Electoral Commission announces plan to begin Iraqi election recount

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – The Iraqi Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) on Thursday announced they are working on plans to implement the Supreme Court’s ruling triggering a recount of the May 12 national election results.

Present at the meeting were the Board of Commissioners, the Secretary-General, and the Directors-General of the IHEC, the nine judges which parliament appointed to replace the Commission and handle the recount, and other officials in the organization’s national office.

The Board reviewed “the requirements for a recount, to develop a comprehensive plan to begin the implementation of counting and sorting [the votes] manually,” read the statement the IHEC released.

The ruling of Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Court (ISJC) came a week after the controversial parliamentary session in which lawmakers, by majority vote, decided to implement a manual recount and annul all the Kurdistan Region's early votes,  as well as those of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) and expats.

The Higher Judicial Council (IHJC) sided with parliament's decision in full the day after it was voted on, but the final say remains with the ISJC

The Supreme Court, however, said it approved of a manual recount but not the annulment of thousands of votes, a decision that was well received by various political entities, especially in the Kurdistan Region.

The statement added that the recount process would be carried out “in a timely fashion.”

The Commission also declared it would consider Saturday the start of operations for all IHEC employees and ordered the “suspension of time off for all staff in the National [Baghdad] Office and provincial offices [of the IHEC] except in cases of emergency.”

Editing by Nadia Riva