IHEC: Low elections participation in Duhok due to technical issues
Shafaq News/ On Sunday, the Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) in Duhok province announced that the voter turnout in the electoral process has been below expectations so far, noting that the province used to record the highest turnout rates in previous elections.
Khaled Abbas, director of the IHEC office in Duhok, told Shafaq News that “the electoral process faced some technical issues related to the devices used in voting, but the maintenance teams were able to deal with them immediately.”
He added that challenges faced reading the fingerprints of some voters during biometric voting. Statistics showed that about 5% of those whose fingerprints were not read in the biometric process will be entitled to vote. However, “anyone whose fingerprints were not read will be definitively deprived of casting his vote during the voting process in compliance with the Commission's rules.”
Abbas expressed his concern about the possibility of an “increase in voter turnout at polling stations in the last hours of voting, which may lead to great pressure on the centers and affect the smooth flow of the electoral process.”
The voting process in the Kurdistan Region, which began on Sunday, faced some issues, most notably the failure to register fingerprints for some voters, particularly the elderly, according to Shafaq News correspondent.
The Independent High Electoral Commission of Iraq (IHEC) opened 1,622 polling stations at 07:00 a.m. for eligible residents across the Region, with a total of 2,683,618 eligible voters out of 2,899,578 registered voters.
The commission announced on Friday that 97% of voters in the special voting—comprising 215,960 members of the Peshmerga and internal security forces—had participated, confirming that the process ran smoothly with no significant violations reported.
A total of 1,091 candidates from both genders are competing for 100 seats in the Kurdistan Parliament, five of which are reserved for minority groups. This number has been reduced from 11 seats following a decision by the Federal Supreme Court, Iraq's highest judicial authority.
According to the electoral law, at least 30 seats must be allocated to women.
The race is spread across four provinces: 32 seats in the capital, Erbil, 36 in Al-Sulaymaniyah, 24 in Duhok, and three in Halabja. The five quota seats for minorities are divided as follows: two in Erbil, two in Sulaymaniyah, and one in Duhok.
The legislative election in Kurdistan has been delayed four times over the past two years due to political disputes. It was originally scheduled for 2022.
Since its establishment in the early 1990s, the Kurdistan Region has held five parliamentaryterms.
