Lawmaker: Parliament eyes amending election law to change voting results
elections (representational photo)
Baghdad (Iraqinews.com) – An Iraqi lawmaker has accused the House of Representatives of violating the constitution after it embarked on amending the elections law in a bid to change voting results of May 12 parliamentary polls.
“The House of Representatives went ahead with amending the elections law in order to change results of parliamentary elections by means of recounting votes manually and cancelling some constituencies,” MP Zainab al-Sahlani told Knooz Media Tuesday.
Sahlani stressed that the Iraqi parliament, according to the constitution, is idle now and “has no power to discuss or even amend any law, except in emergency cases, which makes it necessary to legislate some important laws for the country.”
The Iraqi lawmaker further noted that the Federal Supreme Court of Iraq is the only body entitled to look into and decide on any complaints or challenges related to parliamentary elections.
Earlier this week, a parliamentary fact-finding committee revealed that it has clear evidence of vote-rigging in the May 12 parliamentary elections, the first in the country since the defeat of Islamic State last year.
“The parliament’s fact-finding committee received strong evidence that there were manipulation and fraud in the recent parliamentary polls,” the committee’s head Adel Nuri told Iraqi website Alghad Press, vowing to take legal action against perpetrators of rigging the vote.
Nuri described the Iraqi Independent High Electoral Commission, which ran the polls, as a “non-independent body” after it dealt with Iraq’s political blocs in a non-neutral way.
Iraq’s parliamentary elections decide the 329 members of the House of Representatives who will in turn elect the Iraqi president and prime minister.
The elections were originally scheduled for September 2017, but were delayed due to the country’s fight against Islamic State, which ended in December 2017 with the recapture of their remaining territories.
Even with more than 10 million Iraqis voting, the election saw a record low turnout, with 44 percent of eligible voters casting ballots.