Voting Registration Problems In Kirkuk?
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Elections, The War On Terrorism, WarThe elections in Iraq are on Thursday, but the confidence of some voter rolls are already coming into question.
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 11 - With just four days to go until parliamentary elections, the Iraqi electoral commission said today that it had found irregularities in voter registration in the volatile northern oil city of Kirkuk.The discovery was the first instance of an election irregularity announced by the commission as the country prepared for the vote on Thursday.
The commission said experts conducting an audit of voter lists found that there had been an unexpected surge in voter registration in the area. When the experts scrutinized the voter registration forms, the commission said in a written statement, they found that many had been filled out incorrectly. Some had missing signatures and others had more than one signature. In some cases, the same name appeared on several forms.
Adel al-Lami, the director general of the Iraqi electoral commission, said in an interview that in his view the voter registration irregularities were technical errors and not politically motivated. “Please stay away from political conspiracies,” he said. “There’s no political reason for this.”
Hopefully these irregularities can be cleared pre-election, although something tells me that they won’t be and we’ll simply have to rely on the assurances that this isn’t a conspiracy.
Personally, I’d much rather see some clear signs that these problems are simply malfunctions, but I doubt we’ll get that kind of assurance before the elections. Too bad.
This entry was posted on Monday, December 12th, 2005 and is filed under Elections, The War On Terrorism, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
December 13th, 2005 at 1:01 am
I can only smile and wonder what the level of inaccuracy is in US voting records. I had no trouble registering (legitimately) in the US from here in Australia via the net. In Australia they actually go door to door and check the roll. Given the negative implications of the report’s second paragraph stating that this is the first announcement of this kind I am suspicious that irregularities are going to be used to try delegitimize this election. Fairness demands mention that irregularities in the constitutional vote were extensively investigated. The election authorities have been working on this issue all along and it is not a newly discovered problem as the article implies. I wouldn’t panic any time soon.