Iran’s election day for choosing the new president that started this Friday morning, ended the same day at 12 am.
Polling stations across Iran closed at 12am local time after a series of extensions to allow people to vote for their preferred candidate.
According to Iran’s state media, no official statement has yet been released about the number of participants in the election. However, unofficial figures suggest that more than 40 percent of eligible Iranians took part in Friday’s election, which accounts for nearly 24 million participation. Over 61 million people were eligible to vote in the election, according to Iranian authorities.
Vote count under way
Immediately after the voting time ended and the polling stations across the country closed, the process of counting the ballots started with the presence of officials from monitoring bodies as well as representative of all the four candidates.
According to Iran’s state media, IRNA, counting the votes still continues and the latest official figures suggest that reformist candidate Masoud Pezeshkian is leading the race, with Saeed Jalili tightly following him, and the two other candidates, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf and Mostafa Pourmohammadi coming third and forth.
Pezeshkian leads he race
Mohsen Eslami, the spokesperson of Iran’s Ministry of Interior announced in a statement Saturday morning that so far, votes from 47,604 polling stations in 444 cities across the country have been counted.
“So far, 19 million 69 thousand 713 votes have been counted and the order of votes is as follows:
Masoud Pezeshkian: 8,302,577 votes
Saeed Jalili: 7,189,756 votes
Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf: 2 million 676 thousand 512 votes
Mostafa Pourmohammadi: 158,314 votes,” Eslami said.
