Iraq electoral body to start limited manual recount Wednesday

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Iraq’s electoral commission on Wednesday will start a manual recount of votes from certain polling stations where complaints were filed after it finishes investigating appeals into the October 10 parliamentary election results, state media reported.

The Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) assessed 483 complaints on Sunday and rejected 461 of them. Twenty-two complaints distributed over 13 provinces in Iraq will be looked into further.

The commission last week announced the final preliminary results in the parliamentary election following the manual count of polling stations that were not electronically counted due to technical issues. It also gave parties the option make complaints about the updated results.

Over a thousand appeals have been submitted and two thirds of them have already been investigated, a member of the commission’s media team said on Saturday. The IHEC is expected to finish its review of complaints on Monday.

Manual recounts of votes have been ordered in some cases, but most of the complaints have been rejected.

Iraqis voted in an early election on October 10. The preliminary results handed victories to the Sadrist movement, Taqadum, Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), and the State of Law Coalition. Iran-backed parties affiliated with the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF, or Hashd al-Shaabi in Arabic) such as the Fatih Alliance did not do as well as expected. They have alleged fraud and supporters are staging a sit-in in Baghdad.