November 19, 2021
At least five Iranian-Americans were running for election to local offices this month two easily won election, since they drew no opposition; one failed to pass 50 percent in a five-candidate race but is the overwhelming favorite to win the run-off; another lost her bid to be a big city mayor and the fifth ran as a write-in candidate on a Trumpian platform for school board and did well for a write-in candidate, but still got trounced.
Two of the Iranian-Americans, both born in Georgia, were running for seats on the 15-member Atlanta City Council.
Amir Farokh, who won his seat four years ago, had an easy race since no one challenged him.
Liliana Bakhtiari also ran for a City Council seat four years ago, but lost by just 247 votes to the incumbent, who is retiring this year. This year, Bakhtiari was way ahead of her four opponents. But she just failed to pass the 50 percent mark, pulling down 49.9 percent of the ballots. Still, the second-place finisher she will face in the November 30 run-off, got only 18 percent, so everyone expects Bakhtiari to win easily. She is lesbian and Muslim.
Her win would mean two of the 15 seats on the Atlanta City Council will be held by Iranians.
The other winner was Ramin Fatehi, who had no opponent in his race to be common-wealth’s attorney in Norfolk, Virginia. The commonwealth’s attorney is the county prosecutor in Virginia. Two years ago, another Iranian-American, Parisa Delghani-Tafti, won election to be commonwealth’s attorney in Arlington, Virginia. Fatehi was born in Virginia while his father was studying there. The family returned to Iran and Fatehi was raised there until the family decided to head for Virginia again after the revolution.
In another race, Sheila June Nezhad challenged the incumbent mayor of Minneapolis, running on a platform of reducing the power of the police department in the city where a police officer was videotaped killing George Floyd, a Black American, in front of dozens of people. She came in second in a 17-person field, and the mayor won re-election. Nezhad got 21 percent of the vote to the mayor’s 43 percent.
Nezhad made her family background a part of her campaign, identifying her father as Persian and her mother as Anishinaabe-Scandinavian.
A referendum on the city ballot to replace the police department with a department of public safety was also defeated. Ironically, the effort to defeat that proposal was chaired by another Iranian-American, Leili Fatehi. She drew 56 percent of the vote to defeat the proposal.
The fifth Iranian candidate, Anita Edgarian, was running for a seat on the school board in West Chester, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. She ran as a write-in candidate trying to unseat the man who took the microphone from her while she was speaking about critical race theory at a meeting earlier this year.
Anita Edgarian made headlines on July 26 when she, like many parents across the country have done in recent months, spoke angrily and lengthily against the teaching of critical race theory, even though it is not taught in Pennsylvania schools.
Her criticism led to a testy exchange, prompting board director Chris McCune to confiscate the microphone after saying her speaking time had run out.
Edgarian, a mother of three, was born and raised in Iran and moved to the United States in 1984. She has twin girls in middle school and a son in high school.
Edgarian spoke about growing up in Iran during the revolution and how she witnessed her homeland being “ravaged by communism.” She told the school board it was a “nightmare” to see the two sides so divided at the meeting.
When she proceeded to ask whether critical race theory was being taught, McCune said, “Anita, you’re at time.” McCune approached Edgarian at the podium, took the microphone, faced Anita, and told her to leave.
McCune told Edgarian, “This is shameful,” as she was being removed from the building by police officers.
“We’ve had a respectful meeting up until you. You bombarded up there, and now you want to monopolize the meeting. Not happening. You’re gone,” he said.
Edgarian said she felt bullied.
Before the July 26 confrontation, Edgarian said she was “neutral” about critical race theory being taught. She said she attended the meeting with a “completely open mind” and was not there to denounce the curriculum.
“I actually was going to take a chair to put it in the middle of the rows and show people how many parents are neutral in this matter, that we really don’t want division. I was showing that being a parent is just doing the right thing and our education should not be affected by this thing,” she recalled.
The mother of three said she was also “alarmed” that her children have been learning about “gender pronouns” in school.
Edgarian got 9 percent of the vote and came nowhere near winning, but it is rare that a write-in candidate gets as much as 9 percent of the vote.
McCune, the man who took the microphone out of Edgarian’s hands, failed to win re-election.