Iraq election commission announces 1,400 appeals contesting national vote results

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – The Iraqi High Electoral Commission (IHEC) announced on Wednesday that it has received well over a thousand appeals submitted by candidates or others who objected to some part of the results of parliamentary elections held ten days earlier.

"The number of appeals received by the Commission by candidates who objected to the announced results amounted to approximately 1,400," said Chairman of the Board of Commissioners Jalil Adnan at a press conference in Baghdad.

He explained that the commission had reached an "important stage in the electoral process, which is to consider appeals after the end of the legal period for their submission, and instructions were given to expedite their receipt and registration and to allow supporting documents to be submitted later for a period of three days, believing in the necessity of receiving all appeals and facilitating the exercise of the right of appeal by objecting candidates."

Adnan added that, if any complaints within the appeals are assessed to be valid, the commission "will open the contested stations in accordance with Article 38 of the Elections Law No. (9) of 2020 and the votes of those stations will be counted and counted manually in the presence of representatives of the competing candidates."

"In light of this," he added, "a preliminary decision that can be appealed will be issued before the Judicial Authority for Elections in the Supreme Judicial Council, and the Commission will continue to review appeals with the same mechanism and procedures in the coming days until all of them are completed."

"The process of matching the fingerprints of voters in private and public voting has ended and in less than the legal period stipulated in Article 39 Fifth C of the Elections Law, and any violators will be referred to the courts in accordance with legal procedures."

Two days after the election, IHEC announced that the final results would be announced in full after the appeals process had run its course.

Read More: Iraq’s electoral commission: Final results will be announced after appeals are resolved

Initial results that had been publicized at the time, he said, "are not final, and the final results of the elections will be announced after the appeals are resolved."