What Will Happen on Election Day In Iran?
Iran has set procedures for conducting elections, but this year a new committee, composed of allies of the supreme leader, will oversee counting the votes.
The official campaign period for Iran’s 2013 presidential election has come to an end. Now the questions remain: How many will vote and will those votes be fairly counted?
Tomorrow [June 14], 66,000 polling stations will open at 8 a.m. Nearly 1 million election officers will supervise the voting for 10 hours. An extension of voting hours is possible and often implemented to increase turnout and enable it to be the “political epic” that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has urged.
More than 50 million eligible voters will have to choose from a slate of six presidential candidates and more than 800,000 local council candidates will be vying for 207,000 councilor seats. This is the first time in the 34-year history of the Islamic Republic that elections are being held for president and city councils at the same time. Local councilors elected in 2008 were to have been replaced in 2011, but Iranian authorities opted to postpone the vote out of fear of a replay of the post-2009 election disturbances. After all, it was only in February 2011 that the regime succeeded in fully quashing all the remnants of the uprising.
The median age of voters is 38, three years older than in 2009. As prominent Iranian-American economist Djavad Salehi-Isfahani recently argued, this means that economic issues will be a central theme in this year’s race — an emphasis also likely because of the growing impact of economic sanctions. First-time voters comprise roughly a million.
