On June 17, millions of Iranians voted to elect a new president. The two candidates to advance to the June 24 run-off were Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a moderate conservative and former president, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Tehran mayor and a conservative.

But how meaningful are these apparent signs of democracy? According to a U.S.-based human rights group, not very, given that a large number of potential candidates were disqualified ahead of time.

“Iran’s elections, for all practical purposes, are pre-cooked,” said Joe Stork, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East Division in a press release this week.

The elections are essentially a two-stage process, he said: “The Guardian Council appoints a few candidates, and then Iranians get to choose from this very restricted list.”

The Guardian Council is an appointed body of 12 Shia Muslim clerics and religious jurists that enjoys significant power over the governing of the country, including the right to veto legislation coming out of the parliament.

These clerics are from the same faction as Iran’s unelected supreme leader and highest political authority, Ayatollah Khamenei, creating a narrow spectrum of legitimate political views among the governing elite. This has led to the council consistently approving only candidates who are already insiders.

The Guardian Council’s powers in choosing candidates generally go unchecked. On May 22, the Guardian Council announced the approval of six of 1,014 candidates who had registered, five of whom adhere closely to the conservative political views of the council. The following day, however, two more candidates who are slightly more reformist were added to the list at the behest of Khamenei, another example of the arbitrary nature of the electoral process.

Despite the addition of the two reformists, according to HRW, there is hardly a diversity of opinions being represented.

“These elections are neither free nor fair,” Stork said. “Iranians cannot vote for candidates who represent alternative viewpoints from those of the ruling elite.”

Discrimination Based on Political Belief and Gender

The vast majority of those disqualified were candidates whose political and religious beliefs do not coincide with those of the Guardian Council. Iranian election laws require that candidates have “practical belief in the Islamic faith and the sacred order of the Islamic Republic of Iran” as well as declare their loyalty to the concept of absolute Islamic rule. This essentially excludes anyone calling for a secular democracy or those who the clerics do not deem to be a devout enough follower of Shia Islam.

A second group to be disqualified was women. Among the 1,014 candidates to register, 89 were female, the largest number yet in a presidential election. As in past elections, however, none of them were approved.

Regarding this decision by the Guardian Council, Hamideh Edalat, the former leader of the parliament’s Women’s Caucus, told the Iranian Students News Agency: “It automatically eliminates half of the society from the political arena. It will make women wonder if part of the government is just using their votes as a tool if they can so easily take away the women’s right to assume high positions.”