90 Million IDs for 70 Million People

Forouzan Asef Nakhaie, Rooz Online:

Iranian Minister of the Interior says there Iran has a population of 90 million people that hold national identity cards (shenasname) because many older cards have not been nullified.

Based on legal requirements, these formal statistics, especially the number of ID cards, are used for planning purposes in the different sectors of the country. Based on official figures of the Statistics Organization of Iran, Iran has a population of 71 million people, while there are 90 million IDs floating around, that is an additional 20 million IDs. IDs in Iran continue to be used to register real property, buy government subsidized supplies, voting, and in short any official transaction.

While these ID’s may belong to different category of “individuals”, the key question seems to that how many belong to the deceased, as this may be the easiest way to have an ID for a person who longer exists in real according to officials.

So one may ask why are these IDs not being collected and nullified. READ MORE

Or put differently, who will benefit from canceling these IDs? One senior Iranian planning expert says collecting these cards will first of all require money, and secondly it will lead to corruption.

One political activist believes that election officials, who are ultimately responsible for maintaining the statistics of eligible voters, tend to increase the numbers of the eligible or simply remain silent to the difference so that the real voting population of the nation is not revealed. But even the officials in the Ministry of the Interior are reluctant to make such a daring revelation.

With about 20 percent of all IDs announced by officials belonging to deceased individuals, one can conclude that the statistics regarding people's votes are inaccurate.

A former head of Iran's Planning Organization where the Statistics organization is housed, believes that is an old problem that experts over time have come to accept and thus not even address to redress.