Voters registration turnout dropped by 36% between 2005 and 2018, PUK leader says

Shafaq News/ A leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) shed light on the "frightening" deterioration of the voter registration in Iraq and Kurdistan, calling the political parties to pay heeds to statistics and polls.

The Joint leader of the Supreme political council of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), Mala Bakhtiar, said, "Elections is the art of harvesting votes on one hand, and total reliance on statistics and polls on the other hand," deeming the neglect of stats as "leaving it to fate" and "handing victory" to rivals.

In a Facebook post titled "The Elections' statistics...frightening", Bakhtiar said that the registration for the elections dropped by 36% in 2018 compared to 2005.

Bakhtiar reviewed the data of biometric registration of voters, "In Erbil, of 1,000,222 registered voters, 741,000 renewed their registration. In al-Sulaymaniyah, only 913,199 people renewed registration out of 1,000,361. For Duhok, 583,216 out of 827,657 voters renewed their IDs.

The PUK leader said that out of 25,139,379 registered voters nationwide, only "1600025" had visited the biometric registration centers, statistics deemed by Bakhtiar as "frightening".