Baghdad, March 15: Electoral officials say that software problems have delayed the count for this month’s general election but some politicians are now alleging fraud.
Faraj al-Haidari, head of the Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC), told reporters on Sunday that early in the process, its data entry system had been unable to cope with the volume of information being inputted.
“The first and the second days, there were a very high number of tally sheets,” he said. “The server was not able to cope with it and crashed several times.
“We changed our procedures and now the work is going on,” he added, without elaborating.
But an election official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the computer system crashed again on Sunday.
The computer crashes have worsened what was already expected to be a time-consuming process. The United Nations, which is advising Iraq on election procedures, warned last month that full results were not expected until March 18.
Hundreds of election workers on two six-hour shifts input tally sheets sent to Baghdad under armed guard from 46,000 polling stations in Iraq’s 18 provinces.
Once at the data entry centre, the tally sheets are subject to a “blind double data entry”. An election worker will initially enter figures from one tally sheet into IHEC’s system before the sheet is then transported to a separate location within the centre.
It is then entered by another election worker, who cannot see the figures inputted earlier. Any discrepancies between the two tallies will be flagged by IHEC’s computer system, and will be corrected by a third dedicated section.
So, as of Monday morning, the election commission had released figures for southern Diwaniyah province based on just a tenth of votes cast.
“Delaying the results is not in the interests of any of the political blocs,” said Intisar Allawi, a senior candidate for the secular Iraqiya bloc, which is led by her relative and ex-premier Iyad Allawi.
“Everyone knows there is forgery taking place inside the commission and, if we announce the results quickly, we will be able to stop this.”
However, IEC vice chairman Amal Bayraktar said on Friday that fraud in the data entry centre was all but impossible.
“Nobody can make fraud in the data entry centre because we have so many checks to catch them,” she said.
Further lengthening the time required is Iraq’s complex system of proportional representation, which features more than 6,000 candidates competing for 325 parliamentary seats.
For Baghdad, Iraq’s biggest province in terms of seats, initial election results, based on 18 percent of ballots and posted on IHEC’s website span a whopping 35 pages.
—Agencies