Voter registration deadline for Kurdistan elections postponed

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Iraq’s Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) spokesperson on Monday announced that the electoral body has decided to postpone the deadline for voters to register or update their names for the Kurdistan Region’s delayed general elections. 

Tuesday was the deadline for Kurdistan Region’s citizens to visit the IHEC offices to register for elections or update their registrations. 

Jumana al-Ghalai, the spokesperson of the IHEC told Rudaw on Monday that they have postponed the deadline to the end of this month. 

The process began on February 1.

The Kurdistan Region’s parliamentary elections were initially scheduled for October 2022 but were then pushed to November of the following year due to disagreements among political parties over the election law. 

After an Iraqi court ruling against the self-extension of the Kurdistan parliament as a result of the delayed elections, the vote was postponed to February 25 this year, this time under the supervision of the Iraqi electoral commission.

The IHEC recently announced that the vote must be postponed further as the federal court has yet to make a ruling on the Region’s election law, with one of its officials saying the new date is expected to be set in late May. 

The commission has also warned that any delay in the court ruling will affect the timeline of the Kurdish polls. 

Two politicians from the Kurdistan Patriotic Union (PUK) and a Christian party in Sulaimani have filed two lawsuits against the Kurdistan Region’s election law, which was passed in 1992 and last amended in 2013, separately, to the Iraqi federal court. The court is treating both as one case due to their similarity. 

The lawsuits claim that several articles of the Kurdish election law are unconstitutional. These include Article 36 which stipulates that 11 of the legislature’s 111 seats are dedicated to minorities under a quota system. Turkmens have five seats, Assyrians, Chaldeans, and Syriacs have five, and Armenians have one.