ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Iraq’s electoral commission on Wednesday announced the final results of the Kurdistan Region’s parliament elections in Erbil, with vote counts barely changing from the preliminary results.
Iraq’s Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) announced the results in a press conference, with the ruling Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) coming out on top securing 39 seats with over 800,000 votes across all provinces, The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) won 23 seats and the New Generation Movement 15 seats.
The KDP won 812,794 votes in the polls, nearly double its rival, the PUK, with 409,548 votes,
The rising New Generation Movement, led by businessman Shaswar Abdulwahid, won 15 seats and is set as the third-largest party in the Region.
The main Islamist parties - Kurdistan Islamic Union (KIU) and Kurdistan Justice Group (Komal) - took seven and three seats respectively. The National Stance Movement (Halwest), led by the popular former lawmaker Ali Hama Saleh obtained four.
Lahur Talabany’s People’s Front (Baray Gal) got two seats while the Change Movement (Gorran), once a powerful opposition force took just one seat.
Komal, the KIU, Baray Gal, and Halwest denounced the election results, alleging fraud and manipulation, and questioned the reliability of the voting machines. The parties pledged to release evidence of alleged misconduct in due course.
Judge Omar Ahmed, the head of IHEC during the press conference, said that experts and party representatives had tested selected voting devices at random, adding that the claims “are all baseless talks.”
“This has been the best election since the year 1992,” he asserted.
On Saturday, Komal announced that it will not join the parliament. The Komal leader said that the alleged rigging appears to have been committed from outside the Kurdistan Region, but did not put the blame on any party.
IHEC said the vote counts are not conclusive and a period for appealing the final tally will start the next day.
“All candidates and political parties can appeal these results in the period of three days, this legal period starts tomorrow,” Judge Ahmed said, adding that all their offices in the four provinces will be open to receive complaints.
The Kurdistan Region parliamentary elections on October 20 was a particularly different vote with the legislature downsized to 100 seats from 111 after a landmark Iraqi court ruling that stripped the 11 seats reserved for ethnic and religious minorities, later reinstated a quota of five seats within the 100.
The Assyrian, Chaldean, and Syriac Christian communities, along with the Turkmens, were allocated one seat each in Erbil and Sulaimani provinces, while Christians also received a seat in Duhok.
Ramy Noori Syawish, the incumbent district mayor of Ankawa, a Christian-majority area near Erbil city, won the race for the Christian quota seat in Erbil.
In Erbil’s Turkmen quota, former deputy Kurdistan parliament speaker Muna Kahveci secured the seat.
Babylon’s candidate Dana Amanj Najeeb claimed the Christian seat in Sulaimani while Najdat Mohammed won the province’s Turkmen seat.
The Christian seat in Duhok province was won by James Hassado.
The polls saw a voter turnout of 72 percent, with over two million people across the Region casting their votes, according to IHEC.
