Unexpectedly large turnout in Iran vote

Clutching pens and scraps of paper to write personal notes requesting assistance, the black-draped Iranian women waited for their hero to finish voting before pressing him with their problems.

But after casting ballots in joint city council and Expert Assembly elections, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was thronged as he stepped out of a mosque polling station.

The vote is the first electoral test since the archconservative leader was elected in June 2005. Voting was extended three hours to accommodate a far larger turnout than expected, something analysts said was likely to favor reformists, who are currently shut out of every power structure.

Results will also determine the state of a power struggle between competing conservative factions: the "fundamentalist" one led by the president and the "traditionalist" one by the former police chief who is now mayor of Tehran.

Some 233,000 candidates are vying for tens-of-thousands of seats in the country's village and city councils. These were the seats from which conservatives began making a comeback in elected offices in 2002.

About 166 people vied for a spot on the 86-member Assembly of Experts, made up of carefully vetted conservative senior clerics, which has the power to change and choose Iran's supreme religious leader.

But on election day, loyalists of Mr. Ahmadinejad –who voted in his working-class east Tehran neighborhood, which has seen a blacksmith's son become the president of the Islamic Republic – wanted to celebrate their man and share their concerns.

Some cried. Some held out notes, which he dutifully gathered into an ever-increasing stack, as he does during visits across the country. One woman shouted "Hi!" to get his attention.

"Wait your turn!" the president replied, in a deliberately comic tone that sparked laughter through the tight crowd.

"He came out of the heart of the people," says Soosan Jalali, whose note asked Ahmadinejad to find a job for her daughter, a blind university graduate. "If you put all the [Iranian] presidents on one side, he is something else. We've never had one like this."

Another woman said the president had remembered by name her son, Mahdi, who had worked on his campaign last year. "He still knows everyone here," said Fatemah Jamshidi. "We always pray for him."

"These people are the pillars of the government and the [1979 Islamic] revolution," says Fatemeh Erfanian. She put her phone number on her note, so the president could solve her husband's "problem."

Mrs. Erfanian expects a reply. "He promised me," she says. "And we believe his promises."

Not all are true believers in this neighborhood or across Iran, where current economic policies are raising prices as well as uncertainty. Unease has also grown in many quarters over the friction Ahmadinejad has caused with the West, with his uncompromising comments about the destruction of Israel and his handling of the nuclear issue.

"These people are a minority in Iran," says a goldsmith called Reza, stepping in among the black-clad women and conservative men, and speaking in English. "The majority of the people are not happy with this government because the rate of inflation and [drug] addiction, and unemployment is very high."

"In English you say: 'Don't flog a dead horse,' " says Reza, who came with his daughter, and was too nervous to give his last name. "Whatever the Iranian government does [domestically], it is like 'flogging a dead horse.' It does not have any effect."

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