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Iran to recount Tehran votes after complaints

TEHRAN: Iranian election authorities are recounting one-third of the votes cast in the capital Tehran amid persistent charges of irregularities in last month's parliamentary polls.

Officials from the interior ministry and the Guardian Council, jointly responsible for the election, have agreed to the recount after prolonged wrangling, a spokesman for the ministry told Reuters on Wednesday.

He said some 1,000 ballot boxes, out of a total of 3,111 in the capital, would be recounted, beginning at once.

Javad Qadimi-Zaker, chief elections supervisor for the ministry, told Iranian newspapers the result of the recount would be anounced within five days.

At issue are the last few places among Tehran's 30 seats.

An official count released last week showed former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who headed the conservative and centrist tickets, claiming the final seat by a narrow margin in a contest otherwise dominated by reformers.

A series of losing candidates have protested against the results, mainly complaining that some of their votes were given to namesakes.

Delays in releasing the final results fuelled speculation that votes were manipulated to ensure a seat for Rafsanjani, a veteran revolutionary aiming for the place of the speaker.

Meanwhile, a newspaper said a conservative-run election supervisory board had annulled results in two provincial regions because of "irregularities".

The results had given seats to Ali Hashemi Bahremani from Rafsanjan, in Kerman province, and Reza Norouz-Zadeh in the town of Esferayen, in eastern Khorasan province.-Reuters