<p>TEHRAN, Iran &mdash; Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani said Wednesday he wrote the country’s supreme leader to protest a decision by an election watchdog to reject high-profile nominees for the June 18 presidential election.</p>
<p>Rouhani in a weekly Cabinet meeting said he wished Iran’s Guardian Council would give more would-be candidates the opportunity to run. The council on Tuesday barred former parliament speaker Ali Larijani, a conservative who allied with Rouhani in recent years, from running. It also nixed the candidacies of current senior vice-president Eshaq Jahangiri and former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.</p>
<p>“Yesterday, I had no choice but to send a letter to supreme leader to see if he can help,” he said. </p>
<p>There is precedent for reinstatement. In 2005, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has final say on all state matters, ordered the Guardian Council to reinstate two candidates.</p>
<p>“The nature of the election is competition, if you take this from the election, it becomes a body without life,” Rouhani said.</p>
<p>Iran’s theocracy partially bases its legitimacy on voter turnout numbers. Officials likely will try to pique the interest of a public worn down by the raging pandemic and an ailing economy ground down by American sanctions.</p>
<p>Iran’s 2020 parliamentary vote saw only a 42.5% turnout, the lowest since 1979. By comparison, Iran’s 2017 presidential election saw a 73% turnout. Government statistics suggest 59.3 million people will be eligible to vote in the June 18 election.</p>
<p>The state-owned polling center ISPA has warned of the possibility of a turnout as low as 39% this year — the lowest since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. </p>
<p>The Guardian Council approved only seven of some 590 people who registered with the panel of clerics and jurists overseen by Khamenei. </p>
<p>The candidates include judiciary chief Ebrahim Raisi. The rest are Saeed Jalili, a former nuclear negotiator; Mohsen Rezaei, a former Revolutionary Guard commander; Ali Reza Zakani, a former lawmaker; Amir Hossein Ghazizadeh, a current lawmaker; Mohsen Mehralizadeh, a former provincial governor; and Abdolnasser Hemmati, the current head of Iran’s Central Bank.</p>