Kurdistan
A person casting his vote in the Kurdistan Region's 2009 parliamentary elections. File photo: AFP
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The Iraqi Electoral body on Thursday said that over 3.6 million citizens of the Kurdistan Region are eligible to vote in the upcoming parliamentary elections, adding that they are awaiting a directive from the Region’s presidency to start preparations.
“According to the latest statistics of the [electoral] commission, there are 3,641,566 electorates in the Kurdistan Region,” Jumana al-Ghalai, a spokesperson of Iraq’s Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) told Rudaw.
According to Ghalai, there are 173 voter registry points in the Region, adding that most of the Region’s electorates are in the Sulaimani province, followed by Erbil and Duhok respectively.
The IHEC said in a letter to the Kurdistan Region Presidency, signed on Tuesday but publicized a day later, that it cannot hold the Region’s general poll on its originally scheduled date of November 18 or simultaneously with Iraqi provincial elections a month later, as the Region’s presidency requested a week prior.
In the letter, the commission suggested February 18, 2024 as the date to hold the parliamentary elections, three months after the date originally scheduled by the Region’s presidency.
Iraq’s Federal Supreme Court in late May ruled against the Kurdistan Region’s parliament decision to extend its term by an additional year, declaring that the term of the legislature had ended and that the self-extension was unconstitutional.
A new parliamentary election was set to be held in October 2022, but disagreements between Kurdish political parties over the existing elections law and the electoral commission prevented the process from being conducted on its scheduled time and pushed the legislature to extend its four-year term for an additional year.
With Kurdish lawmakers having failed to reactivate the regional electoral commission before the self-extension and all decisions from the parliament thereafter declared null by the Supreme Court, the IHEC has been tasked with carrying out the poll.
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