Iran presidential election goes to runoff
Iran will hold a run-off between Pezeshkian and Jalili on July 5 after no candidates were able to secure a 50 percent majority in Friday’s poll, the Interior Ministry has announced.
MEHR: Iran will hold a run-off between Pezeshkian and Jalili on July 5 after no candidates were able to secure a 50 percent majority in Friday’s poll, the Interior Ministry has announced.
The ninth update showed Pezeshkian had garnered 10,415,991 votes and Jalili 9473298 out of 24,535,185 votes counted. Ghalibaf and Pourmohammadi also received 3383340 and 206 397 votes, respectively.
According to Press TV, the other two hopefuls – parliament speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf and former interior affairs minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi – trailed behind at 3.3 million and over 206,000 respectively.
Pezeshkian and Jalili will head into a runoff set for July 5. The second round is required if no candidate wins 50 percent of the vote, plus one.
The two candidates are allowed to begin their election campaign from Sunday until Wednesday, Vahidi said. Campaigning has to stop 24 hours before the vote.
The snap election is held to choose a successor to President Ebrahim Raeisi who lost his life in the May 19 helicopter crash along with the country’s foreign minister and others.
In the final tally, Pezeshkian held his lead with 10,415,991 votes (42.45%) out of 24,535,185 votes. Jalili edged closer with 9,473,298 votes (38.61%).
Ghalibaf and Pourmohammadi both came a distant third and fourth with 3,383,340 (13.78%) and 206,397 votes (0.84%) respectively.
Voting was extended three times on Friday, each time by two hours, after 6:00 p.m. local time when the polling was supposed to close as per the Constitutional requirement of a 10-hour voting period.
The voting lines finally closed at midnight after which the vote counting began at thousands of polling stations scattered across the country, including more than 6,000 in the capital Tehran.
The snap presidential election was called after President Ebrahim Raeisi passed away in a helicopter crash with seven others on May 19 in northwestern Iran.
More than 61 million Iranians were eligible to vote in Friday's election, many of them first-time voters.
