The long hours of voting fail to increase turnout beyond the previous low of the 2020 election, reinforcing claims that others are rejecting the regime by staying home.
Voting in Iran’s parliamentary elections ended late Friday and officials said the national turnout reached a record 40. 6 percent.
After 10 hours of voting, turnout was only 27%, and in Tehran it was only 12% after 8 hours, before polling stations remained open for another two hours.
Officials had predicted the final figure would be higher than the 42. 5% recorded in the last parliamentary contest in 2020, but it is lower than that.
The total number of participants rose to 24,861,542, they said, after a delayed increase in voting was imaginable by keeping polling stations open longer.
The Iranian regime attached great importance to expanding participation above the 2020 figure, an all-time low, as it believes that a strong demonstration of political commitment would dispel claims that it would no longer have legitimacy or be able to deliver on the government’s fundamental goals. Requires. Iranian people for economic progress and personal freedom.
Anti-regime social media showed, albeit inconclusively, empty polling stations nearby, but a spokesperson for the Guardian Council, the body that vets candidates, said earlier that the election did not pose unrest and that turnout would reach 2020 levels.
Authorities said they had extended voting hours due to the growing number of people going to the polls, but opposition teams saw it as a panic measure.
Voter turnout in the 2016 election was 62%.
It is a foregone conclusion that fragmented hardliners will tighten their grip on parliament and the 88-member Assembly of Experts, which is tasked with naming the next ideal leader after the death of incumbent President Ali Khamenei.
Many reformers were disqualified, turning the election into a farce in the eyes of many voters, who already know that the country is not governed by politicians, but by branches of the security institutions and the military.
The reform movement has been in steady decline for years and was undermined by the previous president, Hassan Rouhani, who supported it in the elections, although he was not a reformist. It has failed to replace its two presidents’ two years, one of which was marred by the Covid outbreak that has claimed the lives of thousands of Iranians.
Up to 10 million people have the right to vote in Tehran province, and turnout is the lowest. The province of Balochistan has been hit by flooding and is also expected to experience low turnout.
Rouhani was replaced as president by Ebrahim Raisi, a hardliner and former judge close to the ideal leader who pushed the country toward a more pro-Russian and anti-Western stance.
Internal telephone surveys conducted 24 hours before the election showed that three-quarters of the population did not intend to vote and only 16% intended to do so. Three-quarters of respondents said they would not vote because of their opposition to Islam. Republic or the lack of free and fair elections.
A challenge for the regime in the coming days will be whether it deserves to release accurate turnout data if it shows that only about a third of the country’s citizens voted and two-thirds rejected the regime by staying home. Media outlets said invalid votes would count toward turnout. Official government news agencies have in the past begun to suppress turnout figures released for some provinces, as those figures failed to advance the day.
To quell the boycott movement, police officials in West Azerbaijan province announced the identity and arrest of 50 “website operators” who had acted “to disturb the public brain and call for non-participation in the elections. “
In a sign of persistent oppression that alienates millions of voters, the regime used election day to announce that an Iranian court had sentenced Grammy winner Shervin Hajipour to approximately four years in prison. Her song “Baraye” has become an anthem of the “women, life, freedom” protests in 2022, with versions performed at Coldplay concerts. He also commissioned him to write critical music of the United States.
Hajipour sentenced to 8 months in prison for “propaganda opposed to the system” and 3 years for “encouraging and inciting the public to riots aimed at disrupting national security”. Hajipur will serve only the longer criminal sentence of the two.
This article was modified on March 1, 2024. A previous edition incorrectly described Hassan Rouhani and Ebrahim Raisi as former and current prime ministers of Iran, respectively.