Ahmadinejad leads Iran vote

TEHRAN - Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took a strong early lead in his bid to be re-elected president, Iran’s poll chief said after Iranians turned out massively to vote in Friday’s pivotal presidential race.

The incumbent had chalked up 69 percent of the vote after 35.2 percent of ballot boxes were tallied, said Kamran Daneshjoo, chairman of the electoral commission at the interior ministry.

With 10,234,431 ballot papers counted, Ahmadinejad received 7,027,919 votes, or 68.88 percent of the total. That compared with 2,955,131, or 28.87 percent for his closest challenger, former premier Mir Hossein Mousavi, he said.
Former Revolutionary Guards commander Mohsen Rezai remained a distant third, with 162,909 votes, or 1.72 percent. Ex-parliament speaker Mehdi Karroubi remained in fourth place with 88,474 votes, or 0.86 percent.

Daneshjoo did not indicate where the votes were from, saying only that the counting was from polling places across the country.

Separately, a former senior member of the National Security Council, Agha Mohammadi, said Ahmadinejad was likely to end the day with a narrow victory, avoiding the need for a runoff.

“According to the information we have the voter participation will be 70 percent overall (of the 46.2 million-strong electorate) and Ahmadinejad will have a little more than 50 percent of the total vote,” Mohammadi said.

The president is leading in the countryside, which accounts for 33 percent of voters, and in small and medium-sized cities (34 percent). “In big cities and in Tehran, in some parts Mousavi is leading and in some parts Ahmadinejad.”

Mousavi had earlier claimed a landslide victory in Iran’s most hotly contested election since the revolution 30 years ago.

“In line with the information we have received, I am the winner of this election by a substantial margin,” Mousavi told a news conference in Tehran.

Only minutes earlier, close Mousavi aide Ali Akbar Mohatshemi-Pour told a news agency his candidate had won 65 percent of the vote. – AFP