contesting these two seats to the Majlis at present.
The AoE ballot in Tehran Province had only 32 candidates, and the 2.1 million ballots were tabulated yesterday. The Tehran City Council and Tehran, Rey, Shemiranat and Eslamshahr constituency had 1,200 and 100 candidates, respectively. Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi says it will take more time to do the job carefully.
The number of election problems is down remarkably from the 2005 Presidential levels. Either the forces, and there were a lot of them, sufficient to steal both rounds of that election, didn't make the same errors voting the dead and so on, or they weren't available. My guess from the edge of my little tide pool is (b), because there was something really important in this election, the legitimacy of the outcome of the AoE election, and the center of that was the Tehran overlap, where Ahmadinejad's clerical surrogate lost big (AoE), and Ahmadinejad's sister and her slate also lost big (municipal).
Look for this meme in the MSM (current at Reuters):
Political analysts said the elections, the first since Ahmadinejad's stunning 2005 presidential win, would have no immediate impact on policy in the Islamic state where Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has the last word on all matters.
Remember that Ahmadinejad ran in '05 on delivering to the poor, and that his municipal slate lost Tehran and Isfahan, if not all the major urban contests, with both competing slates, Reform (united this cycle) and Traditional (non-Ahmadinejad) messaging that he'd not delivered on the basics. Further, if Ali Khamenei is in fact seriously ill, or may become so during the tenure of the 4th Assembly of Experts, oversite of Ali Khamenei's function as Supreme Leader, and pre-selection competition, even the revisiting of Ali Khamenei's status as a non-marja in candidates for his successor, such as Rafsanjani, will be determined by the composition of the 86 member of the 4th Assembly of Experts.