The vote counting is in progress in Iran’s snap presidential election with preliminary results announced by the country’s election headquarters pointing to a neck-to-neck fight between two candidates.
After the count of more than 19 million votes, it appears to be a close contest between former health minister and senior lawmaker Masoud Pezeshkian and former lead nuclear negotiator and chief of the top security body Saeed Jalili.
The other two hopefuls – parliament speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf and former interior affairs minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi – are trailing behind at the moment.
Mohsen Eslami, spokesperson for Iran’s election headquarters, has so far given eight updates on the results, the first of which came at around 3:25 am local time.
The latest update at around 9:40 a.m. local time showed Pezeshkian consolidating his lead with 8,302,577 votes out of 19,069,713 votes counted so far. Jalili was behind him with 7,189,756 votes.
Qalibaf and Pourmohammadi both trailed behind with 2,676,512 and 158,314 votes respectively.
