Some nuance here from Ahmad al-Asadi on Fatah Alliance's "rejection" of the announced results. He emphasizes they are not claiming fraud in the vote, but incorrect announcement of selective, partial results as if they were final.
Aware of skepticism many will have of an alliance of groups with armed wings, Asadi is at pains to emphasize that their opposition to the announced results will be solely through peaceful, legal means.
Asadi is also at pains to emphasize that Fatah is not claiming that IHEC manipulated the results, but simply made a mistake in the selective announcement of them. He assures supporters that final results will be different, & better for Fatah, than previously announced.
This seems to confirm the point Asadi was making about the results changing.
If this turns out to be correct, & Fatah has seats go up and others naturally must come down, this is a huge foul up. In any democracy you don't want to do this, but esp one like Iraq, where factions have armed wings, men with guns & maybe nothing to do if their party loses.
Also, Asadi said that they have sources inside IHEC who have told them their results will be different when "new" results are posted. This is a terrible way to do this.
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Coalition of the Whining: Allawi, Abadi and Fayyad join those doubting validity of Iraq's election results. alquds.co.uk/%d8%a7%d9%84%d…
I suppose the first point to make here is that Allawi said openly several times in interviews before the election that he had stopped campaigning because it was all a fraud and there was no point. His daughter, Sara Allawi, still campaigned, but not Allawi himself.
This also notes that Fatah has opened a new front, calling for the prosecution of Kathimi advisor for electoral security, Muhannad Naim, based on a statement they say shows he was biased & wanted the results to weaken the major blocs.
What makes this easy is that IHEC's website was terrible beforehand. It looked good in terms of technical design, but in doing research before the election we found it to be useless. Information of outdated and limited in terms of precise info on candidates by district.
This is state TV al-Iraqiya's live feed of information dripping out from IHEC.
Regarding last night's discussion on Sadrist results, in the last couple of hours they are projecting 75-90 seats. If that is correct, the weeks to come will be focused on preventing Sadrist domination to the exclusion of other considerations.
So #Iraq had parliamentary elections today. We await results which are expected w/n 24 hours.
The one result which can be announced is that participation was low. Precise % not released yet, but talk from Iraqi journos is that optimistically they hope it will exceed 40%.
The other observation from multiple sources - some others here on twitter have also noticed this - is that participation from the youth was very low. Participation from older Iraqis appears to have been respectable.
From studying the district candidacies & from what is coming out of multiple Arab TV channels on how it, if there are any big wins they will likely be the Sadrists in Baghdad & the south & Speaker Muhammad al-Halbusi in the Sunni-majority provinces. Specific reasons:
Regarding events in Iraq today: first, this is the text of Abd al-Mahdi's "resignation" statement. I would encourage media to be careful about using the word "resignation" to the extent that implies AAM has left or will imminently leave office. pmo.iq/press2019/29-1…
My take is that this is the end of the beginning of this crisis, not the beginning of the end. AAM simply says "I will submit my formal resignation" to parliament, after noting that he said he was ready to resign last month. There is no clear rule parl't has to accept it.
Notably, AAM's statement contains a lengthy quote from the religious authorities' statement from Karbala today. This is the video of Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani rep Ahmad al-Safi: