WATCH: Early voting for parliamentary election kicks off in Kurdistan Region

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – On Friday morning, early voting for the Kurdistan Region’s parliamentary election kicked off for over 170,000 members of the security and police forces.

According to the Independent High Electoral and Referendum Commission (IHERC), 773 candidates from 29 political parties will compete for a seat in the 111-seat parliament in the semi-autonomous region.

Just over half of the Kurdistan Region’s population of almost six million people are eligible to vote.

From the total 3,085,461 registered, 39 percent are from Sulaimani Province, 36 percent from Erbil, 23 percent from Duhok, and another two percent from the recently established Halabja Province. On Sunday, voters will be able to cast ballots at one of the 5,941 local voting centers where their names are registered.

The number above includes the 170,469 military and police forces who are eligible to vote on Friday, with 99 voting centers opened for early voting – a policy that was implemented in Iraq to free security forces up for the election day itself. Members of the Asayish, Peshmerga, and police in all four provinces will be heading to the polls.

Unlike Iraq’s widely-disputed national election in May that employed the use of electronic vote-counting devices, the Kurdistan Region will count all ballots manually to quell concerns any party may have about potential vote-rigging, election tampering, or other fraudulent acts. A new regulation also stipulates that the commission is charged with taking close-up photographs of each voter before ballots are cast.

It is the first regional election in the Kurdistan Region since the defeat of the Islamic State (IS) last December.

Editing by Nadia Riva