The Vote Changed Everything

A writer in Tehran on the moment the regime ended and the coup began:

There's no doubt the vote mattered. Had we not voted, had we not stood in line and suffered this fate together, then we would not have come to the square, we would not be climbing the rooftops every night to sing protests that our votes were so clumsily and needlessly taken away. The fact is that up until four Saturdays ago, Iran's system, with all of its limitations and compromises, was not completely rotten. Our peculiar democracy permitted faith in a residual uncertainty, in the possibility that the guy who can't possibly win, whom they won't let win, still just might. June 12, 2009, ended that uncertainty, brought clarity.