Interior Ministry declares early official results from Iran’s presidential poll

The Iranian Interior Ministry has declared a first series of partial results from the Friday presidential election, putting Hassan Rouhani in the lead with 22,796,468 votes so far.

Out of the 40,076,729 votes counted so far, 38,914,470 ballots were declared valid. The candidate with the second largest number of votes was Seyyed Ebrahim Raeisi, who garnered 15,452,194 votes, according to the Interior Ministry.

Mostafa Aqa-Mirsalim and Mostafa Hashemi-Taba, the other two candidates, each so far received 455,211 and 210,597 votes respectively.

Rouhani has thus gained 56.88 percent of the votes so far, compared to 38.55 percent for Raeisi. Aqa-Mirsalim and Hashemi-Taba have so far secured 1.13 and 0.52 percent of the votes, respectively.

Ali Asghar Ahmadi, the Head of the Election Committee of Iran’s Interior Ministry, who announced the partial results, also said that over 40 million people voted in the election but said that turnout figure was not a final one.

He said that Iranian Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli would announce the final results of the election at 2:00 p.m. Iran time (09:30 GMT) on Saturday.

Iran’s 12th presidential election was held on Friday. Elections were also simultaneously held for City and Village Councils.

Voting hours were extended several times due to a high turnout in the polls.

Six candidates had been vetted and approved by the Guardian Council to run in the election. In the final days of campaigning, however, two of the candidates, namely First Vice President Es’haq Jahangiri and Tehran’s Mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, withdrew from the race in favor of President Rouhani and Raeisi, respectively.