The Islamic Republic of Iran’s “election circus” – as it is known in Farsi – is well and truly underway ahead of the presidential vote on June 28.
If past is prologue, the outcome will be highly manufactured and manipulated by the regime. Election engineering in the Islamic Republic is certainly nothing new.
Until now, however, the Guardian Council – which is controlled by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and vets all prospective election candidates – has been viewed as the main mechanism for voter rigging in the clerical regime. This time around, the Guardian Council, made up of 12 hardline Islamists directly or indirectly appointed by the supreme leader, only approved six candidates out of the 84 names passed onto it by the Ministry of Interior.
These six include Saeed Jalili, Khamenei's representative in the Supreme National Security Council and a former hardline nuclear negotiator; Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, an IRGC commander and current speaker of the Iranian parliament; Alireza Zakani, the IRGC-affiliated mayor of Tehran; Amirhossein Ghazizadeh Hashemi, the head of the Martyrs and Veterans Affairs Foundation; Mostafa Pourmohammadi, former minister of interior; and Masoud Pezeshkian, a so-called “reformist” parliamentarian.
While almost all attention has been on the Guardian Council’s role in election engineering, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) invisible hand has been critical in manipulating electoral outcomes for the Office of Supreme Leader.
Of course, the IRGC’s involvement in “election” manufacturing has been long-standing in the authoritarian regime that is the Islamic Republic. But its role in vote rigging in Iran has historically been messy, clumsy, and sloppy in its implementation. As a result, the election circus was full of drama, disputes, and elite fallouts – the most serious of which occurred in 2009 and triggered mass nationwide anti-regime protests.
In the past five years, however, while election engineering in Iran has reached unparalleled levels, it has occurred with greater precision, coordination, and structure.
This is anything but a coincidence, as this paper exposes.
Following Iran’s March 2024 parliamentary vote, a leaked audio file of former Foreign Minister Javad Zarif was revealed where he outed Mohammad Ali Jafari, the former commander-in-chief of the IRGC, as being responsible for election engineering in Iran. According to Zarif, Jafari and the former head of the IRGC’s Intelligence Organization Hossein Taeb were “behind everything” in the March 2024 parliamentary elections, including preparing “the entire candidates list”.
Zarif’s reference to Jafari was particularly significant. Jafari not only has a track record in vote rigging that dates back to 2009 but, in the past five years, he has been commanding a shadowy IRGC headquarters – the Baqiatallah Cultural and Social Headquarters – which has created a full apparatus and strategy to engineer political and cultural outcomes in Iran.
Although Zarif mentioned Jafari’s direct hand in rigging the parliamentary vote, the method of electoral manipulation has not been clearly exposed until now. But with the presidential election around the corner, this question is perhaps more important than ever before.
Using primary Farsi sources – including official IRGC material obtained from inside Iran – this paper, for the first time, reveals the shadowy Baqiatallah Headquarters, its political and cultural missions, including involvement in election engineering and its creation of an Islamic society.
Eye on Iran is a news summary from United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), a section 501(c)(3) organization. Eye on Iran is available to subscribers on a daily basis or weekly basis.
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