Iran plans first runoff presidential election

TEHRAN, Iran – None of the seven candidates in Iran’s presidential election won an outright majority, setting the stage for the first presidential runoff in the country’s history, a government official said today.

With one-third of the votes counted, the favorite candidate Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani was in a virtual dead heat with conservative-turned-reformer, Mahdi Karroubi, according to the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency, or IRNA.

An Interior Ministry official involved in the counting told the Associated Press that a second round of voting would take place on June 24. He said the vote count he had seen makes it impossible for any one candidate to collect more than 50 percent, the condition for avoiding a runoff.

According to IRNA, Karroubi, a former Parliament speaker but a close ally of Iran’s Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had 22 percent of the roughly 14 million votes counted by early today, while Rafsanjani had 21.3 percent. Those returns did not include urban areas, which could significantly change the balance in favor of Rafsanjani and the reform-minded Mostafa Moin, a former culture minister.

Turnout in Friday’s vote appeared stronger than expected and polls stayed open an extra four hours, with voting booths even set up at Tehran’s main cemetery for those paying weekly visits to family graves.

The results of next week’s run-off would decide who inherits a long list of challenges, including nuclear talks with the West and demands for reform at home.

Some credited U.S. denunciations of the election for goading more Iranians to cast ballots after a Western-style campaign that has reshaped Iranian politics. A runoff would almost certainly include Rafsanjani, a political veteran and leader of the Islamic Revolution who now portrays himself as a steady hand for uneasy times.

With 90 percent of the votes tallied in his home province of Kerman in southern Iran, Rafsanjani took only 45 percent of the votes, Rasoul Moazemi, a provincial election official, told the Associated Press.

The bigger question is how voters will treat Rafsanjani’s main rivals: a former police chief backed by conservatives, and another allied with outgoing President Mohammad Khatami’s stumbling reform movement.

Final results were expected today.