Kurdistan expected to purge more than 100k names from voter rolls

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — The Kurdistan Region’s elections commission announced that the process of cleaning the voter registration list will be finished next week with an official advocating for some 100,000 repeated names or those of the deceased to be removed.

“I suggest more than 100,000 dead and repeated names exist in the voters register lists,” Jutiyar Ali, a member of elections body, told Rudaw on Tuesday. “They will all be removed.”

He added that next week the commission will announce the end of their task to clean the voters’ registry and to prepare for the elections.

The Prime Minister of the Kurdistan Region, Nechirvan Barzani, announced on Monday that the government, parliament and the elections commission will sit down next week and set a date for the elections.

An estimated 3.3 to 3.5 million people will be eligible to cast a ballot in upcoming elections, according to the electoral commission’s data.

Presidential and parliamentary elections were scheduled to be held simultaneously on November 1. On October 14 and with Iraqi forces preparing to enter disputed or Kurdistani areas claimed by both Erbil and Baghdad, the high electoral council announced that election preparations had been halted “because of not having candidates at the specified time and current new developments.”

The Kurdistan parliament voted on October 24 to postpone parliamentary and presidential elections by eight months and extend the current term of parliament until elections.

Kurdish political parties have in the past questioned the accuracy of the Kurdistan voter list and asked for a clean one to be prepared for the elections that does not include the names of the deceased.

“According to the new voter registration records sent to the high electoral commission by the Iraqi Ministry of Trade, between 2013 and 2017, the number of voters in the Kurdistan Region increased by 500,000. But we want a new accurate and clean list prepared for the elections that does not include the names of the deceased,” Khasraw Goran, the head of the election institution of the KDP, told Rudaw in June.

Other Kurdish parties, including the now-opposition Gorran (the Change Movement), have also questioned the voter rolls.

The Kurdistan Region last held parliamentary elections in 2013. The presidential election has not been held since 2009.

The Kurdistan Region’s Office of the Presidency remains, despite Masoud Barzani stepping down on November 1. In his letter to parliament, Barzani advised the parliament to resolve the matter of the duties and powers of the president to ensure there is no “legal vacuum.”

Kurdistan expected to purge more than 100k names from voter rolls

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