23 Nov 2021; MEMO: Iraq's High Electoral Commission yesterday announced that it will start manually recounting votes in 870 electoral stations based on judicial orders, Anadolu news agency reported.
The agency quoted Imad Jamil, a member of the commission's media team, as saying that the manual recount came upon the order of the Elections Judicial Commission, which accepted 21 appeals filed against the results in 870 stations, noting that the process could change the preliminary results of the elections.
The Electoral Commission had previously settled 1,415 appeals approved by the judiciary, including 68 appeals that resulted in a manual recount of the votes, without changing the preliminary results.
According to the preliminary results, the Sadr bloc, led by Muqtada Al-Sadr, ranked first with 73 seats out of 329, followed by Progress bloc, led by former Parliament Speaker Muhammad Al-Halbousi with 38 seats.
Major Shia alliances in the country have, however, rejected the elections results as "inaccurate".
