"It does not matter who votes, it matters who counts," Joseph Stalin is said to have remarked. While Stalin did not practise democracy, he understood political power. Elections are most easily stolen at the point when votes are counted and tallied. This can be impossible to prove, as the recent elections in Iran have shown.
While the published results of Iran's presidential election are widely disputed, claims of fraud have been difficult to substantiate because so many steps took place behind closed doors. The only remedy against this increasingly fashionable method of electoral fraud is transparency, which should be promoted forcefully in the interests of democracy and conflict prevention.
The full article was published in The Guardian and can be found here.