In Iran, election critics ask: How can 40M paper ballots be counted so fast?

CAIRO (AP) — How do you count almost 40 million handwritten paper ballots in a matter of hours and declare a winner? That’s a key question in Iran’s disputed presidential election.

International polling experts and Iran analysts said the speed of the vote count, coupled with a lack of detailed election data normally released by officials, was fueling suspicion around President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s landslide victory.

Iran’s supreme leader endorsed the hard-line president’s re-election the morning after Friday’s vote, calling it a “divine assessment” and appearing to close the door on challenges from Iran’s reformist camp. But on Monday, after two days of rioting in the streets, he ordered an investigation into the allegations of fraud.

Mir Hossein Mousavi, Ahmadinejad’s reformist challenger, claims he was robbed of the presidency and has called for the results to be canceled.

Mousavi’s newspaper, Kalemeh Sabz, or the Green Word, reported on its Web site that more than 10 million votes were missing national identification numbers similar to U.S. Social Security numbers, which make the votes “untraceable.” It did not say how it knew that information.

Mousavi said some polling stations closed early with voters still in line, and he charged that representatives of his campaign were expelled from polling centers even though each candidate was allowed one observer at each location. He has not provided evidence to support the accusations.

Ahmadinejad, who has significant support among the poor and in the countryside, said Sunday that the vote was “real and free” and insisted the results were fair and legitimate.

“Personally, I think that it is entirely possible that Ahmadinejad received more than 50 percent of the vote,” said Konstantin Kosten, an expert on Iran with the Berlin-based German Council of Foreign Relations who spent a year from 2005-06 in Iran.

Still, he said, “there must be an examination of the allegations.”

One of the central questions was how 39.2 million paper ballots could be counted by hand and final results announced by authorities in Tehran in just over 12 hours. Past elections took at least twice as long. A new computerized system might have sped the process in cities, where most Iranians live, though it is unclear if that system extended to every small town.