June 25, 2021
Iran held a presidential election June 18 and the overwhelming winner was apathy. For the first time in the history of the Islamic Republic, the majority of eligible voters stayed home.
The official winner was 60-year-old Ebrahim Raisi, currently the head of the Judiciary, who pulled down 62.9 percent of the votes cast.
But 51.5 percent of the 59,310,307 eligible voters did not bother to go to the polls. And 13.1 percent of those who did vote cast blank or spoiled ballots, indicating that 64.6 percent or almost two-thirds of the eligible voters did not vote for any of the official candidates.
There is no way to know for certain why so many voters chose to oppose the system. But two causes are suspected to predominate. First, many Reformists had for months called for a boycott out of disgust with the electoral system. Former President Mahmud Ahmadi-nejad joined in that call, labeling voting a “sin.” And when the Council of Guardians refused to allow any of the prominent Reformists or Ahmadi-nejad onto the ballot, those calls for a boycott surged. Second, with each passing year, more and more Iranians view the elections as irrelevant, because presidents have so little impact, given that all major and many minor policies are determined by the Supreme Leader, the Pasdaran and the clergy.
The Associated Press said, “The sense the election served more as a coronation of [Raisi] sparked widespread apathy among eligible voters in the Islamic Republic, which has held up turnout as a sign of support for the theocracy since its 1979 Islamic revolution.”
The US State Department said simply, “Iranians were denied the right to choose their own leaders in a free and fair electoral process.”
While the regime issued photos of long lines at some polling stations, the AP said that was not what it found. “At one polling place inside a mosque in central Tehran, a Shiite cleric played soccer with a young boy as most of its workers napped in a courtyard. At another, officials watched videos on their mobile phones.”
The Council of Guardians approved seven candidates for the ballot. (See story on Page 10.) But on the last day of campaigning, three of them withdrew.
Here are the final results as announced by the Interior Ministry.
Ebrahim Raisi 18,021,945 62.9%
Blank/spoiled ballots 3,740,688 13.1%
Mohsen Rezai 3,440,835 12.0%
Abdolnasser Hemmati 2,443,387 8.5%
Amir-Hossain Ghazizadeh
1,003,650 3.5%
Unaccounted for ballots 100,201 0.0%
Total 28,750,736 100.0%
The total number of ballots cast came to 48.5 percent of the 59.3 million people eligible to vote, a number announced more than a month before the balloting by the civil registration office.
That was the lowest turnout for any presidential election in the Islamic Republic—and the first time blank ballots came in second! The charts below show the turnouts for all presidential and legislative elections since the 1979 revolution. None has fallen below 50 percent until last year and this year.
The regime acknowledged that 13.1 percent of the ballots were blank or spoiled, an astonishingly high proportion.
Raisi will take office August 3 as the first Iranian president sanctioned by the US government. That was for human rights violations when he was part of a 1988 panel that picked out people for execution as well as for his actions in recent years as head of the Judiciary. The EU has also sanctioned Raisi for the same reasons.
A multitude of prominent Reformists urged the public to boycott the election. The most prominent Reformist to break with that line was Mehdi Karrubi, a losing candidate in the 2009 election who is under house arrest but authorized his son to say he urged all Iranians to vote. But he also called this year’s highly restricted candidate list “a national humiliation.”
The regime’s publicity machinery spoke only of a huge turnout of enthusiastic voters crowding the polls, even though its own numbers showed the opposite.
A month ago, regime officials were saying the turnout would be low because of the coronavirus epidemic. But, toward the end of the campaign, they dropped that line and began a major effort to get people to vote. Posters for the candidates, which usually dominate the streets in a campaign, were this time outnumbered by government posters urging people to vote as a civic responsibility.
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi charged that the regime’s “enemies” were actively trying to discourage voting in order to weaken the government and pave the way for terrorist organizations. He also said specifically that casting a blank ballot was “forbidden.” After the election, he said the huge turnout had foiled the enemy’s efforts. He called the turnout “epic and sensational.”
Regime propaganda went so far as to say the turnout was higher than in the United States. Actually, in two centuries of presidential elections, the US turnout has never been as low as just seen in Iran though in one year it was very close. The highest US turnout in US presidential elections was 81.8 percent in 1876 and the lowest was 48.9 percent in 1924. Turnout was below 50 percent only in 1920,1924 and 1996. The low turnouts in 1920 and 1924 was because women just got the vote in 1920 and did not begun voting in large numbers until 1928. The voter turnout in last year’s US presidential election was 66.1 percent.
Public opinion polls published in the days before the election were accurate in showing Raisi far in the lead, Rezai topping Hemmati, and boycotting at a very high level. That will likely give some credibility to other public opinion surveys taken inside Iran by the same groups.
Soon after the polls closed and long before the final results had been released, the three losing candidates all made concession statements and congratulated Raisi.
As per usual, the Interior Ministry kept extending voting hours to accommodate what it said were masses of voters. The polls did not close nationwide until 2 a.m. Saturday morning, the latest closure ever in a regime election.
Former President Moham-mad Khatami has long opposed ballot boycotts but the regime has ordered the media not to carry any news stories or photos of him. However, afternoon newspapers on election day carried prominent photos of him voting, suggesting the censors had ordered this story to be reported.
In addition to the presidential balloting, people went to the polls to participate in the city and village council elections across the country as well as midterm Assembly of Experts elections in four provinces Tehran, Khorasan Razavi, Qom and Mazandaran and midterm Majlis elections in six provinces Tehran, East Azerbaijan, Gilan, Markazi, Kohgiluyeh and Boyer Ahmad and Hamedan.
The election was slightly marred when a helicopter carrying ballot boxes crashed in Khuzestan province, killing one passenger, and a minibus carrying another ballot box overturned in Kurdistan province, killing one soldier on board.
