Public Participation or Statistic-Maker Participation
Public participation or statistic-maker participation is an example of number fabrication to deceive public opinion. It suggests that while statistics don’t lie, they can be used to lie. Considering the strange statements by some government officials about the increase in participation rates in the upcoming elections for selecting representatives for the Islamic Consultative Assembly, it is suspected that the government’s intention to fabricate numbers is firm.
For this reason, Iran Gate has examined this issue. The twelfth parliamentary elections will be held in about three months under conditions where the government and the people, as two separate worlds, are on different paths. In an intensified polarized environment, there is no room for widespread or significant electoral participation. Additionally, the actions of the executive election boards in broadly disqualifying moderate and reformist independent candidates have also revealed the government’s intention to further restrict participation channels in electoral competitions.
Apparently, the Islamic Republic, guided by Ali Khamenei, no longer cares to tactically use the capacity of elections. On the other hand, it does not want the unified rule of principlists and the dominance of factional players to be challenged in the continuation of the purification process. On the other side, reports from society indicate that after two decades of experiencing maximum and minimum electoral capacities, people have decided to boycott ineffective and decorative ballot boxes, considering the structural blockage and the government’s exploitation and efforts to display legitimacy.
Since December 2017, the trend of protests in society has taken a revolutionary direction and inclined towards surpassing the entirety of the Islamic Republic. This trend began with the eleventh parliamentary elections, which recorded the lowest participation rate in the history of parliamentary elections. The chart below shows the trend of changes in participation rates in the parliamentary elections of the Islamic Consultative Assembly. This chart is drawn based on official statistics, and the actual figures, especially in the eleventh term, are lower.
The downward trend in participation continued in the 2021 presidential elections. Now, about 20 months after the thirteenth presidential election, Ebrahim Raisi’s government is preparing to hold its first election during its term. This election is being held after the Women’s Life Freedom protest movement, in a situation where the gap between the government and the people is at its deepest and most severe.
Although the government does not attach the same importance to high electoral participation rates as in the past, the current special political conditions in Iran and the fragility of the current calm are reasons that make the display of a grand election important to the government to some extent. In this framework, government and semi-security media have been creating a narrative for some time, suggesting that the significant drop in electoral participation was due to the poor performance of Hassan Rouhani’s government and that Ebrahim Raisi’s government has brought hope back to society.
As we get closer to the election time, it is predicted that these claims and specific advertisements will intensify. At the same time, efforts will be made to encourage the government’s social base and floating votes to participate at the ballot boxes by any means possible.
The cliché of the foreign enemy conspiracy is also, as always, a cornerstone for the government. For example, the Javan newspaper, affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, wrote that in the upcoming elections, the people of Iran will see the sincerity, perseverance, jihadist determination, and revolutionary approach of the government, and the people will not be intimidated by the enemy’s black portrayal, dead-end portrayal, and cognitive warfare, and will appreciate the statesmen and, as in all past periods, will create wonders.
Ahmad Khatami, the Friday prayer leader of Tehran, also claimed that the enemies want to turn the parliamentary elections into a referendum against the government, while currently, indifference to the elections is the prevailing view in public opinion, civil society forces, and critical and opposing political activists. Even most reformist and moderate activists did not nominate themselves in this period.
Now the question arises whether the claim of increased electoral participation after Raisi’s presidency is merely boasting and rhetorical, and similar to the previous election period, the 40% threshold is presented as acceptable by the government, or if special measures are planned to increase the participation rate.
Given the prevailing trend in the political arena in recent years and the further reduction of the competitive scope in the upcoming elections, increasing votes through natural and healthy means seems almost impossible. Therefore, the government practically only has two options: accepting real participation with a low multiplier or fabricating numbers within the 50% range. The eligible voting population in the 2022 elections is about 60 million and 600 thousand people.
This estimate is based on calculating the population of Iranians aged 18 and above from the 2016 census results and subtracting the number of deaths from 2016 to 2021, plus an estimate for the first 11 months of this year. First-time voters are about 600 thousand people, among whom the percentage of government supporters is relatively lower. The institution of the Supreme Leader in this situation does not have an easy task of displaying a grand election, but as always, it resorts to a kind of deception that seems more transparent than before.
This year, based on the Guardian Council’s assessment of previous elections, the government decided to make candidate registration a two-step process: first, a pre-registration phase with document uploads, and after an initial formal evaluation by the Ministry of Interior officials, the final registration phase. The goal of this was announced as reducing the workload of the Guardian Council and its supervisory boards by reducing the number of candidates, but in practice, something else happened.
Although the number of candidacies has increased since the ninth parliament, this time the principlists, in an organized manner, launched a candidacy movement to artificially increase the number of registered candidates and claim a record. In the pre-registration phase, 48 thousand people registered, and in the final phase, slightly less than 25 thousand people registered, which is the highest in the history of parliamentary elections. The short-term goal of this action is to reduce the percentage of disqualifications, and the longer-term goal is to use many candidates to increase the number of votes cast.
The organizers believe that in this way, given the relevance of local, tribal, and familial competitions in medium and small cities and rural areas, they can bring more people from outside the government’s social base to the scene. However, this belief is based on a superficial and hasty assessment, and it is unlikely that this tactic will lead to a significant change in the number of votes. Given the high cost of election campaigns, those who do not have support or are not on government group lists or do not have social authority will withdraw or not actively participate in the electoral competitions.
Therefore, the scenario gains strength that creating an artificial registration tsunami is a government tactic to make the elections appear competitive and to fabricate participation numbers with a high multiplier so that the announced participation rate significantly differs from the real one. The likelihood that the number will be announced at least higher than the participation rate in the 2019 elections is strong, with the aim of making the promotional claim about Raisi’s better performance compared to Rouhani in creating hope for the country’s future within the framework of government policies appear believable.
Since the ninth period, conditions for candidacy have become more difficult with the requirement of a master’s degree. Therefore, the decrease in the number of candidates in the ninth period compared to the eighth was mainly for this reason. This chart shows two indices: first, the degree of competitiveness of the elections. Although the mathematical correlation coefficient between the number of registered candidates and the participation rate in elections is about negative 40%, and thus there is no strong linear relationship between the two, relatively in past periods, in periods where the electoral atmosphere was warm, the tendency to candidacy was also higher. This feature can be identified in the ratio of the number of registered candidates to the eligible voting population.
The high level of this index in the seventh, eighth, and eleventh parliaments, which were less vibrant elections, reveals the unnatural situation and government intervention to artificially increase the number of candidates, which has intensified in the twelfth period. Of course, it should be noted that part of the increase is also due to a new tendency in society to want to register.
Another index is the gap between the ratio of the number of registered candidates to potential votes and the ratio of the number of candidates to votes cast. A larger gap between these two indices indicates a decrease in the level of competition in the elections and a lack of widespread attention to elections in society since the fifth parliament, where meaningful competition was created. The greatest gap occurred in the eleventh parliamentary elections.
Among these, the first parliament is an exception due to its foundational nature. The credibility of participation rates in the second, third, and fourth parliamentary elections is also questioned, and their gap with real statistics is relatively large. At the same time, it is possible that during those periods, local and non-political competitions in medium and small cities of the country were hot, leading to a relative increase in participation.
However, considering the sixth parliament, it can be concluded that in periods where depoliticization has spread in society, the number of people who potentially saw themselves as parliamentary representatives also increased. Conversely, in conditions where organizations, parties, and political groups have been active, the tendency for candidacy among professional political forces has increased, and the tendency of ordinary individuals without a history of continuous political activity to run for parliamentary elections has decreased, and they have not seen the conditions as favorable for their success.
The statistics of the tenth and fifth parliaments are enlightening in this regard, showing that despite the absence of a political atmosphere, a result of the depoliticization applied, the electoral competition space was relatively hot for non-political reasons: economic, cultural, social diplomacy. Therefore, the unnatural situation of the twelfth period is evident in this chart. Based on this, a similar measure might be employed in the overall participation rate of elections, even with a high number of invalid and blank votes, to reduce the gap between the ratio of registered candidates to potential votes compared to votes cast relative to the eleventh period, while at the same time making the number of candidates appear high in a showy manner.