TEHRAN: Early results in Iran’s 14th presidential election have put Massoud Pezeshkian ahead, according to the spokesperson for Iran’s Election Headquarters, Mohsen Eslami, Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) reported.
Voters cast their ballots on Friday to elect the successor to President Ebrahim Raisi, who lost his life in a helicopter crash on May 19.
The ballot boxes of 47,604 polling stations across the country have been counted so far, Eslami announced on Saturday.
Over 61 million Iranians were eligible to vote in the election.
The initial results of Iran’s 14th presidential election show a tight race between Massoud Pezeshkian and Saeed Jalili as the early results were just announced today.
After counting 19,069,713 votes, Pezeshkian is ahead with 8,302,577 votes while Jalili has 7,189,756.
Another candidate, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, has 2,676,512 votes while Mostafa Pourmohammadi has 158,314.
Amirhossein Ghazizadeh Hashemi and Alireza Zakani had dropped their candidacy before the election.
Under Iranian electoral law, a runoff between the two top candidates is held on the first Friday after the result is announced if neither wins at least 50 per cent of the votes.
As scheduled earlier by the Interior Ministry, the runoff will be held on July 5 if none of the candidates wins in the first round of the election.
As many as 58,640 polling stations in Iran and 344 others abroad had been set up for the election.
On May 19, a helicopter carrying late Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, late Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, and several other officials crashed while flying from Khudafarin to Tabriz, and the Iranian president and the entire accompanying delegation were martyred. – Bernama, IRNA
