Get out and vote in Iran today
Today there is an important election in Iran.
It’s a polarized run-off between Mousavi (the youth vote) and Ahmadinejad (the trad vote), and there’s evidence that it’s a far more on-line event than our elections over here in the good old US of K.
People are blogging. People are on the streets. There is a demographics of youth tilting the whole vote in a new direction. The Guardian reporter says:
For young people I think what you see is a sense of liberation. Normally in Iran there is the morality police who are out and about patrolling, making sure that women have their head covered, young men aren’t wearing tight jeans, that couples are canoodling in public. There is an islamic morality that is part of the way this country works. And for the period of the election this has been relaxed, so you have this tremendous sense of people letting off steam, letting their hair down while they can, and it’s become galvanized into what really seems to be a significant social political movement…
Are election leaflets too old fashioned? Well, the Ahmadinejad side probably needs to use them, because their supporters are not going to be young and on-line.
I don’t know what Iranian election leaflets look like. Maybe someone could upload one.
We’d like to see the software behind TheStraightChoice.org go global. This would be interesting because we’d have to solve the post-code-location problem for different countries, and that’s a useful resource to have.
I have this intuition that the live record of physical events (leaflet drops through letter boxes) is going to feel more compelling than the timeline of tweets and blog posts. I don’t know why.
If Ahmadinejad loses, then a lot of campaigning material in America and Israel that says, “vote for me because Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust” is going to have to be dumped.
That argument never made any sense. But you don’t have to make sense to get votes. That’s the beauty of it.