In the nights leading up to the 2009 election, hundreds of thousands of Tehran residents flooded the streets in a show of excitement over a presidential contest that few had expected would attract much attention.
Today, however, Iran's vast capital does not look like a city that will help to choose a new president on Friday. Four years after contested ballot results that led to months of unrest there, authorities have gone to great lengths to minimize public campaign events, shifting the focus to the quiet of Iranian living rooms.
That change has also been reflected on state media outlets, which have been tasked as the main engine of creating public interest in the election. Instead of the live, one-on-one televised debates that it introduced in 2009, Iran's state television network, known as the IRIB, has adopted a more subdued round-table format.