With no election in sight, KDP announces app for election results

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — With the scheduled parliamentary election in Kurdistan increasingly expected to be postponed, and with the powerful Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), headed by Masoud Barzani, apparently willing to boycott the Iraqi elections, the party says it has created an application able to get election polling results minute by minute, entered by party members at the poll stations to fight off uncertainty that looms in the days following election.

 

“The KDP has created an application for the election so that during the [process] of counting the votes in the elections, it can get the changes in the shortest time,” Karwan Jalal, the head of the party’s branch in Erbil told Rudaw on Thursday. “We successfully tested the application today in the presence of a great number of our leaders.”

 

As the results start to come out, the party representatives at the polling stations would enter the results into the new system using encrypted methods.

 

Jalal said it will enable the party to get to know the “changes” of the election “minute by minute” like much of the rest of the world.

 

In Kurdistan, like in the rest of Iraq, it often takes days, even weeks, before official results are announced. In this time span, political parties desperately wage campaigns through the media, fueled by their own figures produced independently of other parties, and usually independent of the official election commission.

 

The system could help the KDP and the other parties, which use more traditional means, collect data to contest the official results.

 

During the 2014 elections in which Kurdistan Region voted both for the Iraqi parliament, and the provincial council, the Gorran Movement and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) continued its die-hard campaign even after the election day, with each side claiming victory.

 

The primary disagreement centered around the main counting station in the city of Sulaimani, where the two parties have their strongholds, with Gorran claiming that the PUK had tried to change the results in their favour, while the PUK denied the allegation.

 

The final results were 12 to 11 seats in favour of the Gorran.

 

Some political parties have expressed their doubts about the official figures accusing members of the electoral commission stand of partisanship.