TEHRAN, Iran - Iranians began voting on Friday in the country's third-ever local council elections that could prove to be a public approval
testing ground for hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Polls opened Friday morning and people lined up at polling stations in the capital, Tehran, to have their identification cards stamped and select their favorite candidates.

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State-run television showed live coverage of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, voting and urging others to do the same. State TV also aired footage of Ahmadinejad casting his ballot at a mosque in a middle-class neighborhood.

"I have voted in all elections after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. My ID card is full of stamps of the elections," said Zia Maroufi, a 54-year-old plumber. "I voted for allies of Ahmadinejad."

Ahmadinejad was expected to face some dissatisfaction among conservatives.

Some feel the president has spent too much time confronting the West since he took office last year than making changes to improve Iran's economy at home.

Though Iran's reformist movement - which dominated the councils, presidency and parliament in the late 1990s and early 2000s - was largely crushed by the country's hard-liners, some are hoping the council elections will give them a sign that popular support still exists.

All the 233,000 candidates, including some 5,000 women, for town and city
councils across the country were vetted by parliamentary committees, which are dominated by hard-liners. The committees disqualified about 10,000 nominees, reports said.

Based on survey results, Iran's official news agency IRNA predicted about 64 percent of the 46 million eligible voters were expected to vote. Results were expected Sunday or Monday.

The local councils approve community budgets and planning projects. In smaller cities and towns, the councils elect mayor. In Tehran and other large cities, the councils only propose nominees, and the Interior Ministry chooses.

Friday's vote was the third time Iranians voted for local councils, a reform introduced in 1999 by former reformist President Mohammad Khatami.
Iran's Parliament Speaker Gholam Ali Haddad Adel on Friday urged people not to wait until the last minute to vote.

"Do not wait for extra time as our football players did last night," he joked.

Iran's national soccer team defeated South Korea 1-0 in 114th minute in
Qatar's Asian Games on Thursday night.

Voters on Friday also casted ballots for the Assembly of Experts, a body of 86 senior clerics that monitor Iran's supreme leader and choose his successor.

Voter participation was expected to be lower for the assembly's election
because there was little difference among the candidates who are selected by a watchdog controlled by hard-liners.

Among those running for the assembly's seats were former president Akbar
Hashemi Rafsanjani, former Iranian top nuclear negotiator Hasan Rowhani, and two top hard-line clerics Ahmad Jannati and Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, both prominent supporters of Ahmadinejad.