New electronic system to speed up poll results

BAGHDAD: A new electronic system will deliver the results of Iraq’s upcoming national election within hours of polls closing, the country’s chief electoral officer said, a marked improvement from previous years when it took weeks to announce the outcome.

Iraqis head to the polls on May 12 and will be using an electronic voting system for the first time.

“The results will be announced in hours, not days,” Riyadh Al Badran, the Chief Electoral Officer of the Independent High Electoral Commission, said in a Reuters interview in Baghdad.

“We will have results that accurately reflect the will of the voters,” Badran said, adding that the new system significantly limits the possibilities of voter fraud.

More than 24 million of Iraq’s 37 million people are eligible to vote next month. Iraqi authorities hope to avoid the political tension caused by delays in reporting the results in previous elections.

Under the new system, which replaces the ink-stained fingers indicating who voted that became a symbol of post-Saddam democracy, Iraqi voters will insert ID cards into a machine which will link them to individual ballots using machine-readable codes.

After voters mark the ballots, they put them into a scanner that will tally and record results.