By Patrick Merloe
Director of Electoral Programs at NDI

Since the Iranian election on June 12th, onlookers have called for a recount to assess whether incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad actually won, as the election commission reported he had. It’s certainly true that the results are suspicious. One example is the large portion of results available in an extraordinarily short period of time given the fact that voters had to handwrite a candidate’s name on the ballot and that the counting had to reconcile number of ballot stubs with ballots.

The Iran Election Bulletin is a biweekly publication covering domestic political and election issues in Iran.

By Sophie Bordbar

Nearly two weeks after the Ministry of Interior announced that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won the June 12 presidential election in a landside, protests by angry voters who allege election fraud continue. According to the Ministry, Ahmadinejad received 63 percent of the votes, but his victory is contested by Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi, two reformist candidates who stood against him. The third candidate, Mohsen Rezai, a conservative, has also lodged complaints about election irregularities.

By Masih Alinejad

By Geneive Abdo
Iran Analyst, The Century Foundation

The basij militias may have crushed the historic street protests against Iran’s election results, but Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei now faces a more pressing problem: how to prevent a potent coalition of political elites arrayed against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from destabilizing the entire Islamic political system – and undercutting his own power, too.

Editor’s Note:  The author is an Iranian-American who spent four months in Iran around the election period and wishes to remain anonymous.

By Masih Alinejad

Editor’s Note:  Masih Alinejad originally wrote this article as a column for Etemad Melli a reformist Iranian newspaper headed by presidential candidate Mehdi Karroub . Her editor declined to publish it for fear that the baton carriers would descend on the newspaper office.

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A diverse group of North African women with the potential to be leaders in their countries convened in Rabat, Morocco, last week as part of a collaborative program, unprecedented in the region, to shape future roles for women in political and civic life.