Iranians headed to the polls on Friday to elect a new president. The whole process is window-dressing. Under the Islamic Republic’s constitution, the presidency is a position without meaningful authority to make policy.
That power instead resides with the supreme leader, currently Ali Khamenei, a figure the Iranian people do not elect but who rules for life. Put another way, to put the relative power of the president versus the supreme leader in an American context, the Iranian president has about the same sway over policy in Tehran as the secretary of agriculture has in Washington.
Why, then, does the Islamic Republic engage in the charade? Khamenei argues that voting affirms the legitimacy of his theocracy in the eyes of the Iranian people. “This vote, even by those who may have objections against the Islamic system, means they have accepted the framework of the system since they cast votes within this framework and trust it and consider it efficient,” Khamenei explained.
It is in this context that the Biden administration’s decision to allow the Islamic Republic to set up polling stations in the United States is bizarre. It is impossible for the White House to say it supports the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement and then facilitate a propaganda operation for the regime that fires grapeshot into women’s faces and executes athletes who advocate human rights and whom the Iranian regime feels might gain too great a following.
If the Biden administration truly cared about democracy and human rights, it might have instead used the polls as a true expression of regime legitimacy. It might have set up polling stations, but with expanded ballots that included a referendum on the validity of the supreme leader and the Islamic Republic itself. It have might included presidential candidates such as Saeed Jalili and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, but it could also have included more popular figures such as Reza Pahlavi, the son of the ousted shah, as well as journalist and women’s rights activist Masih Alinejad.
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True, the Islamic Republic would not include such polling results in its own tally, but a broader poll not limited to mirror image candidates approved by the Guardian Council could further neuter Khamenei’s assertion of legitimacy. Such a poll would also help Iranian Americans to assert themselves directly, without having agenda-driven intermediaries such as the National Iranian American Council or the Mujahedin al-Khalq Organization promote themselves as speaking on Iranians’ behalf.
Let Iranians vote, but, at least on U.S. soil, freedom and liberty should always take precedence over a dictatorship’s charade and self-affirmation.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.