Iran’s Guardian Council has ruled out an annulment of the controversial Iranian presidential election, but the debate about the credibility of the official results will not go away any time soon. Detailed analyses, such as a recent Chatham House study, raise serious doubts about the results, although until now they have produced no “smoking gun.” But the smoking gun is in fact the election process itself. Iran’s election laws are so short of minimal guarantees of transparency that any less-than-plausible results are bound to provoke a lack public confidence. There is no remedy now to a process that was so opaque that it could have been manipulated at any stage. The only solution is to hold new Iranian elections, with basic transparency safeguards.
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