Zero chance for vote rigging in Kurdistan Region’s parliamentary elections: IHEC head

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region of Iraq - The president of the Iraqi electoral body said on Friday that there was “zero chance” for electoral fraud in the Kurdistan Region’s parliamentary elections following reports of alleged violations against the IHEC’s rules and regulations in Sulaimani and Halabja provinces.

“Vote rigging is impossible and there is zero chance for that" in the Kurdistan Region’s parliamentary elections, Omer Ahmed, head of the Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) told reporters at a polling station in Erbil.

Early voting in parliamentary elections began on Friday for security service members of the Kurdistan Region. Polling stations were opened at 7am and they will close at 7pm.

Around 216,000 members of the Kurdistan Region's security forces are eligible to cast their ballots during the early vote. The early voting will take place in the provinces of Erbil, Sulaimani, Duhok, Halabja, Nineveh, Kirkuk, Diyala, Anbar, Salahaddin, Wasit, and Baghdad.

One of the strict measures issued by the IHEC is that voters are not allowed to take mobile phones inside polling stations in a bid to prevent them from filming their votes.

A number of political parties, however, have claimed that some members of the security forces have sneaked mobile phones into polling stations in Sulaimani and Halabja provinces.

Kawa Ali, head of the Kurdistan Islamic Union (KIU) list in Halabja province claimed that “mobile phones are openly taken to the polling station [in Halabja] and security service members told me that they had been forced to take mobiles inside to take photograph of their votes and send to them [ to their superiors] under threat.”

The head of the IHEC dismissed the claims that voters had brought mobile phones into the ballot boothes.

“Mobile phones have not been taken inside polling stations,” Ahmed said. "The process is going very well."

For his part, Aysan Yasir, an IHEC official told The New Region that they were going to take “legal actions against anyone caught taking their mobile phones inside the polling stations.”

Yasir added that they were also going to take voting cards away from members of the security forces once they have cast their ballots, so they cannot use them again to vote along with the general public on October 20.

The IHEC said voter turnout until midday was as the following; in Erbil 70 percent of voters had cast their ballots, in Duhok 77 percent, in Sulaimani 67 and in Halabja 64.

After two years of delay and four times of rescheduling, the public will on Sunday head to the polling stations to vote in the Kurdistan Region’s parliamentary elections.

A total of 100 seats are up for grabs. Of this number, five seats are reserved for the minorities - three for Christians, and the remaining two for Turkmen.

For the first time in three decades, the electoral system was changed by dividing the Kurdistan Region into four constituencies - Erbil, Sulaimani, Duhok, and Halabja. In other words, members will be elected by open-list proportional representation, representing the Region’s four provinces.

A total of 38 seats have been reserved for Sulaimani province, 34 for Erbil, with the remaining 25 and three going to Duhok and Halabja respectively.

Around 3.8 million people were eligible to vote in the upcoming elections, out of which nearly three million have completed the biometric process and will be able to cast their ballots on October 20.

According to the IHEC, there will be more than 1,400 polling stations across the Kurdistan Region, to be monitored by 13,478 political party observers, 2,100 local and 1,165 international observers.

The Kurdistan Region last held its parliamentary elections in 2018.

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