Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Wednesday said the number of Iranians who exercised their rights in the first round of Iran's Presidential Election last month was lower than expected, calling on citizens to exercise their rights in Friday's election.
In the election held on June 28, the number of voters was recorded at only about 40 percent, the lowest record since the 1949 revolution, Iran's Ministry of Home Affairs said.
"We hope that the number of voters in the second round will be important and a matter of pride for the Islamic Republic," said Khamenei.
The second round of the Iranian presidential election will be held on Friday, after no single of the four competing candidates, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, Mostafa Pourmohammadi, Massoud Pezeshkian and Saeed Jalili, won the majority in the election to find a replacement for the late President Ebrahim Raisi who died in a helicopter crash last May.
Voting on Friday will be a tough competition between MP Massoud Pezeshkian, the only moderate candidate from four existing candidates, and former member of the Saeed Jalili Revolutionary Guard.
Khamenei assessed that the lower number of voters than expected was due to "several factors", saying voters' claims that did not vote against the Islamic Republic were "very wrong".
"Considering people who did not vote in the first round (the presidential election) against establishment was a completely wrong interpretation," Khamenei said, quoted by the Tasnim News Agency.
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A total of 24,535,185 votes from around 61,452,000 eligible voters were collected in the first round last June 28. Masoud Pezeshkian and Saeed Jalili, two candidates with the highest number of votes, will compete in the July 5 election.
Pezeshkian garnered 10,415,991 votes, Jalili 9,473,298 votes, Qallibaf 3,383,340 votes and Pormohammadi 206,397 votes, as quoted by IRNA. This makes Qallibaf and Pourmohammadi eliminated.
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