Hard-liner threatens to nullify votes in Iran's local
elections
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Allies of Iran's moderate president triumphed in
local elections in the capital and prevented hard-liners winning a single
race, according to preliminary results Monday.
The tally from Friday's voting for thousands of municipal council seats
elsewhere in Iran may not be counted for several days.
The hard-line chairman of the electoral supervision board vowed to
challenge the results from Tehran.
With more than half the votes counted Monday, President Mohammad Khatami
loyalists won 12 of the 15 seats in Tehran, the focus of the struggle between
hard-liners and moderates in Iran's Islamic government.
Independents won the other three seats in the vote, the country's first
local elections since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
"We will definitely nullify the votes of those candidates who
were disqualified by us ahead of the polls and were illegally allowed to
run by the Interior Ministry,'' said Mohsen Yahyavi, the head of Tehran
Supervision Board.
The board, which is dominated by hard-liners, disqualified about 50
candidates, mostly moderates, before the elections. But Khatami ruled the
disqualifications illegal and instructed the Interior Ministry, which ran
the elections, to let the candidacies stand.
Several of the front-runners in the Tehran results, including the popular
former Interior Minister Abdollah Nouri, were on the board's disqualified
list.
It was not clear whether the electoral supervision board or the Interior
Ministry would prevail in the dispute. Both organizations claim to have
the right to supervise the polls.
Election officials had counted about 15 million votes, or 60 percent
of the ballots, by Monday, Tehran radio reported.
The ministry says final results may not come before Friday, especially
in larger cities like Tehran. In some towns and cities, the turnout was
so high that polling stations ran out of ballots and voting hours had to
be extended.
About 330,000 candidates ran for some 200,000 seats on municipal councils
in the elections. Some seats were unopposed.
Women were front-runners in at least 20 cities, the results showed.
Nearly all of them are supporters of Khatami, who has encouraged women
to play a bigger role in Iran's political life.
Women have looked to Khatami, a moderate cleric, to improve their social
standing. They were instrumental in Khatami's victory against a hard-line
rival in the May 1997 presidential election.
Khatami supporters were ahead in 11 of Iran's 28 provinces, the moderate
newspaper, Akhbar, reported Sunday.
In Tehran, former minister Nouri, a well-known Khatami ally, received
the largest number of votes, according to the results published in Iranian
newspapers.
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