Peregraf - Invalid ballots emerged as the third-largest vote category in the Kurdistan Region during special voting for Iraq’s parliamentary elections held yesterday, totaling roughly 40,000 ballots - ranking behind only the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), according to Peregraf’s monitoring.
Election officials rely on electronic vote counting. Under Iraqi electoral rules, ballots are void if the voter selects more than one party list. According to Peregraf’s follow-up, a significant share of invalid ballots stemmed from improper marking, while others were intentionally spoiled.
Some voters mistakenly selected both a political party and a minority-quota candidate, unaware that doing so would nullify their ballot. Election observers say that this confusion was partly linked to efforts by the KDP and PUK to steer some members of the special vote - particularly Peshmerga and internal security forces - toward quota candidates close to their parties, which may have encouraged double-marking.
In certain cases, voters were reportedly pressured to photograph their ballots - despite a ban on mobile phones - prompting some to deliberately spoil their votes after taking pictures, marking multiple lists to render the ballot unusable.
Regional Breakdown
The highest number of invalid ballots occurred in Sulaymaniyah, at about 20,000, followed by Erbil with roughly 13,000, and Duhok with nearly 5,000. When combined, these ballots outnumbered votes cast for any opposition party in the Kurdistan Region.
Special voting turnout in the Kurdistan Region exceeded 96%, contributing to an overall special voting rate of more than 82% nationwide, according to the election commission.
Across Iraq, Sulaymaniyah posted the highest participation rate at 98.16%, followed by Erbil (97.79%) and Duhok (91.66%), while Baghdad-Rusafa recorded the lowest at 70.37%.
The commission said only four appeals were submitted over the special vote process.
Scope of the Special Vote
More than 270,000 security personnel from the Kurdistan Region’s Ministry of Peshmerga and Ministry of Interior were eligible to vote. Across Iraq, more than one million security-force members participated, in addition to over 26,000 internally displaced persons.
The general parliamentary election is scheduled for tomorrow. Several parties and political figures have urged a boycott, leaving voters split between participation and abstention.
According to Peregraf’s findings, 700,000 people in the Kurdistan Region - roughly 18.4% of eligible voters - cannot vote because they did not update their voter registration. That group is effectively excluded from the process, amounting to what analysts call a de-facto pre-election boycott.