Parliament has no power to annul vote results: Al-Sadr

By Ali Jawad

BAGHDAD (AA) – The Iraqi parliament has no jurisdiction to annul the results of the country’s parliamentary election, firebrand Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr said Sunday.

In a statement, al-Sadr’s spokesman Jaafar al-Moussawi said the election commission is responsible for looking into complaints about the vote results.

“What the parliament is doing is an attempt to violate the powers of other authorities,” he said.

Al-Sadr's Sairoon coalition won 54 parliamentary seats in the May 12 polls, followed by a Hashd al-Shaabi-linked coalition (47 seats) and Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi's Victory bloc (42 seats), according to the election commission.

The vote results, however, were greeted with widespread fraud allegations during the polls.

Last week, the electoral commission announced that it had annulled all ballots cast in 103 polling stations in the Baghdad, Anbar, Nineveh, Saladin, and Erbil provinces and the Iraqi government formed a commission to look into the fraud allegations.

On Sunday, Parliament Speaker Salim al-Jabouri called the assembly to convene on Monday to vote on annulling the vote results, after 85 MPs called for a parliamentary session to discuss the alleged vote fraud.

The parliamentary election was the first since Iraq declared victory over the Daesh terrorist group after a 3-year war.