Also I had no idea that Iranians were such fervent supporters of ham. All that sodium.

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See this English socialist blog post for an extremely useful and thorough analysis of the numbers and an exploration of why Ahmedinajad could quite fairly have won. Just because Americans hate him and paint him as a cartoon doesn't mean he actually is.

[leninology.blogspot.com]

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There's a pretty sweeping claim made by a poster above, that "Ahmadinejad had a massive lead in every pre-election poll," whereas this is the actual poll in question. This was the only legitimate poll out there, Ahmadinejad clearly had the lead, but a runoff election was not out of the question. My post was about snark, or to refute or butress that poster - it's just meant to offer some context and objectivity.

The word plurality is not meaningless. My understanding is that a candidate has a plurality when he or she has received more votes than any other candidate, but no more than 50% of the total votes cast, in an election where there are more than two candidates.

According to the poll, Ahmadinejad had 34% and Moussavi had 14%, the other candidates had 1 or 2%. But because 27% of those polls "don't know" for whom they'd vote, the first round of voting would likely lead to a runoff election between the two top candidates to see who would win more than 50% of the total vote.

If my post has to be super opinionated, I'd say that that poster was wrong about there being a wealth of polls out there, but that this poll seems to support his initial claim, namely that Moussavi was not favored to win. Morever, I think that, if the polls is accurate, it is realy interesting that even though the electorate named the economy, free elections, and free pres as chief concerns, the regime rigged an election for the electorate's favorite candidate, silenced press coverage, and that said candidate is widely regarded (even by Iranians) to be responsible for Iran's troubled economy. That's rife with contradiction and, if true, speaks to the complexity of Iran's political and social landscape, as I said earlier.

Finally: if I could edit my previous post so that "ham" was spelled properly as "hamas", i don't think I even would. It's cute, but provacative no? ;)

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Plurality in a public opinion poll is a bit different than in actual voting. There's a reason that the author didn't use stronger phrasing when reporting the poll -- because it's inconclusive and probably doesn't give us much insight into the actual situation. Therefore, you are even more right -- if this is the only poll you could find and it doesn't really tell us anything, then the original poster doesn't have much of an argument, as I originally expected. I just couldn't tell if you were refuting or supporting the original point from your remarks, and "plurality" didn't go too far towards helping me. Given the top concerns of the electorate, it seems like that's a good word to choose if you are trying maybe to obfuscate results that would show that the regime might need to rig the election. It's all very confusing but what I am saying is that the deliberately vague language can possibly give us some clues.

@scarletmenace: How the Western media portrays Ahmedinajad, or what I think of him as a result, had nothing to do with my post. All I was saying was that if that poll is being used to show how Ahmedinajad's legitimate victory was possible, it's not doing a very convincing job.

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