Iraq’s parliamentary Security and Defense Committee announced on Saturday that influential parties plan to disrupt electronic ballot processing ahead of the May 12 vote, with the aim of imposing manual counting methods. The accusations claimed that the parties are seeking to falsify the results, which would only be possible if the electronic system is replaced with manual counting. “Information gathered by the committee through my tours in some areas and governorates, especially in hot spots, confirms that there are under the table arrangements between ballot station managers and authoritarian parties, which rely on fraud,” parliaments Security and Defense Committee head Hakim al-Zamili told Asharq Al-Awsat. Agreements struck between ballot monitors and parties seeking a stay in power cover rigging or damaging voting machines in the last hours of elections. Zamili explained that “these parties are addicted to forging results since past periods, and they have stayed in power through influence and money.” More so, the committee issued a statement confirming that “intelligence information revealed attempts of some influential political parties to disrupt electronic voting devices in order to resort to manual counting to falsify the results.” “We sent a letter to the electoral commission stipulating that any station which does not use electronic voting will be discounted from elections, and any station experiencing device malfunctions must not resort to counting votes manually,” Zamili said on countermeasures carried out by the committee. In turn, Dr. Qahtan al- Jubouri, former Tourism Minister and official spokesman of the Sadrist-backed alliance ‘Sa’iroun’, told Asharq Al-Awsat that it is not unlikely for such foul play to take place. Jubouri said many reasons support the possibility of it happening, most notably that there are political parties that strongly hyped the return to manual counting, arguing that voting machines were “rigged.” “We announced our position from the start that we are adopting the electronic counting because it leaves no room for doubt,” he added.