First the breaking news, from the reliable Press TV (Iran's version of CNN or Al Jazeera, and, based on their coverage over the past weeks and months, quite "fair and balanced" in their coverage of the Iranian election):
Official preliminary results show that Iran's incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is leading the polls with 69.04 percent of the ballots that have so far been counted.
In a surprise press briefing, Iran's Election Commission Chief, Kamran Daneshjoo, announced that 19.42 percent of the votes were counted until 23:54 local time (20:24 GMT).
According to Daneshjoo, Ahmadinejad is leading in the polls, followed by Mir-Hossein Mousavi who has 28.42 percent of the votes.
Preliminary results show that Mohsen Rezaei has won 1.62 percent of the votes and Mehdi Karroubi has grabbed 0.9 percent.
Update: Via AP: With more than 15 million votes counted [that would be 47% of the vote], Ahmadinejad had 67.7 percent and Mousavi had 30.3 percent, said Kamran Daneshjoo, a senior officials with the Interior Ministry, which oversees the voting. [By the way, the bias of the Western media is well demonstrated by the AP headline: "Iran's Ahmadinejad, rival both claim election win." The article says no such thing. Moussavi declared himself the winner before the polls had even closed, but Ahmadinejad has made no such claim whatsoever; only the Election Commission has made any claims about Ahmadinejad, and that was only to say he is leading, not that he has won.]
Update 2: Al Jazeera TV reports the latest, with 60% of the vote counted, with unchanged results - 66% for Ahmadinejad, 30% for Moussavi.
Update 3:With 94% of the vote counted, the results are - 64.3% for Ahmadinejad, 32.6% for Moussavi.
Some are already screaming "fraud!" Of course such screams presuppose that polls mean anything (anyone remember New Hampshire?). They also are heavily biased by the Western coverage of such elections, which gives total emphasis to what is happening on the streets of Tehran, where one expects students with time on their hands to have greater presence than their actual weight in society, and no emphasis at all to the rural communities where the evidence is that Ahmadinejad has much of his strength.
In Lebanon, we've heard from various quarters about the "Obama effect." Here's a riddle: What does Hezbollah have in common with Al Gore?
Answer: They both won the popular vote in their elections. Yes, despite the Western triumphalism about the defeat of Hezbollah and its allies in the recent Lebanese election, it turns out the popular vote was: opposition 50.4%, ruling coalition 46%, and other 3.6%. The structure of the elections, with allocations of seats along sectarian lines, means that a democratic result is not at all ensured in the election. And furthermore, the "huge defeat of Hezbollah" caused Hezbollah and its allies to go from 58 seats in the former Parliament to 57 in this one. Again, some claim the "Obama effect" was reflected in that the fact that Hezbollah was "expected" to win, but who says? Based on what unreliable polls did that information come? Have we seen any polls that said X% of the voters switched their vote after hearing Obama (or after Obama was elected)? Not that I've seen.
Some things to think about.