Iranian News Media Portray Elections as a Blow to the U.S. Iran's state news media reported that voting in parliamentary elections in Iran on Friday was a huge - even "epic" - success. "Tehran set a new record in terms of participation in the Majlis election," the state-run Mehr News Agency quoted the city's Governor General Morteza Tamaddon as saying. With opposition leaders under house arrest and their followers calling for a boycott of the first election since Iran's disputed presidential vote in 2009, state-run news sources flooded the Internet with reports on enthusiastic, ink-stained voters and a record turnout, just as they had predicted. As my colleague Robert Worth reports, Iran has sought to portray the protests after the last election as a Western plot, encouraging voting on Friday to prove that alleged efforts to undermine Iran by so-called arrogant powers have failed. The semiofficial Fars News Agency published a series of propaganda cartoons illustrating, in one case explicitly, a tsunami of ballots and, in another, President Obama quaking under his covers as he imagines the vote. A photo gallery of polling places published by Mehr included one bit of perhaps inadvertent sartorial discordance with the message of the day: The vote appeared likely to reflect a struggle for influence between elements of the country's conservative leadership represented by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, both of whom were pictured voting. The image above appeared to show Mr. Ahmadinejad's national identification papers with an inkblot as proof of the day's vote. The apparent use of inkblot verification may have been behind some of the turnout among those who sought to avoid official wrath for not voting, analysts predicted before the vote. In another image, posted on Parsine, an Iranian news Web site, what appeared to be the same ID sat in a row of others that had been stamped and laid out on a table, an apparent effort to show the president as just another member of the Iranian voting public. The official Islamic Republic News Agency said on its English-language site that Friday's elections were "recurrence of epic incidents in the history of Islamic Republic of Iran that blinded the enemies." While the official news media trumpeted the parliamentary vote, Ivan Watson of CNN, one of the few Western reporters invited to cover the scene on Friday, found evidence of dissent, posting voices of disaffected voters in Tehran to his Twitter account: In another update, an anonymous voter in Tehran bemoaned the forced confinement at home of Iran's most prominent opposition leaders, Mir Hussein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi. One resident of the Iranian capital told the PBS blog Tehran Bureau, which has been live blogging the vote: I didn't go to the polling station. The TV shows people waiting to vote. I was out between 2:10 p.m. and quarter to 3. I didn't see anything. The streets were empty and there was no traffic all the way to work. No crowds, but the TV tells a different story.