Iran

Over 20 years ago, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei stood before a crowd at Friday prayers to denounce the United States for its disenchanted electorate.

“It is disgraceful for a nation to have a 35% or 40% voter turnout, as happens in some of the nations that you see having presidential elections,” Khamenei said in 2001. “It is obvious that their people do not trust their political system, that they do not care about it and that they have no hope.”

Iran now faces what the ayatollah described.

Iran will hold a runoff presidential election Friday, only its second since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, after only 39.9% of its voting public cast a ballot the previous week. Of over 24.5 million votes, more than 1 million ballots were later rejected — typically a sign of people feeling obligated to head to the polls but wanting to reject all the candidates.

Meanwhile, public rage simmers after years of Iran's economy cratering to new lows, along with bloody crackdowns on dissent, including over the mass protests sparked by the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini after her detention by the country's morality police allegedly over not wearing her headscarf to their liking. Tensions with the West remain high as Iran enriches uranium closer than ever to weapons-grade levels.

Now, hard-line former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili faces the reformist Masoud Pezeshkian, a heart surgeon who likely needs a widespread turnout to win the presidency. Pezeshkian's supporters warn of dark days ahead under Jalili. Meanwhile, many people are unconvinced that their vote even matters.

“I did not vote and I will not, since nobody apologized because of Mahsa and later miseries that young people face, neither the reformists nor the hard-liners," said Leila Seyyedi, a 23-year-old university student studying graphic design.

Iranian election law requires a candidate to get over 50% of the vote to avoid a runoff. In results released Saturday, Pezeshkian got 10.4 million votes while Jalili received 9.4 million. Parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf came in third with 3.3 million, while Shiite cleric Mostafa Pourmohammadi had over 206,000.

Most voters for Qalibaf, a former general in Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard and national police chief known for his crackdowns against students and for corruption allegations, likely will break for Jalili after Qalibaf endorsed him, analysts say. That has put Jalili, a 58-year-old known as the “Living Martyr” for losing a leg in the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, in the lead position for the runoff.

But his recalcitrant reputation among Western diplomats during negotiations over Iran's nuclear program is paired with concern at home over his views. One politician who has aligned himself with the moderates, former Iranian Information and Communications Technology Minister Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi, put the choice between Jalili and Pezeshkian more starkly.

“We will not let Iran fall into the hands of the Taliban,” he wrote on social platform X.

But even such dark warnings seemingly failed to have an effect. On the streets of Tehran after the June 28 vote, many told The Associated Press they didn't care about the election.

“I did not vote, as former presidents failed to realize their promises," said Ahmad Taheri, a 27-year-old psychology student. “I will not vote this coming Friday either.”

Mohammad Ali Robati, a 43-year-old electronic engineer and a father of two, said Iranian officials' apparent indifference to people's economic pressures caused him not to vote.

“After years of economic difficulties, I have no interest in politics,” Robati said, though he held out the possibility of voting Friday.

At the time of Iran's 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, the exchange rate for Iran's currency was 32,000 rials to $1. Today, it’s 617,000 rials to $1 — and many have found the value of their bank accounts, retirement funds and other holdings gouged by years of depreciation. It's nearing its record low of 700,000 rials, briefly reached after Iran's unprecedented direct attack on Israel in April.

Iran’s plan to run absentee voter ballot stations in more than 30 U.S. cities for the first round of its presidential election had mixed results, a VOA investigation has found.

Information obtained and reviewed by VOA indicates that absentee voting events were held on Friday in at least half of the 33 venues displayed on a list of U.S. ballot stations published online by Iran's interests section office in Washington.

But the voting operation also suffered setbacks, with three of the listed venues canceling their voting events on Friday under pressure from Iranian American activists and protesters who oppose Iran’s authoritarian Islamist rulers.

Organizers responded to two of the cancelations by updating the list of ballot stations to show last-minute switches to alternate venues.

SEE ALSO:

Exclusive: US confirms Iran will run absentee ballot stations in US

The most prominent absentee voting site was Washington’s Iranian interests section office, where a VOA Persian reporter observed about 35 people arriving to vote in a nine-hour period. Dozens of protesters shouted at the voters, accusing them of supporting an Iranian government that oppresses its people and legitimizing a sham election whose only candidates were loyalists of Iran’s supreme leader.

In addition to Washington, VOA assessed that voting events were held at 18 sites on Iran’s list of ballot stations. VOA obtained verbal confirmations in Friday phone calls to staff at 12 hotels on the list and vetted activists’ images of the other six venues.

The 12 hotels included four Hilton properties in Lincoln, Nebraska, Long Island City, New York, Milpitas, California and Seattle, Washington; four Hyatt properties in Dallas, Texas, Fort Lee, New Jersey, Houston, Texas and Raleigh, North Carolina; two Marriott properties in Cleveland, Ohio and Mesa, Arizona; an IHG property in Chicago, Illinois; and the Savai Hotel in Overland Park, Kansas.

Social media videos indicated that two additional hotels hosted ballot stations despite hotel staff saying they had no knowledge of such activity.

Multiple videos posted to X and sent to VOA by activists showed an entrance to one hotel, Hilton’s DoubleTree in Gaithersburg, Maryland, where several Iranians could be seen standing outside and exiting the building as activists in the parking lot verbally berated them for participating in the election.

A DoubleTree manager contacted by phone and informed of the videos maintained that the hotel was not being used as a ballot station.

The other hotel, Choice Hotel's Comfort Inn Sandy Springs in Atlanta, Georgia, appeared in a mobile phone video posted to X. An activist holding the phone walked into the hotel and entered a function room serving as a ballot station, interacting with the Iranian attendants before apparently being told to leave.

A hotel staff member who answered the phone said he had “no idea” about the event.

Two other ballot station venues were seen in social media images showing that voting activity had taken place for several hours before being canceled in the face of protests. Organizers relocated one of the venues to a third ballot station.

Activists outside the Ontario Airport Hotel & Conference Center in California were seen shouting at several Iranians who showed up to vote on Friday morning before the hotel canceled the event at around 11 a.m. local time. A staff member who answered the phone confirmed the cancelation, which prompted the venue’s removal from an updated version of Iran's ballot station list.

Another group of activists outside The Congregational Church of Weston in Massachusetts were seen in a video posted on X. The activists jeered at a car leaving the site and cheered when a police officer told them that organizers were preparing to shut down the ballot station.

An updated Friday version of Iran’s ballot station list showed the Weston venue was replaced by an Islamic center in Milford, Massachusetts. A photo posted to X showed an Iranian voting notice on the center's front door, indicating that it also was used as a ballot station.

A sixth venue where voting activity appeared on social media was an office building of Easterns Automotive Group, a used car dealership in Sterling, Virginia. A video posted to X showed a man walking up to the entrance as a guard opened the door, which displayed an Iranian election notice.

A review of Friday updates to Iran’s ballot station list showed the Sterling venue replaced the nearby Hilton McLean Tysons Corner hotel, which had been listed earlier as a ballot station before its station number was removed from the list. Siamak Aram, an activist with the National Solidarity Group for Iran, told VOA that his group had contacted the hotel to urge cancelation of the voting event. A hotel staffer who answered the phone confirmed that the event was not on Friday's schedule.

Iran’s ballot station list contained another three hotels and an event hall for which there were no confirmations of voting activity from staff contacted by phone and no social media images of such events found by VOA. They included a Hilton hotel in Rancho Cordova, California, an IHG hotel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the Biltmore Hotel Oklahoma and The Rose Court event hall in Tampa, Florida.

The remaining nine venues on the ballot station list included four Islamic centers in Detroit, Michigan, Manassas, Virginia, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Portland, Oregon. The others were a landscaping company in Buffalo, New York, and four Virginia and Maryland locations that a mobile voting station was slated to visit during the day.

The addresses of all the U.S. ballot stations besides Iran’s interests section office only began to appear online as voting began on Friday morning. In almost all cases, the addresses were displayed as street names and numbers, without the venues being named. The entire list was deleted on Saturday.

“The Islamic Republic and its agents understand that the regime is deeply unpopular in the Iranian diaspora, whose members are channeling the voices of their Iran-based compatriots calling for regime change,” said Jason Brodsky, policy director of U.S. advocacy group United Against Nuclear Iran, in a VOA interview.

“The regime and its agents fear the Iranian diaspora because of its organizing power, so they want to keep this U.S. voting activity as quiet as possible to prevent embarrassing situations in which their fellow Iranians denounce the election for the sham that it is,” Brodsky said.

Soran Khateri of VOA’s Persian Service contributed to this report.