Iraq’s election commission ignored an anti-corruption body’s warnings about the credibility of electronic vote-counting machines used in May’s parliamentary election, according to investigators and a document seen by Reuters. The devices, provided by South Korean company Miru Systems under a deal with the Independent High Elections Commission (IHEC), are at the heart of fraud allegations that led to a manual recount in some areas after the May 12 election. The results of the recount have not yet been announced and political leaders are still trying to form a government. Concerns about the election count center on discrepancies in the tallying of votes by the voting machines, mainly in the Kurdish province of Sulaimaniya and the ethnically-mixed province of Kirkuk, and suggestions that the devices could have been tampered with or hacked into to skew the result.
Iraq’s Board of Supreme Audit (BSA) expressed reservations about the vote-counting system in a report it sent to the IHEC on May 9, three days before the election.
The BSA said in the report, seen by Reuters, that the IHEC had not responded to 11 concerns it had raised — including over contractual procedures, the inspection of company documents and a failure to properly examine the devices for any flaws.
“Hereby, we found that ignoring and not responding to the report’s findings is considered a clear legal violation contributed to the passage of the electronic vote counting devices despite its unsuitability and easiness of being tampered,” the BSA said in the report.
Full Article: Exclusive: Iraq election commission ignored warnings over voting machines – document | Reuters.
