At the Grand Hyatt Hotel in midtown Manhattan on Friday, a decorous LCD placard outside a ballroom—the sort that might have announced the name of a session at a conference of anthropologists or oral surgeons—read, “The Islamic Republic of Iran: Elections, 7 A.M. to 9 P.M.” On the way to the hotel, I’d swapped headscarves with an Iranian friend. The one she’d brought was green, the official color of the campaign of the reformist presidential hopeful Mir Hossein Mousavi, and she had heard that in Tehran it was forbidden to wear green inside the polling places. But at the Grand Hyatt, there were no headscarves to be seen, and plenty of green.

The ballroom was nearly empty when we arrived at 3:30 P.M., except for a table staffed by three Iranian-Americans, one of whom assured us that they were volunteers, not employees of the Iranian government. That would explain the lack of compulsory hijab. He said he’d seen about five hundred voters so far, and he estimated that seventy-five per cent of them were young people. Our little group included a thirty-year-old man and three women in their twenties. “Iran has a bright future,” the volunteer told us in avuncular tones, “with so many young people getting involved.” My friends filled out their ballots. Three were voting for Mousavi, one for the other reformist in the race, Mehdi Karroubi.

We loitered outside the ballroom, where two Iranian journalists sat on the floor glued to their Blackberries, looking for Facebook updates from Iran. The ballroom was filling up. A leggy young woman entered, in a green tank top and white hot pants, to a burst of appreciative laughter and a flurry of photographs. Iranian sweets called gaz appeared on the refreshments table. They were green, one voter pointed out, for Mousavi, and white, for Karroubi. Another, mocking President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s 2005 campaign promise to bring oil to the people’s supper tables, said, “This is the gaz Ahmadinejad has brought to our tables.”

From 3:30 P.M. until 4:15 P.M., the scene at the Hyatt was festive, despite the news earlier in the day that the reformist headquarters had been sacked and prominent reformists arrested. Everyone had a story about a relative who had never voted before, who was a royalist or an all-purpose skeptic, who was wearing green in the streets or simply casting a vote for Mousavi. There was only one way this could go. Turnout, we heard, was over eighty per cent.

But then the first ominous Facebook update came in. The Ministry of Interior had announced that of the twenty-five million votes counted thus far, sixteen million were for Ahmadinejad. The time, in Tehran, was just past midnight. The polls in the cities had just closed. It was not time to panic yet; maybe this was just the rural vote. But the mood in our little circle darkened. It wasn’t true, came another update—only five million had been counted, and, of them, both candidates were claiming sixty per cent. Then the tally reached ten million, with sixty-seven per cent for Ahmadinejad. And then the most sinister news of all: the public had been told that if anyone approached the Interior Ministry, which would be the obvious site for a protest of the vote count, the police had orders to shoot.

There can be no question that the June 12, 2009, Iranian presidential election was stolen. Dissident employees of the Interior Ministry, which is under the control of President Ahmadinejad and is responsible for the mechanics of the polling and counting of votes, have reportedly issued an open letter saying as much. Government polls (one conducted by the Revolutionary Guards, the other by the state broadcasting company) that were leaked to the campaigns allegedly showed ten- to twenty-point leads for Mousavi a week before the election; earlier polls had them neck and neck, with Mousavi leading by one per cent, and Karroubi just behind. Historically, low turnout has always favored conservatives in Iranian elections, while high turnout favors reformers. That’s because Iran’s most reliable voters are those who believe in the system; those who are critical tend to be reluctant to participate. For this reason, in the last three elections, sixty-five per cent of voters have come from traditional, rural villages, which house just thirty-five per cent of the populace. If the current figures are to be believed, urban Iranians who voted for the reformist ex-president Mohammad Khatami in 1997 and 2001 have defected to Ahmadinejad in droves.

What is most shocking is not the fraud itself, but that it was brazen and entirely without pretext. The final figures put Mousavi’s vote below thirty-five per cent, and not because of a split among reformists; they have Karroubi pulling less than one per cent of the vote. To announce a result this improbable, and to do it while locking down the Interior Ministry, sending squads of Revolutionary Guards into the streets, blacking out Internet and cell-phone communication, and shuttering the headquarters of the rival candidates, sends a chilling message to the people of Iran—not only that the Islamic Republic does not care about their votes, but that it does not fear their wrath. Iranians, including many of the original founders and staunch supporters of the revolution, are angry, and they will demonstrate. But they will be met with organized and merciless violence. Already, YouTube clips are streaming out of Iran, many of them showing riot police savagely beating protestors.

Mousavi and Karroubi have been placed under house arrest. (Update: It appears that Mousavi’ situation is more complicated.)

When it comes to the instruments of democracy in Iran, there is understandable confusion abroad. Iran has elections, and in 1997 Mohammad Khatami won them by a landslide and initiated an eight-year period of internal reform. But this is only half the story of the reform years. The other half involves the relentless occlusion of the reform agenda by clerics who outrank the president, and the systematic elimination of every loophole through which another Khatami might creep into the state apparatus. By 2005, the country’s hard-line Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, had made it abundantly clear that he did not intend to tolerate a divided government. The mood of the electorate, in 2005 and at the two mid-term elections since, has been cynical and despondent. It was logical to conclude that no candidate who ran in the 2009 race could be expected to put up real resistance to the Supreme Leader, and that no reforms would be successful. And so it was particularly stunning to watch Iranians resurrect their hopes and place them in Mir Hossein Mousavi—even if they did so for the main purpose of ejecting Ahmadinejad from power.

When the Supreme Leader approved Mousavi and Karroubi as presidential candidates earlier this year, Karroubi lacked a constituency, and Mousavi was no liberal. Perhaps Khamenei did not count on Mousavi’s emergence as the vehicle for a groundswell of youthful democratic sentiment—meaning whatever his personal views or background, if Mousavi became president, he would carry with him the same social forces and the same expectations as Khatami, who was fatefully paralyzed between the demands of his supporters and the constraints of his superiors. Where Khatami was conciliatory by nature, Mousavi had a reputation for a steelier resolve. And there is the small matter of Obama, the outreach from the United States, and the unavoidable sense that most of the Iranian public and its political establishment, including all three presidential challengers, support dialogue with America. The major exceptions have been the Supreme Leader himself, his hard-line inner circle, and Ahmadinejad. Did Khamenei fear the presence of unreliable forces in government during such a sensitive moment in Iran’s foreign policy? Or did he want to shut down the possibility of dialogue altogether?