(Bloomberg) -- The U.S. said it has sanctioned members of an Iranian government agency that it says rigs elections in the country by disqualifying candidates who don’t echo the political ideology of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Five members of Iran’s Guardian Council and its Elections Supervision Committee, who are appointed by Khamenei, were added to the U.S. sanctions list on Thursday, the Treasury Department said in a statement.

“The Trump administration will not tolerate the manipulation of elections to favor the regime’s malign agenda, and this action exposes those senior regime officials responsible for preventing the Iranian people from freely choosing their leaders,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in the statement. “The United States will continue to support the democratic aspirations of Iranians.”

The chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces called for “strident and maximum” turnout in parliamentary elections this month to counter the “terrorist American regime that is the axis of hostility and evil,” according to a statement published by Sepah News, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s news website on Thursday.

The government is concerned about low turnout for the election after the Guardian Council and its elections committee issued mass disqualifications of reformist and moderate candidates. Treasury said in its statement that “several thousand” candidates were ruled ineligible for the election, “including several incumbent legislators.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Alex Wayne in Washington at awayne3@bloomberg.net;Golnar Motevalli in London at gmotevalli@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alex Wayne at awayne3@bloomberg.net, Larry Liebert

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