?Kurdish security personnel enter a polling center in Erbil Province in the Kurdistan region, Iraq, on Sept. 28, 2018. The semi-autonomous Kurdistan region in northern Iraq on Friday held its early parliamentary vote with participation of more than 170,000 Kurdish security personnel eligible to cast their ballots. (Xinhua/Yasser Jawad)
BAGHDAD, Sept. 28 (Xinhua) -- The semi-autonomous Kurdistan region in northern Iraq on Friday held its early parliamentary vote with participation of more than 170,000 Kurdish security personnel eligible to cast their ballots.
Sherwan Zarar, spokesman of the regional Independent High Electoral and Referendum Commission, said the voting started at 7 a.m. (0400 GMT) at 93 polling centers distributed across the three provinces of Erbil, Sulaimaniyah and Dohuk in the region.
The voting by the regional members of the Kurdish security forces, including Peshmerga and Asayish, will continue until 6 p.m. (1500 GMT), Zara added.
The vote counting will start immediately after the closure of the polling centers, but the result may not be announced immediately after the counting is finished, he noted.
The early vote comes ahead of the regional parliamentary elections on Sept. 30, when about 3 million eligible voters will cast their ballots for more than 700 candidates within 28 lists vying for the 111 seats in the regional legislature.
Under the quota system, the Kurdish political parties will take 100 seats, while the minority groups will share the remaining 11 ones.
The Kurdish parliamentary elections came more than four months after the Iraqi national elections on May 12, which were fraught with allegations of fraud and have yet to result in a new federal government.
The elections are the fifth of their kind since the Iraqi Kurds established the region in 1991.?
