2016 Iranian Assembly of Experts election
5th Iranian Assembly of Experts election

The fifth Iranian Assembly of Experts election were held in Iran on 26 February 2016 to elect the members of the Assembly of Experts. All 88 members of the Assembly of Experts, who are known as mujtahids, are directly elected. The elections had been planned for 2014, but were delayed in order for the election to be held alongside the Islamic Consultative Assembly elections.
Incumbents were reelected in 49 of the assembly's 88 seats.
Background
In the previous election, The Two Societies endorsed 81 candidates in a joint statement and were able to win 69 seats out of 86. The reformists did not reach a coalition and lost the election.
Along with the Parliamentary elections, it was the first election since the implementation of a landmark nuclear agreement between 5+1 and Iran that saw it curb sensitive nuclear activities in return for the lifting of sanctions against Iran. The deal was opposed by many hardliners but backed by moderates and reformists. Over 30 million Iranians voted in the elections, according to the BBC.
According to Deutsche Welle, several polling stations were left open until midnight, in order to enable millions of voters that came late to take part in the elections.
Registration and qualification process
For the first time in the history of the Islamic Republic of Iran, 801 aspirants registered to run in the elections.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “2016 Iranian Assembly of Experts election” as 5th Iranian Assembly of Experts election. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as 5th Iranian Assembly of Experts election. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16045408. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2016 and 2014.
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This entry incorporates text from “2016 Iranian Assembly of Experts election” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.