BAGHDAD: The electoral commission has sent results from 17 of Iraq’s provinces in its March 7 poll for ratification by the supreme court, with Baghdad the lone exception, an election official said on Sunday.
Authorities have been carrying out a recount in Baghdad, Iraq’s biggest electoral constituency with 68 of the 325 parliamentary seats up for grabs, since last week.
"We decided to send election results for 17 of the provinces, except for Baghdad, to the federal supreme court," Qassim Al-Abboudi, spokesman for the Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC), told AFP.
Abboudi added that three of the eight seats reserved for minorities would also be sent to the supreme court for ratification, with five Christian seats and seven national compensatory seats being held back.
Saad Al-Rawi, an IHEC official, added that the results from the vote held two months ago were sent to the court at the request of the presidency council, made up of President Jalal Talabani and Iraq’s two vice presidents.
If all of the results are ratified, 245 of parliament’s 325 seats will have been finalized.
Complicating the supreme court’s job is the fact that nine election-winning candidates are awaiting a ruling on whether or not they will be allowed to take office, having been barred for their alleged links to executed dictator Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.
One winning candidate, from the Iraqiya bloc of secular former premier Iyad Allawi, has already been disqualified.
Of the nine candidates, only four were running in Baghdad, with one each coming from Anbar, Nineveh and Babil provinces respectively, all three of which were sent to the court.
Rawi said the IHEC had sent its own remarks and notes to the supreme court along with the results it had tabulated.
Full results from the parliamentary election were initially expected to be ratified in early April, but counting delays, multiple complaints and appeals from political groups have set this back.
The Iraqiya bloc won the most seats in the vote with 91, followed closely by sitting Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki’s State of Law Alliance with 89, according to the full results for the 18 provinces.
The Iraqi National Alliance (INA), a coalition led by Shiite religious groups, finished third with 70 seats.
State of Law and the INA announced on Wednesday that they had struck a deal to form a coalition, but with their alliance so far falling four seats short of a parliamentary majority.
The final number of seats gained by each party could yet change, however, as the IHEC is conducting a manual recount of votes in Baghdad, where Maliki won 26 seats to Allawi’s 24, while the INA won 17.
