The Solution For Iranians is to have an open ballot.

All they have to do is have their own ballot. Don't ask the government to do it for them. Just have it. On the web. And make it open. Register which way they want to vote for all the world to see.

That is a simple solution.

Simple in theory. Harder to put into practice, but the web half of it could be done fairly easily by those with the appropriate expertise.

That's the easiest bit.

It needs some computer space but not much in today's terms. 65 million people in Iran. How many voters? I don't know. It wasn't easy to Google so I gave up. Not important for this discussion.

Say 65 million voters.

If we give each of them, say, 1 kilobyte - 1,000 bytes - to record their name, address, vote and any other details that should be vastly enough. I can write my name, address and vote into a text file of 128bytes, I find.

Well 1000 x 65 million bytes is only 1 gigabyte. Paltry today. Almost any computer in the world could hold the complete database.

Then we need the software to take in these votes. Well that's also fairly trivial. Almost any webpage, certainly any forum, has a method of inputting information and screening logins, taking new registrations. That software is freely available and adaptable to this purpose.

The software would need to be elaborated a little to try and more carefully ascertain if the registrant is indeed who they claim to be. But it needn't go overboard with this. People on the ground will work that out.

If you were a voter and you went to register and found someone (or some crooked government) had already registered your name and voted for you then you'd have to contact the database proprietors and use some method of establishing your identity upon which they'd erase the old entry and let you start a new one complete with your own password and secret identity checking questions and such.

Perhaps you'd provide scanned photographic identity stuff such as driver's licences, birth certificate or whatever.

And perhaps this would be the hardest thing in a country like Iran. But surmountable.

The database wouldn't be like our current secret ballots, supervised, organised, time constrained.

It would grow over perhaps a long period of time - maybe never getting to be complete, why would it need to be? As people got an opportunity to register and vote it would grow.

And we would all be able to see the results.

Not just the totals, I'm suggesting, but the actual votes. See who had voted which way.

Rather than stand in the streets and risk being shot by those insane gunmen currently proliferating in the world and supported by governments everywhere, police forces everywhere, you could just stand up on the web. Stand up, be seen, register your vote.

They'd have a hard time stopping that.

In fact such a thing could probably start immediately after a fashion on a thing like Twitter. You need your own account and then you can write your vote.

The forces of evil would have a hard time faking millions of twitter accounts wouldn't they? They're simply outnumbered in this instance, too much work for them, too much sheer physical work. They steal a million votes simply by taking a pencil and writing a number. But you can't steal a million Twitter accounts like that.

They could get serious and steal many, many, though. Ludicrous though it would be.

And then the real people could open another Twitter account and call it 'John DoeTRUE' or somesuch and register their vote.

Of course this is not a database and there's no mechanism that i know of for counting who has voted this way or that. But it would be a phenomenon that the world would know about and somehow they'd find a way of estimating numbers.

The point is that the internet and the computer is Power To The People and all we've got to do is use it.

All the Iranians need to do is stand up - which they're already doing at enormous risk right there in the streets - and declare their wishes, their vote.

And the truth would be out.



So it is a fairly trivial computer exercise