Iraq’s electoral commission said Monday that it is throwing out votes from 227 ballot boxes in last month’s parliamentary elections because of fraud, a tiny percentage of the total vote that shouldn’t greatly affect overall results.
Complaints by Sunni Arab and secular Shiite Muslim parties charging voting fraud and other irregularities have delayed announcement of final results from the Dec. 15 election, slowing negotiations on forming a new, broad-based coalition government.
Election officials annulled some of the boxes because fake ballots were used, said Hussein Hendawi, an official with the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq. The votes of about 53 boxes were annulled because too many votes were cast, he said.
Iraqis cast ballots at about 6,200 voting centers across the country Dec. 15, and there were an average of five ballot boxes at each. So 227 ballot boxes would be about two-thirds of 1 percent of the total vote, which was estimated at about 11 million ballots.
“a tiny percentage of the total vote that shouldn’t greatly affect overall results.”
This may be the strangest sentence I have ever read in politics. So much for ‘every vote counts’.
Voter fraud: I wonder what would happen if something like this were to ever happen in say the United States.