By Michael Rubin:

On September 30, 2018, Iraqi Kurds once again went to the polls to choose a regional parliament. Because citizens and officials lodged more than 1,000 complaints with regard to fraud, the Independent High Elections and Referendum Commission took three weeks to certify the results. Neither the results nor their certification surprised observers. After all, the regional election commission is not, as its name suggests, independent. Rather, it is beholden to party leaders. The regional government itself chose and funded monitors who were neither able to monitor polling stations rigorously or to the professional standards established by non-participating independent monitoring groups such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the National Democratic Institute, or the Carter Center.

While Masoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) can claim victory and the Talabani family’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) will accept its runner-up status so long as it can dominate Sulaymani, the real problem may be more than disenfranchisement of individual voters or the corrosive cynicism that now permeates Kurdish society. Rather, the specific method of much of the fraud will have ramifications far beyond election day.

According to civil society leaders and politicians with whom I spoke during a trip to Iraqi Kurdistan earlier this month, both the KDP and PUK reportedly provided peshmerga and party cadres with multiple voter identification cards in order to inflate their election tally: Each card had fake names but a real photo of the individual to which they were issued and legitimate biometric data for that individual. In many cases, ten fraudulent cards each with a valid chip were issued to single individuals to allow them to vote ten separate times. In one case, a party member in Kuysanjaq bragged that he had received over two hundreds separate cards, each with separate identities but his picture. Such cards helped the KDP and PUK maintain their grip on power but neither party made any effort either to collect or destroy the cards after the election.