Interior ministry vows to protect people's votes

The Iranian interior ministry, which is tasked with arranging and holding elections in the country, announced that it will not allow any individual, group or party to impair the healthy process of the upcoming parliamentary elections."We will not allow certain people to commit malfeasance in the elections," Iranian Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar said on Monday. He reiterated that his ministry will do anything possible to protect the people's votes. Najjar also underlined the interior ministry's industrious efforts to facilitate and increase security and preciseness of the voting process, and said 10% of the polling stations will be equipped with computers for electronic voting in the upcoming parliament elections, a move which serves as a prelude to the full practice of electronic voting in Iran in the near future. Najjar had made similar remarks last Monday, saying that his ministry would not allow any individual, group or party to impair the healthy process of the upcoming elections. "With regard to elections, we will endeavor to implement the law exactly and we will not allow anyone to interfere with the elections," Najjar told reporters on the sidelines of a gathering of the executive officers involved in the 9th parliamentary elections last Monday.Najjar stressed the necessity for transparent information dissemination in the process of holding elections so that the Iranian people will be updated on the voting events. Earlier this month, Iranian Intelligence Minister Heidar Moslehi had warned that those who staged a sedition plot after the 2009 presidential election in collaboration with a number of western states have once again hatched plots to undermine the country's security during the upcoming parliamentary elections, but added that Iranian intelligence forces are fully prepared to foil such plots. Addressing an Expert Assembly session here in Tehran in September, Moslehi said that masterminds and perpetrators of the post-election unrests in Iran in 2009 are seeking to find themselves new allies through both overt and covert actions in an attempt to start another move to strike a blow at the principles of the Islamic Revolution and the Islamic establishment. "The intelligence ministry enjoys a high level of vigilance and will not allow these movements to derail the Esfand 12 (March 2, 2012) parliamentary election from its normal path," Moslehi noted.