As Iran fights back against supporters of opposition candidate Mir Hussein Mousavi, the government’s Guardian Council admitted today that there were irregularities in the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.

In an appearance on the state-run Press TV, a representative from Iran’s elite election monitoring board said there were more votes cast than there were eligible voters in 50 cities, affecting up to three million ballots. Although the report contradicts Ayatollah Khamenei’s assurance of the election’s legitimacy, the board said the discrepancies were not significant enough to have an effect on Ahmedinejad’s 11 million vote lead.

Election officials also claimed that, because registered voters are not required to vote in their home provinces, voter turnouts exceeding 100 percent are not uncommon in national elections as voters travel to nearby provinces to cast ballots. A recent report from the London-based Chatham House think tank, however, says that even if the government had no hand in doctoring the three million disputed votes, Ahmedinejad’s landslide victory was statistically unlikely. The Iranian government reported that Ahmedinejad took away 62.6 percent of the popular vote–that’s 13 million more than he received in 2005. Amid low job approval ratings and high youth voter turn out which was seen as a boon for Mousavi, Ahmedinejad was unlikely to have gained the support of moderates and even some within his own conservative party. Although commentators claimed in the run-up to the election that Ahmendinejad drew his support from the rural provinces, the report showed that Ahmedinejad did not receive their support in 2005 and that this month’s election results bucks the bloc’s voting trends since the revolution.

The announcement bolsters claims by Mousavi and other presidential runners-up who have accused the Iranian establishment of rigging the June 12 election, and further delegitimizes Khamenei. On Sunday, Mousavi called on his supporters via Facebook to take to the streets in protest of the results, despite the Supreme Leader’s warnings that demonstrators would face harsh punishment.

On Monday, thousands of protesters gathered in central Tehran in defiance of the government, and were quickly met with baton-wielding police who used tear gas to disperse the crowd. Security forces also interrupted a memorial service for Neda Soltan, a young protester who has become a martyr of the movement after footage of her brutal death at the hands of Iranian police forces spread across Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Neda–now a trending topic on Twitter–is seen as the face of the green-clad peaceful resistance movement in Iran that has been successful in locking the government in a Ghandian trap.

Although protests persist, there is evidence that the government crackdown has had some effect on demonstrators, as their numbers have dwindled since the weekend. Up to 1,000 protesters have been taken into custody by Iranian authorities since protests began two weeks ago. Mousavi has called on the judicial authorities to give his supporters fair trials, or risk making “the gap between themselves and the people wider.”

World governments have continued to call on Khamenei to respect the rule of law within his borders. Although he has received criticism from both Liberals and Conservatives who say he is not doing enough, President Obama sent a staid but stern message on Sunday, calling on Iran to end violence and respect the rule of law. Despite criticism from Republicans like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R - S.C.) who say that Obama is squandering this opportunity for regime change in the Middle East, the President has been treading a narrow line between pushing for democracy in a region in need of it, and “meddling” in Iranian affairs, which may give the Khamenei regime more reason to crackdown on protesters.

The diplomatic situation in Iran is even trickier because of the hard line that the regime has taken against foreign journalists, and its limited success in shielding itself from international news coverage. The Iranian government has barred news organizations from broadcasting from the country, and prominent news agencies, like the BBC and Al Arabiya, have had correspondents expelled from Tehran.

The censorship of foreign correspondents has made new media and social networking sites all the more important. Mousavi has embraced Facebook as an essential medium of communication with his supporters, viral videos of the protests accessed on YouTube have become a staple of cable news coverage of the events, and a grassroots Twitter revolution has transformed the way the world sees the crisis.

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