Coleman-Franken, meet Ahmadinejad-Moussavi

Photos: WDCpix

Absentee voters complaining their ballots went uncounted. Charges of ballots disappearing in the rear of a vehicle. Suspicions that the top election official skewed the system to benefit his favorite. Minnesota’s senate contest? Sure. But over the weekend, gripes long familiar to observers of the Coleman-Franken fracas got a fresh airing in Iran’s disputed presidential election.

Thousands of Iranians outside of the country voted by absentee ballot and were not confident their votes were counted, and that issue has also been a worry for supporters of both Democrat Al Franken and Republican Norm Coleman during their six-month election dispute.

The disproven claim that Minneapolis election officials carelessly or corruptly kept ballots in a car trunk had an echo in one of the Twitter messages emanating from inside Iran during the early hours after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner over Hossein Moussavi in Iran. ”My Father has a truck load of ballot boxes that were to be burned in the back of his truck,” wrote Raymond Jahan, who has the unequivocal Twitter handle StopAhmadi.

In both elections, critics threw a harsh light on the possibility that partisan politics had twisted the administrative efforts of the top  election officials: Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, a Democrat, and Iran’s Interior Minister Sadeq Mahsouli, a top aide who answers directly to Ahmadinejad.

Then there is the chameleon character of one player in each drama. Coleman ran against his former Democratic Party to gain the Senate seat that’s still in dispute. Moussavi was a prime minister allied with Iran’s revolutionary hard-liners in the 1980s now running as a reformer.