WASHINGTON – A poll of Iran’s electorate three weeks before its election showed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad leading by a two to one ratio, greater than the announced results of the contested vote, pollsters said yesterday.
The poll showed Mr Ahmadinejad's disputed victory, which has sparked riots and demonstrations since it was announced, might reflect the will of the people and "is not the product of widespread fraud," pollsters Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty said in a column in the Washington Post.
The election protests have marked the sharpest display of discontent in the Islamic republic in years as supporters of opposition candidate Mir Hussein Mousavi alleged fraud in Friday’s election.
“While Western news reports from Tehran in the days leading up to the voting portrayed an Iranian public enthusiastic about Ahmadinejad’s principal opponent . . . our scientific sampling from across all 30 of Iran’s provinces showed Ahmadinejad well ahead,” the pollsters said.
Of those polled, 34 per cent said they would vote for the president while 14 per cent preferred Mr Mousavi, with 27 per cent undecided.
The poll was conducted by their non-profit organisations – Terror Free Tomorrow: The Center for Public Opinion and the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation – from May 11th to 20th and funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
It was the third in a series of polls over the past two years and consisted of 1,001 telephone interviews in Farsi from a neighbouring country, with a 3.1 per cent margin of error.
“The breadth of Ahmadinejad’s support was apparent in our pre-election survey,” the pollsters said, rejecting arguments the poll might have reflected a fearful reluctance to give honest answers.
The poll also found nearly four in five Iranians wanted to change the system to give them the right to elect Iran’s supreme leader, who is not subject to popular vote, they said. Iranians chose free elections and a free press as their most important priorities.
“These were hardly ‘politically correct’ responses to voice publicly in a largely authoritarian society,” the pollsters said.
“The fact may simply be that the re-election of President Ahmadinejad is what the Iranian people wanted.”