On March 1, following the regime’s sham presidential elections, Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, the president-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), said, “No doubt, Khamenei and the Velayat-e Faqih regime will come out of this theatrics, much weaker and more fragile than ever, which will expedite their overthrow.”
Under such circumstances that the people have boycotted the elections by a very large margin, the regime’s ploys to “engineer” the results in its favor will only make things worse for regime supreme leader Ali Khamenei.
The regime made extensive efforts and employed its Basij and IRGC agents to create the impression of a substantial participation in the elections. It used different methods and rules to allow its loyalists to cast multiple votes in the elections. Yet, despite these efforts, even the regime’s own media admitted that the mass boycott of the election went even further than 2020, which previously marked the lowest voter turnout in the regime’s history.
On the day of the election, before the polls closed, the Fars News Agency, run by the IRGC, declared that 25 million of the 61 million eligible voters had participated, an overly exaggerated number but still lower than any previously engineered figures by the regime.
The state-run Asr-e Iran newspaper wrote, “The participation in the elections for the 12th parliament was declared to be 41%. According to the government news agency, from 61 million eligible voters, 25 million went to the polls. This is the lowest turnout in 12 parliamentary elections.”
This means that the boycott was so strong that even with its exaggerated reports, the regime was forced to admit that the March 1 election was the most lackluster election in the regime’s 45-year history.
Foreign media outlets and analysts also acknowledged the mass boycott. “Iran vote turnout hits historic low amid discontent,” Reuters reported.
The Guardian reported, “Extending polling hours fails to boost turnout beyond previous low from 2020 election, strengthening claims people are rejecting the regime by staying at home.”
The low turnout has distinct meanings and implications: The people are rejecting the regime in its entirety. Regime officials tried to justify the situation. Mohammad Hassan Ghadiri Abyaneh, a politician with close ties to Khamenei, said to the state-run Ofogh TV, “I believe there has been a mistake in reporting the stats. They say 41% of eligible voters. Many Iranians who are abroad are eligible for voting… If we subtract that 10-12 million who are abroad, the percent of participation will be much higher… Moreover, in some locations, there was heavy snow. It must be taken into consideration… In Baluchestan, there were floods.”
But these futile efforts will not help the regime recover from the blow it received from the people. On the contrary, it will further highlight the regime’s big defeat.
Beyond the regime’s fake figures, the truth was revealed in the thoroughly documented assessment of the Social Headquarters of the PMOI. According to a statement by the PMOI:
“In these evaluations, 1941 polling stations, including large, medium, and small stations in Tehran and cities, villages, and different regions of the country, were continuously monitored from 8:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. in order to verify the correctness of observations, statistics, and reports from other stations…
“In the 1,941 monitored stations, a total of 156,597 voters were counted, averaging 81 voters per station. Extrapolating this to the entire country’s 59,000 stations, the estimated total number of voters is approximately 4,779,000, rounding up to 5 million. Therefore, given the 61,172,298 individuals eligible to vote as reported by the regime’s election headquarters, the participation rate, including those who voted voluntarily or under compulsion, is calculated to be 8.2%.”
The main conclusion from these results is what Mrs. Rajavi described as a “referendum” in which the people of Iran “said a resounding ‘No’ to dictatorship. The people of Iran vote for the regime’s overthrow.”
