On May 21, a group of Iraqi parliament members submitted a request to the speaker to cancel the results of the May 12 parliamentary elections. The group also called for dissolving the Independent High Electoral Commission, discontinuing electronic voting and reinstating manual voting and sorting, with many legislators saying the elections were sabotaged. The next day, six Kurdish parties of the Iraqi Kurdistan region threatened to boycott the political process if their demand to cancel the results in Iraqi Kurdistan and other contested areas is not met. However, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), the two main political parties that came in first and second in the provinces of the region, did not join in on the complaints. On May 18, the Independent High Electoral Commission announced the results of the elections. It also said that ballots cast in 103 polling stations in five provinces — Baghdad, Anbar, Salahuddin, Ninevah and Kirkuk — had been annulled because of sabotage and suspicions of fraud. However, the commission did not say whether the cancellation of those ballots actually changed the results.
Out of 329 members of the Iraqi parliament, 176 agreed on canceling the results of the elections, legislator Tawfiq al-Kaabi said. This would mean that the number of parliament members calling for the elections to be voided has reached the majority required for a law to be passed.
Legal analyst Ali Jaber told Al-Monitor, “The Iraqi parliament has the right to dissolve the current electoral commission and cancel the results of the election if it is proven to be sabotaged and fraudulent.”
Said al-Kakai, a member of the Independent High Electoral Commission, agreed with those calling for the cancellation of the results and the reinstatement of manual sorting. During a televised interview aired May 18, he said results that had been double checked in six provinces did not match with the original tallies, with the worst cases having differences ranging from 12% to 63%.
Full Article: Many Iraqi legislators call for canceling election results.
