In a complaint written underneath the minutes of the vote count in Kermanshah (western Iran), the executive board of elections in the city has protested widespread rigging. All the members of the executive board signed a statement complaining, "In light of the atmosphere prevailing the elections, the large number and various forms of rigging, and the officials' failure to promptly address the problem, certifying the minutes do not indicate an endorsement of the elections." (A copy of this minutes is available upon request.)
Reports from Shemiranat (north Tehran) also indicate that while, based on the official statistics of the regime, the population in the city is 280,000 and the number of eligible voters 179,000, the authorities sent 360,000 ballots to Shemiranat, 213,000 of which were used.
According to the assessments of the Resistance's command headquarters inside Iran, based on the monitoring of 2,500 voting stations in Tehran and 100 cities, only 6.5 million people took part in the elections nationwide.
In addition to widespread rigging in the voting stations, Khamenei and Rafsanjani reached agreement to exaggerate the number of votes cast four to five-fold in a face-saving formula for the regime as a whole. This agreement, coupled with false claims of women and youth participation, were the ruling clerics' response to the support of the vast majority of Iranians for the Resistance's President-elect Maryam Rajavi.
Secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran - Paris
May 28, 1997
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