Tehran, June 23: Amid claims of a ‘rigged-election’ by certain defeated Iranian presidential candidates, a top election official says the box-by-box details of the vote will be released.
“During previous elections in the Islamic Republic, statistics concerning individual ballot boxes were considered confidential information … this kind of information was only available to certain officials,” deputy head of the Interior Ministry’s election headquarters Ali-Asghar Sharifi-Rad said Sunday.
According to Sharifi-Rad, the Ministry had, however, decided to publish the results “box by box,” to resolve ambiguities about the disputed election in which incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won a landslide victory, ILNA reported.
His comments came after the country’s highest electoral authority, the Guardian Council, said, “Votes collected in 50 cities surpass the number of people eligible to cast ballots in those areas.”
A spokesman for the Council, however, said that the additional votes did not change the outcome of the election, as they were not enough to reverse the reelection of President Ahmadinejad.
The extra votes amount to roughly three million ballots.
Following the victory of President Ahmadinejad on June 12, the country has become the scene of illegal rallies with defeated presidential hopefuls Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi rejecting the result as fraudulent and demanding a re-run.
The office of Tehran’s prosecutor general on Monday said it had launched an investigation into the death of the 13 people who lost their lives in Tehran violence on Saturday. The unrest left 20 others injured.
The office announced on Monday that one of the individuals detained in connection with Saturday’s violence is an armed terrorist, adding that further investigation will bring the remaining offenders to justice.
–Agencies–