Voting is underway in Iran's presidential election today, which is expected to be the closest in the country's history.

Local television showed long lines of voters outside polling booths in the most populous nation in the Middle East but there is no clear indication of turnout. Turnout dwindled to just over 50 per cent in last year's parliamentary elections.

Today's elections are going ahead amid widespread calls for a boycott among the young and frustrated sections of the Iranian population, who have seen the outgoing president, Mohammed Khatami, stifled by Iran's clerics in his attempts to reform the country.

President Khatami has served two terms and was elected in a huge wave of support in 1997, when nearly 80 per cent of Iran's adult population turned out to vote. But since then, disaffection has grown as Iran's economy has struggled and the country has become increasingly alienated from the West.

In defiance of the boycott, the nation’s unelected ruler, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei today called on voters to flood Iran's 41,000 polling stations to demonstrate that the country is a working democracy. Voting is also availabe to Iranian expatriates, with 12,000 expected to vote in Iraq today.

Iran's 46.7 million voters have seven presidential candidates to choose from, and observers expect the elections to go to a second round for the first time since elections began after the Iranian Revolution in 1979. To win outright, a candidate must obtain 50 per cent of the vote.

Iran's constitution allows an elected president, but his powers are overshadowed by the unelected and conservative panel of clerics, known as the Guardian Council. Members of the council are chosen by Ayatollah Khamenei and can veto legislation.

The seven candidates in today's election were selected by the Guardian Council from a list of over a thousand applicants. The council disqualified all the women who applied to stand, and even blocked the most popular reform candidate, Mostafa Moin, until he was reinstated directly by Ayatollah Khamenei.

The narrow favourite to win today's election is Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president who is known as a pragmatic and conservative politician. Rafsanjani was president from 1989 to 1997 and has fought a moderate campaign, in which he has called for economic reform and a measure of reconciliation with the West, while maintaining the current theocratic system of government.

Other front runners include the reform candidate, Mostafa Moin, who has the support of President Khatami and his brother, Mohammad Reza Khatami, who will serve as his deputy if he wins.

Moin is a former doctor who attracted great support from the liberal Iranians when he resigned from his job as higher education minister when hardline clerics shut down student demonstration in 2003. Moin has called for the release of political prisoners and negotiations with the US over Iran's nuclear programme.

A third candidate thought to be in the running is former police chief Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, a moderate conservative and former pilot who keeps his hand in by flying as a co-pilot on a passenger jet every ten days.

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