The vote counting has begun in Iran’s snap presidential election since early hours of Saturday after the polling station closed at Saturday midnight.

According to the initial results former health minister, Masoud Pezeshkian, is leading the former nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, in a race for presidency.
 
The seventh update showed Pezeshkian had garnered 5955781 votes and Jalili 5560321 out of 14,070,642 votes counted. Ghalibaf and Pourmohammadi also received 1891385 and 111967 votes, respectively.

Mohsen Eslami, spokesperson for Iran's election headquarters, announced the results, counted across 27,938 polling stations out of 58,000, on Saturday, according to Press TV.

The results gave Jalili as many as 4,266,386 votes, and Pezeshkian 4,244,815.

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iranian Parliament speaker, and Mostafa Pourmohammadi, former interior minister, the two other candidates in the race, trailed far behind with respectively 1,385,83 and 80,506 votes each.

The polls closed at midnight local time on Saturday (20:30 GMT on Friday), ending a 16-hour-long voting process.

The election was called after President Ebrahim Raeisi was martyred along with seven others on May 19, when the helicopter carrying them crashed in northwestern Iran.

More than 61 million Iranians have been eligible to vote in the election.

As the preliminary results show, the elections could go to a runoff, which Eslami has said will be held a week late.