Almost none of these analysts will say much, if anything, about the nearly 40 million citizens who are expected to turn up to vote of their own accord on May 19, or why they bother. Voting in Iran, one is left to imagine, is only for the true believers or for the easily duped, participants in a collective act of dissembling that adds up to nothing.

In fact, however, many Iranians vote because they do not believe in their system; they vote precisely out of a lack of faith.

“Voting is a religious duty and a holy act,” they are told by those in charge, and so citizens double down on the premise as an act of vigilance, determined to meet the state on its own terms as well as to bear witness should the authorities deny citizens their votes. Against the fevered proclamations of radicals on either side of the Iranian political spectrum, the grassroots opposition stands firmly for the belief that presence at the ballot box is prevention, and that prevention is “better than a cure.”

Iran’s diminished democracy offers few guarantees, but one certainty is that low turnout opens a path for reactionary elements to take control of the government. This was the painful lesson of the era of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose rise to power was abetted by a boycott of the 2005 elections by the public. Disillusioned with the reform movement of outgoing president Mohammad Khatami, and convinced that it made little difference who occupied the presidency, many Iranians stayed home on election day. Just under 28 million Iranians, 60 percent of the voting population, bothered to vote in the second-round runoff between Ahmadinejad and the late Hassan Rafsanjani—anemic by Iranian standards. It wasn’t long before a bevy of incompetents took advantage of the voters’ apathy, rushing in to occupy the political field abandoned by those holding out for more democratic conditions in Iran.

It was a mistake that many in the opposition have sworn to never repeat. In 2009, some 40 million Iranians, a record 85 percent of the eligible population, cast their ballots in the presidential election in an effort to put Ahmadinejad and his allies out of office. The implausible reelection of Ahmadinejad sparked Iran’s worst crisis since the overthrow of the monarchy, producing the Green Movement protests that paralyzed much of the country for nearly a year.

Nearly 37 million would turn out in 2013, despite the violent suppression of the Green Movement just four years earlier. They were determined to vindicate the movement’s imprisoned leaders, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karrobi, and to finally force an answer to its slogan, “Where is my vote?” That these many voters were empowered to do so by the very system that they oppose is the story missing from the coverage leading into this month’s presidential election.