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Iraqi poll body rejects criticism
The Independent High Electoral Commission of Iraq (IHEC) has fought back against its critics, after a day of fielding accusations of fraud, malpractice and incompetence. The IHEC is responsible for counting the votes in the March 7 general elections, and for investigating complaints about the voting process.In frank interviews with Al Jazeera, senior figures in IHEC expressed frustration and indignation at the slew of criticisms. They were fully backed up by officials at Unami - the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (TK) - who are dismayed and disappointed at the allegations. There's a surprise ... Faraj al-Hayderi, the chairman of IHEC, lashed out at Struan Stevenson, a European MP who had issued a statement claiming there were "suspicious delays" in announcing the results, and that "widespread fraud during the elections ... amounted to a plan to drive Iraq into a crisis". Al-Hayderi said the allegations were a "complete fabrication", and that Stevenson had no professional contact with the many EU observers who had been stationed in Iraq for the vote. "He had nothing to do with the Iraqi elections. He's sitting over in Brussels and it's his own opinion," al-Hayderi said. "He has to do something to protect his phoney-baloney job!" Concerns about IHEC's ability to handle the volume of paperwork and computer programming involved in processing the election results of about 50,000 polling stations began to emerge when the commission cancelled a scheduled news conference on Tuesday when it had hoped to announce some of the preliminary results. This led to claims that the count was falling behind schedule. But on the day the results began to emerge, Sandra Mitchell, Unami director of elections, denied those claims. "The chairman of IHEC said it would take four days [from the elections]. Today is that day," Mitchell said. "From the UN's perspective, there is no delay and the counts are being released on schedule as planned." She also defended IHEC against charges that it was understaffed, pointing out that they had three times the staff assigned to work on the provincial elections in 2009. "I don't think you could get many more staff into this facility, or that they could work any harder," Mitchell said. But the allegations took on a more damaging turn when an article in the New York Times on Friday - since withdrawn by the editor, and replaced with a far more measured piece - claimed that the IHEC computer system was "overloaded and crashed for hours on Wednesday". So the NYT isn't content to wreck America ... That was a malicious distortion, Qasem al-Aboudi, an IHAC spokesman, said. He explained that the vast amount of data being processed for the election - the software required scans of the original documents to be entered into the database - means the server has to be reset once a day. "It was not a crash - it was a routine service. At the start it took up to three hours, but now we are much quicker," al-Aboudi said. Posted by: Steve White 2010-03-13 |
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