Why Iran's Election Was Doomed to Fail From the Start

Since the Iranian election on June 12, 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 on the face of it. 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 the number of ballot stubs with the ballots.