Iraq’s Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) is struggling to tabulate election results after a major technology failure during the special voting phase of the Provincial Council Elections held on December 16.
The Alliance of Networks and National Organizations for Monitoring Elections (ANNOME), a local institution overseeing the election reported that electronic counting devices failed to transmit results in 70% of voting stations.
The issue forced the IHEC to manually count and sort ballots after transferring the ballot boxes to central audit centers in the governorates. Meanwhile, officials are urging the public to maintain peace and patience as they work diligently to sort and confirm the election results.
Miru Systems, the technology provider headquartered in South Korea, admitted to the glitches affecting the election's integrity. In an email communication with Iraq’s Independent High Electoral Commission, the company stated, “Our company would like to show that there was a technical defect in sending a number of special voting stations.”
ANNOME also reported that the region of Kurdistan experienced one of the highest malfunction rates where more than 75% of the electronic devices failed. The problem was not isolated there; it also spread to other regions including Wasit, Maysan, Kirkuk, Nineveh, Baghdad, and Sulaymaniyah.
Sajjad Salem, a member of the Iraqi Parliament, revealed that warnings about the electronic devices' functionality had already surfaced in the months leading up to the election, specifically since the previous September. The election commission dismissed the warnings and assured that those glitches had been resolved.
Miru Systems faced similar problems in Iraq five years ago when authorities had to annul votes from 1,000 polling stations in 2018.
This election chaos highlights an urgent need for stringent oversight and failsafe procedures to safeguard the electoral integrity in Iraq's democratic process. The election is scheduled to resume on Monday, December 18.
