Voter registration for upcoming elections in Kurdistan Region ends

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The voter registration process for the Kurdistan Region’s delayed parliamentary elections ended on Thursday, with nearly three million having registered for the poll, an official from Iraq’s Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) said.

Imad Jamil, the head of the IHEC’s media team, told Rudaw’s Hastyar Qadir on Thursday that the deadline for the voters to register for the upcoming parliamentary elections in the Kurdistan Region has now expired, adding that IHEC has no plans to postpone it further. 

Jumana al-Ghalai, IHEC spokesperson later told Rudaw that the deadline has in fact been extended by five days.

The deadline initially expired on February 20 but was postponed to Thursday. 

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

Rudaw has learnt that  IHEC has suggested June for the polls and awaits the Kurdish authorities to set a new date. 

Jamil said that while 3.7 million people were eligible to vote only 2.8 million have registered or updated their registrations, meaning that around a million voters will not be able to cast their votes in the Region’s upcoming parliamentary elections. 

Iraq’s federal court recently ruled that the 11 quota seats in the Kurdistan Region’s parliament reserved for ethnic and religious minorities were “unconstitutional,” effectively rejecting the legitimacy of the seats.

According to a letter issued by the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) interior ministry on Sunday and seen by Rudaw, the ministry asked the political parties to submit the names of their lists, their agendas, and their logos by March 3 and instructed them to start preparing their lists of  candidates for the general elections.