As Iraq wraps up election recount, is a new government in sight?
In the midst of intensive negotiations by the winning parties in the elections to form a new government, the Independent High Electoral Commission has completed the process of manual counting, without expecting a significant change in the results.
Iraq’s Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) finished the manual recounting of votes on Aug. 6 amid an outcry over potential fraud that involved ballots in Anbar province and Baghdad and Kirkuk cities, as well as districts in the Iraqi Kurdistan region and all ballots allotted for Iraqis who live abroad. The IHEC decided to cancel the recount process for the al-Rusafa district in Baghdad, as the ballots and machines used to submit and count votes were damaged in a fire following the election.
Laith Jabr Hamza, the official spokesman for the IHEC, addressed the decision to cancel the recount in this area, saying that the commission, which consists of select judges, came to the decision after “reading the record for the count proceedings by the judge who was instituted to oversee the IHEC in al-Rusafa. This took place after the fire that razed the depositories [on June 10].” The decision was made due to the fact that all recording and biometric verification devices, as well as the ballots, were completely devastated in the fire, which rendered a manual recount impossible.
