Presidential elections were held in Iran on 18 June 2021, the thirteenth since the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979. Ebrahim Raisi, the then Chief Justice of Iran, was declared the winner in a highly controversial election. The election began with the mass disqualification of popular candidates by the Guardian Council, and broke records of the lowest turnout in Iranian electoral history (around 49%), as well as had the highest share of protest blank, invalid and lost votes (around 13%) despite a declaration by the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, considering protest voting religiously forbidden (haraam) as it would "weaken the regime." Reporters Without Borders reported 42 cases of journalists being summoned or threatened for writing about candidates, and the chief of the police threatened people who discouraged others to vote.

The Guardian Council announced the approval of seven candidates after the wide disqualification of prominent candidates, including Ali Larijani, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (the former president of Iran), and Eshaq Jahangiri (the Incumbent first Vice President), among others, which provoked many activists and candidates to call for boycotting the election, including Ahmadinejad, who said that he would neither participate nor recognize the election. Hassan Rouhani, the incumbent Iranian president, could not run for re-election under the constitution of Iran as he had already served his maximum two consecutive terms.

Considered a "show election" to elect the handpicked candidate of the Iranian Supreme Leader, the elections were the first in Iranian history in which the reported number of invalid ballots, 3.84 million, outnumbered every non-winning candidate; the second-placed Mohsen Rezaee received 3.44 million votes. The elections were widely described as "neither free nor fair", a "sham", and a "selection" by different international human rights organizations, such as Human Rights Watch and the Center for Human Rights in Iran, and others called for an investigation into Raisi's role as an overseer in the 1988 executions of Iranian political prisoners.