Foreign desk: Iran’s Dud Election

“What if you held a national election and no one turned out?” Ilan Berman mock-asks at National Review. “Just 42 percent of Iranians voted in the country’s latest parliamentary elections,” which is “the lowest percentage ever recorded” in the Islamic Republic’s 41 years — and even that number is likely “inflated.” The “lackluster showing” should be no surprise: Two years of “persistent protests” indicate a population “profoundly disaffected with the country’s clerical regime,” and the “accidental Jan. 8 downing of a Ukrainian airliner” convinced “many Iranians that their government is dangerously incompetent.” Plus, “the Trump’s administration’s ‘maximum-pressure’ strategy” is hurting the regime economically. Iran’s “beleaguered” rulers wanted this election to show the world that “their regime remains stable, secure and firmly in control” — but it proved “the exact opposite.”

2020 watch: Bernie’s Stoppable Revolution

Bernie Sanders claims he is “leading an unstoppable revolution” — but, Keith Naughton argues at The Hill, “his numbers tell a different story.” His success so far is only “a result of the structure of the early primary process”: He had “an enormous advantage” in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada thanks to his “strong legacy organization.” But “his vote totals and polling within the Democratic Party are much worse than when he lost” in 2016 to Hillary Clinton. He is going to have a tough time in the next states — especially if Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Tom Steyer and Elizabeth Warren, who are “just taking up space,” drop out. Bottom line: “Any thought that Democratic voters are coalescing around him is absurd and conclusively disproved by the numbers.”

Libertarian: AOC, Charter-School Advocate?

In a resurfaced 2017 video, “self-described democratic socialist” Rep. ­Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said she “worked to secure a spot for her goddaughter at a Bronx charter school” — and thus, snarks Reason’s Billy Binion, “inadvertently made the case for school choice.” She made it last October, too, when “she shared that her family left The Bronx” for Westchester so “she could attend a higher-quality school.” AOC has “correctly diagnosed the problem,” but like many Democrats won’t admit “school choice can help fix” it — because teachers’ unions, “a powerful part of the Democratic coalition,” are “staunchly opposed.” Ocasio-Cortez’s experience, though, should lead her to support school choice, to which she and her family turned to escape failing public schools. Asks Binion: “Can you blame them?”

Health watch: Surprise-Billing Solution

Surprise medical billing happens when emergency patients “are rushed to a hospital that might be in-network” but employs out-of-network providers, explains Peter Ferrara at Issues & Insights, and “insurance companies refuse to pay their bills.” Patients are naturally shocked to get bills that “can run to thousands of dollars. They thought they bought insurance to pay for that.” Insurers must “take responsibility for protecting patients from their medical bills” — if they don’t, “the government will succeed politically in taking over health care.” One solution: “The doctors, hospitals and insurance companies each bid for the share of the bill that they feel they can each bear,” and an arbitrator “picks the most reasonable.” The result: a solution with “no price fixing, no benchmarking, just free-market arbitration and ­negotiation among the big parties who can bear the costs.”

Conservative: Make Architecture Great Again

Team Trump has drawn up an executive order mandating “special regard for the classical architecture style” in the design of new federal buildings. The wisdom of the order, writes First Things’ R.R. Reno, should be “obvious to anyone free from ideological bondage to modern and contemporary architecture.” Federal buildings of the past drew on “the Greek temple, an archetype of civic architecture in the Western tradition” that “dignified” citizens who entered them. Yet the JFK administration foolishly “discarded” that tradition, and “since then we’ve been subjected to the aimless banality of contemporary architecture, a style without style.” Reno hopes that “President Trump signs the executive ­order and puts an end to federal subsidies for the kind of banality that disgraces our cities.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board