BAGHDAD, May 19 (Xinhua) -- The Iraqi parliament on Saturday called for measures to instill confidence in the election process after complaints by political entities of alleged irregularities and forgery.
The parliament Speaker Salim al-Jubouri said the parliament will send a letter to the Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) "to take all means that include confidence in the electoral process, including random (manual) counting."
The measures also include "providing the political entities with photos of the results and to verify the process of matching the data with many ballot boxes, in addition to demanding the electoral judiciary panel to deal carefully and impartially with the appeals submitted by the political entities," Jubouri said.
Early on Saturday, IHEC announced the final results of the parliamentary elections, which showed that the political coalition al-Sa'iroon, led by the prominent Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, won 54 seats in the upcoming 329-seat parliament.
In the afternoon, the parliament held an emergency session to discuss the results of the parliamentary elections, but the lawmakers failed to make quorum with the presence of 110 lawmakers out of the current 328-seat parliament, turning the session to be a consultation one.
On Thursday, Jubouri called for an emergency session at 1:00 p.m. (1000 GMT) on Saturday on the request of some 80 lawmakers to discuss the results of the parliamentary elections.
Many Iraqi parties, especially in the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan and some disputed areas, have complained about alleged irregularities and forgery in the parliamentary election.
The complaints put the electoral commission under pressure to carry out manual recount of many ballot boxes. It had only collected the electronic count of the votes.
On Thursday, the United Nations special envoy to Iraq Jan Kubis issued a statement, calling on the IHEC to carry out an immediate and thorough investigation into all complaints concerning the election.
Earlier, Riyadh al-Badran, head of the electoral commission, told a press conference that "there is no justification for a manual recount yet" despite many accusations of voter fraud.
On May 12, millions of Iraqis went to 8,959 polling centers across the country to vote for their parliamentary representatives in the first general election after Iraq's historic victory over the Islamic State (IS) group last December.
Some 90 political entities and 7,000 candidates were vying for 329 seats in the parliament.
