This is a guest post by ganselmi.

“Did you vote for Dr. Ahmadinejad yesterday?” I jokingly asked a friend who lives in Tehran. “Yes, I did,” he responded without missing a beat or elaborating on his response. For a second, I started to get worried. I’ve known my friend to be a vehement and longtime critic of the recently re-elected Iranian President. “You’re kidding right?”

He was. “Well, to tell you the whole story, I did vote for Mousavi initially,” he reassured me. “But the Interior Ministry magically transformed my ballot into a vote for the incumbent.”

Joking aside, my friend’s sentiment is shared by the millions of women and young people who were re-energized by Mr. Mousavi, whose campaign promised economic opportunity, civil liberties, and a more moderate approach to the rest of the world (if not a substantive change in foreign policy). Before voting got underway, they were convinced that if Mousavi were to lose in spite of high turn-out, then the elections would surely have been rigged.

They were right. Numerous complaints of voting irregularities have poured into the Mousavi camp. Independent monitors were banned from polling places, where voting intimidation was apparently the order of the day. More importantly, severe ballot shortages were reported, especially at key locations across Tehran and other major urban centers where Mousavi would have been expected to garner heavy support.

Mousavi supporters are justifiably angry. But to enforce the Supreme Leader’s call that the “Saturday after an election should be a day of patience and kindness,” the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC) has imposed unofficial martial law in many cities and is actively working to crush Mousavi gatherings as we speak. The allegedly “pragmatic” Khamenei has once again shown that he supports Ahmadinejad every step of the way.

The results were not surprising when we take the widespread corruption and lack of transparency in the Iranian political system into account. Indeed, even if the vote wasn’t manipulated to fabricate a 30-point margin for Ahmadinejad, the fundamentally undemocratic structure of the clerical regime rules out the very possibility of a fair result. What was surprising however, was the degree to which some Western observers had managed to delude themselves regarding the true nature of Iranian politics in providing the kind of “horse race” coverage (complete with opinion polling, etc.) typically afforded elections in liberal democracies.

Ultimately then, the 2009 election was a sham much like previous ones. But the IRI’s conduct of this particular election - its total abandoning of even the appearance of fairness - reflects the troubling shift in the center of power away from the traditional clerical establishment towards the IRGC, whom Ahmadinejad represents, as well as the broader militarization of the regime. If this trend holds, the Iranian people are sure to face even more intense tyranny than they did during the first 30 years of the IRI’s reign.

And there will be many more magical ballots cast.