Iraqi court to oversee manual vote recount

BAGHDAD — Iraq’s Supreme Court will oversee a manual recount of ballots from last month’s election, according to an announcement Thursday, as a crescendo of fraud complaints and criticism of the country’s electoral commission threatened to undermine the legitimacy of the tightly contested vote.

The announcement from the court came in response to an unusual and politically tinged vote in Parliament on Wednesday in which lawmakers — including many who had apparently lost their seats in the election — amended the election law to demand a manual recount overseen by a panel of judges. The May 12 election appeared to result in a surprising victory for the coalition led by Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, overturning a political establishment that has been entrenched since 2005.

Since the election result, politicians have made a barrage of complaints about voting irregularities, often without citing any evidence, and have made competing demands to address those flaws. The vote and its aftermath have crystallized pent-up frustration among Iraqi political parties and the international community about the performance of the Independent High Electoral Commission of Iraq, the quasi-autonomous agency that oversees campaigns and elections. Informal results from the vote showed that al-Sadr’s Sairoon alliance, favored by many working-class and leftist voters, had won 54 of 329 seats in Parliament. Fatah, the bloc of popular Shiite militia figures who earned respect for their defense of the nation against the Islamic State group, placed second with 47 seats. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s Nasr bloc came in third with 42 seats.

The results, however, have not been ratified, as the country has waited for the electoral commission to investigate allegations of isolated cases of fraud and reports of multiple technical malfunctions in new electronic ballot machines.