Shafaq News – Nineveh

National Security forces in Nineveh detained eight people on Tuesday in eastern Mosul of Nineveh Province with 2,500 voter cards, a security source told Shafaq News.

The source said the suspects had been collecting the cards “illegally for specific parliamentary candidates and were caught in a series of targeted ambushes.” Judicial authorities placed them in custody, while the National Security Directorate pursues investigations to identify the political actors or candidates behind the scheme.

How Voter Card Fraud Works

Security experts note that voter card exploitation often follows a pattern:

-Political operatives or associates of a candidate gather large numbers of voter cards.

-They enter personal information from the cards into the biometric registration system.

-Instead of recording the legitimate voter’s fingerprint, they register a forged or substitute print.

-On election day, the system validates the false fingerprint, enabling an unauthorized person to cast the ballot.

Such schemes typically exploit weaknesses in enrollment, loose oversight of card handling, or the complicity of registration staff. If biometric systems lack “liveness detection” or strong audit trails, the fraud becomes harder to detect.

Read more: Money, power, and ballots: Iraq's struggle against electoral fraud