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When Overtime Is Illegal

Andrew Apostolou is a Senior Program Manager at Freedom House.

Today, the Guardian Council, which has been swearing up and down that the election was without serious problems, asked for an extra five days for its investigation. Problem is, the request is illegal. Iranian electoral law (Chapter 7: Investigation of Complaints, Article 79) gives the Guardian Council between one week and ten days to investigate election complaints (they received 646 of them).

So what did the Supreme Leader say to their request for extra time? He said "yes"--one of the perks of a job called "Supreme Leader" is that you get to make up the law as you go along.

--Andrew Apostolou