The automatic response to critics of such a poll (a similar one was conducted in June) tends to be that people simply have a hard time accepting the fact that Ahmadinejad is popular and has a great deal of support. I won't entirely question the second premise, for his support is still sizable in the rural areas of the country, but it's not that large. Yes, the crowds witnessed on Quds Day were mostly from Iran's major cities, but their commonly asked question to the "president" remains unanswered: where is your 63%?
Iranians have been fearful (and even paranoid) of speaking out against the regime well before the recent post-election carnage. It is widely known that telephones are systematically tapped in the country. And so in the wake of state-sanctioned rape, kidnapping, and torture, how can a poll that asks Iranians to state their belief on the most controversial (if not dangerous) subject of the day even be considered reliable? And this is to not even speak of the fact that the data was being collected by an American organization (albeit with native Farsi speakers), all while the regime is accusing anybody and everybody of cooperating with "foreign agents."
The authors of the study address this critique in their introduction, however:
Naturally a question that arises is whether respondents are freely speaking their minds in such a poll, especially when the Iranian government has been recently cracking down on dissent. As discussed below, the fact that one in four respondents refused to answer the question about who they voted for in the presidential election suggests that some people may have felt uncomfortable answering and thus the findings need to be viewed with caution and not as a clear indication of how people voted.This assumes that the only unreliable data would have come from those who refused to answer questions to begin with. To which I ask, what about those who lied? People do lie in polls. In the United States, there is the well-documented example of how the Bradley effect distorts a poll's reliability. Even then, this phenomenon only addresses citizens' concern (in a free democracy, no less) that they will be seen as racist by the faceless voice on the other end of the telephone line. The situation in Iran is - to be modest - somewhat different.
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However, overall, it should be noted that on most questions the number of people who refused to answer was quite small and only in the question on the presidential vote were there large numbers of refusals, though respondents always had that option.
So when a former Vice-President (and cleric) is paraded onto live television and forced to "confess" to his cooperation with "western agents," is it really so hard to imagine that the average Iranian would lie to a pollster out of fear and intimidation? Surely that is exactly what the regime's crackdown was meant to do: terrify and intimidate people. People are undeniably scared. Scared to trust their neighbors, scared to trust each other, and yes, probably scared to trust an unfamiliar, strange voice who calls from abroad to ask if they believe in the legitimacy of a coup government. If there was ever an example of a Western, myopic, and ivory towers detachment from reality, this would be it.
In a related story, 73% of statistics are made up.
