Reza Marashi, research director at the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), has posted an essay for NIAC Action, the group’s lobbying wing, in which he argues that the vote tallies for Iran’s recent parliamentary elections show that elections do in fact matter inside the Islamic Republic of Iran. “It would appear that a majority of Iranians inside Iran disagree with the people outside Iran who said these elections don’t matter,” Marashi writes, adding, “…Above all else, these elections reflect Iranian society’s continued desire to bring about change through gradual evolution rather than radical upheaval.”

There’s a lot Marashi gets wrong in his piece. It was all well and good to talk about Iran’s youthful population 15 or 20 years ago, but today Iran is facing a demographic precipice. The birth rate in Iran is about half of what it was during the 1980s and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has lamented the failure of Iranian women to have more than one or two children. Like many at NIAC, he appears purposely to conflate reform with democratic aspiration forgetting that so-called reformists pay their allegiance to a system which holds that political legitimacy comes from God and not from ordinary public. This means — as most Iranians know — the muddle through reform simply isn’t possible. The Supreme Leader does not care about the political aspirations or social ambitions of the bulk of Iran’s public. Rather, he believes he answers to God only. Indeed, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps exists to protect the supreme leader from the will of the people.

Supreme Leader  is not only a dictator, but he is also a master marionette. He balances Iran’s myriad power centers and political factions by privileging one only to cut it off at the knees when it gets too powerful. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani had built a formidable political machine. Enabling Mohammad Khatami’s rise helped dismantle that machine. Khatami may have been liberal in the context of the Islamic Republic, but the man is no liberal by any honest definition. After Khatami captured the imagination of ordinary Iranians in 1997, however, Khamenei took steps to neuter him and his followers. After the 1999 student protests, Khatami was effectively a lame duck who ended his presidency having achieved little or nothing. The election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad swung the pendulum back and allowed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to purge many Khatami followers from the bureaucracy. Alas, that group grew too powerful and hence the rise of Hassan Rouhani, the regime’s traditional ‘Mr. Fix-it’ who projected a reformist face even as he privileged intelligence ministry veterans for his cabinet and other appointments. To believe Rouhani is a reformist is to place advocacy above analysis. But, even if he were, one thing is certain: Rouhani will be replaced by someone who embraces a very different political philosophy, perhaps even Qods Force leader Qassem Soleimani.

The question then becomes is elections are really the reflection of the Iranian people’s will, then why is it that such logic only applies when ‘reformists’ win but not hardliners? Comedian Jeff Stilson does an act in which he satirizes post-game press conferences. “..The winning players always give credit to God, and the losers blame themselves,” he observed, “You know, just once I’d like to hear a player say, ‘Yeah, we were in the game, until Jesus made me fumble. He hates our team.’” It may be comforting to see positive trends in Iranian elections and hope that they can herald change. To believe as much, however, would be to misunderstand just why it is that reform has never really taken hold in the Islamic Republic and the true obstacles to achievement of the popular will.