ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Iraq’s electoral commission announced on Sunday it has finished counting votes from last week’s federal parliamentary elections and begun allocating seats, including women’s and minority quota seats, with final results expected within 24 hours.
"Today, the commission will begin counting seats and the seats for women and minority quotas, and it is possible that the final election results will be announced today or tomorrow,” Jumana al-Ghalai, spokesperson of the Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC), told Rudaw early Sunday.
She said that the preliminary results were checked and matched “100 percent” and that no significant changes were found. She noted that the commission has also started calculating seat distributions.
Ghalai added that provincial election offices have begun issuing result strips to alliances, parties, and candidates.
The IHEC announced preliminary results on Wednesday, with Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani’s coalition securing more than 1.3 million votes, equivalent to 45 seats, according to Rudaw’s calculations.
The vote was Iraq’s sixth parliamentary election since the fall of the Baath regime in 2003. Turnout exceeded 56 percent, surpassing expectations and well above the 41 percent recorded in the October 2021 elections.
Once the final results are released, the appeals portal will be available for three days on the commission’s website. The IHEC will then spend seven working days reviewing appeals before sending them to the Electoral Judicial Panel, which must rule on all cases within ten days. Afterward, the Board of Commissioners will forward the certified results and names of winning candidates to the Federal Supreme Court for ratification.
Ghalai said on Saturday that the commission had received 102 complaints about the parliamentary elections, though they are not expected to affect the results. Fifty-nine of them relate to the general vote on November 11 and 43 to the early vote two days earlier. The total is less than a third of the complaints filed after the 2021 election.
Most complaints were categorized as yellow, meaning they do not meet legal conditions and are dismissed. A small number were classified as green, involving alleged violations by commission staff, campaigning on voting day, or misconduct by security forces at polling stations. These require administrative investigation but do not affect outcomes.
Nahro Mohammed contributed to this report.