Voting Starts for Iran’s 14th Presidential Election
Iranian citizens line up to vote, June 28, 2024. Photo: X/ @natty4bumpo
June 28, 2024 Hour: 7:34 am
The voting will be held at close to 59,000 polling stations in more than 95 states.
On Friday, voting for Iran’s 14th presidential election started at 8 a.m. Initially this electoral process was scheduled for 2025 but was brought forward given that President Ebrahim Raisi died in a helicopter crash last month.
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“We start the elections” for the country’s 14th presidential elections, Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi said in a televised address. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei cast the first ballot at a polling station, and made a brief speech calling for the unity of the Iranian people during the election.
The voting will be held at close to 59,000 polling stations in more than 95 states, and over 61 million people are eligible to vote in the election. Iran’s 14th presidential election, initially set for 2025, was rescheduled following Raisi’s unexpected death.
Initially, six candidates — Amir-Hossein Ghazizadeh Hashemi, the current vice president; Alireza Zakani, the mayor of Tehran; Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, the parliamentary speaker; Saeed Jalili, the former top negotiator for nuclear talks; Mostafa Pourmohammadi, a former interior minister and justice minister; and Masoud Pezeshkian, a former health minister — were qualified to enter the race.
Later, Hashemi and Zakani, two principlist candidates, withdrew from the race in favor of Qalibaf and Jalili, who are also in the principlists’ camp.
The data from the latest polls point to a possible second round since it seems that no candidate will achieve 50 percent of the votes. If this happens, Iranians will have to return to the polls in a week to elect their next president from among the finalists in today’s race.
The March parliamentary elections saw the lowest turnout in the 45 years of the Islamic Republic given that only 41 percent of voters went to the polls. For this reason, Khamenei has called on Iranians to vote to “defeat the enemy” and elect a president who he believes in the principles of the Islamic Revolution.
Autor: teleSUR/ JF
Fuente: Xinhua - EFE
