Exclusive: Iran struggled to arrange US ballot stations for presidential election runoff

washington — Iran struggled to arrange absentee voting in the U.S. for the second round of its presidential election Friday, as a VOA investigation found that Tehran’s U.S. ballot stations suffered more setbacks than those it organized for the election’s first round a week prior.

Tehran declared relative moderate former Iranian Health Minister Masoud Pezeshkian the winner of the July 5 runoff against ultraconservative former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili.

Iran's interests section office in Washington began the absentee voting operation on U.S. soil by setting up ballot stations for the election’s first round on June 28.

That first-round operation suffered some setbacks, according to an initial VOA investigation. Three of the 33 ballot station addresses listed online by the interests section office just hours before voting started quickly canceled their voting events under pressure from Iranian American activists and protesters who oppose Iran’s authoritarian Islamist rulers.

VOA’s new investigation found that Iran’s U.S.-based agents encountered deeper problems with organizing ballot stations for the July 5 runoff. The findings conflict with Iran’s assertion, published by state news agency IRNA, that those agents were able to “increase” the number of ballot stations for the runoff, thanks to the “welcome” of Iranians living in the U.S.

Almost half of the June 28 ballot stations were not relisted for use in the runoff, indicating difficulties for the organizers in rebooking some of the first-round venues.

VOA also assessed that for the runoff, the locations where voting was canceled doubled, while ballot stations whose addresses were hidden to keep protesters away increased. Those addresses were accessible only by contacting a listed phone number or email address.

A VOA review of the July 5 ballot station list, which was updated multiple times that day, found that it included street addresses of 32 venues. One additional venue near Boston had been exposed by activists online after they apparently accessed its unlisted address via email. The listed addresses included those of 16 hotels, six Islamic centers, and a variety of other venues.

VOA assessed that voting events proceeded in at least 17 venues on the July 5 list, based on verbal confirmations from venue staff who answered phone calls that day and on images of the sites posted by activists on social media and deemed to be credible.

Fifteen of the identified July 5 ballot station locations had not been listed for the election’s first round, while 18 locations from the first round were relisted for round two.

One of them was the main ballot station, in Iran’s Washington interests section office. That is where a VOA Persian reporter observed about 90 to 100 people entering the venue in a 10-hour period on July 5. Three of them told the reporter that most of the visitors were filling out passport applications or other paperwork rather than voting.

One man was at the office with his wife on July 5 specifically to vote. He told the VOA Persian reporter that voting is a pillar of democracy and could lead to positive change for Iran.

Many diaspora Iranians denounced Iran’s presidential election as a sham, while the State Department called it neither free nor fair. The Islamic republic’s ruling clerics permit only loyalists of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to run for offices such as president and parliament, which are subservient to him on key policy issues.

Iranian American activists opposed to Tehran's U.S. ballot stations protested peacefully on June 28 outside two venues that canceled voting events, and those activist told VOA they successfully appealed to a third to do the same. None of the three venues were relisted for the July 5 vote.

One of them was the Congregational Church of Weston near Boston. Pastoral Resident Megan Strouse told VOA in an interview that those who rented the church on June 28 identified themselves as from Boston’s Iranian American community.

"We thought their intention was to hold an election event for their local community, for a board or something of that nature," Strouse said. "That morning, we realized what the event was, and our senior pastor made the call to ask the renters to stop their event, as it did not align with our mission and purpose as a religious organization."

VOA emailed the independently owned Biltmore Hotel Oklahoma in Oklahoma City on July 3, requesting confirmation of its use as a June 28 ballot station after Iran had identified it as such, and asking whether the hotel would host a voting event for the runoff. There was no response from the hotel, and it was left off the second-round ballot station list published on July 5.

In another sign of the difficulties that Iran faced in its U.S. ballot station operation for July 5, VOA determined that voting was canceled in three of the 33 identified venues.

Hotel staff who answered the phones at the Embassy Suites by Hilton Seattle North Lynnwood in Washington and at Marriott’s The Westin Tysons Corner in Virginia confirmed that the runoff voting events were called off following protest activity.

Protesters also found the unlisted address of a second-round mobile ballot station that briefly operated out of a police station parking lot in the Boston suburb of Woburn. They posted social media images indicating the event was called off after they showed up at the site.

Three additional U.S. cities initially appeared in Iran’s July 5 list as numbered voting precincts, but they were removed in updated versions of the list with no ballot station addresses having been displayed, indicating that voting plans for those locations had been canceled as well. These were Ontario, California; Oklahoma City; and Sterling, Virginia.

Iran also hid the addresses of July 5 mobile voting stations that it listed for three parts of Los Angeles and for New York’s Manhattan borough and the Boston area, forcing both prospective voters and protesters to use the listed contact information for those stations to find their addresses. For the June 28 vote, only the mobile station for Manhattan had an unlisted address.

U.S. advocacy group National Iranian American Council, which has adopted a positive view of Pezeshkian, Iran’s incoming president, decried what it called the protesters’ intimidation and harassment of Iranian Americans who voted at U.S. ballot stations on June 28.

"We cannot be a community that stands for voter suppression and attacks against Iranians who dare to express their political agency," NIAC said in a July 2 statement.

Andrew Ghalili, a senior policy analyst with National Union for Democracy in Iran, an Iranian American advocacy group that opposes the Islamic republic, told VOA that those who organized and participated in the U.S. voting events were helping the Iranian government boost its legitimacy at home and abroad.

But Ghalili said the boycott of the vote by most diaspora Iranians and protest actions by some of them showed that they have lost faith in the Islamic republic’s ability to reform itself through elections.

"Some of the protesters’ goals were accomplished, in terms of making Iran struggle with its election messaging, so I think they should be pleased with their efforts," he said.

Soran Khateri of VOA’s Persian service contributed to this report from Washington.