Less than a week after every single member of the Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) of Iraq tendered their resignation, they have all unilaterally unresigned, and will resume work on April’s election.
The resignations came amid a dispute about interpretations of the election law, and conflicting orders from parliament, the cabinet and the judiciary over how to use it to ban undesirable candidates from running.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has repeatedly used the electoral laws and other de-Baathification rules to undercut Sunni candidates, seeing popular candidates unilaterally banned before the vote and, on occasion, banning them after they’ve already won.
Noteworthy in the retracted resignation is that nothing was settled on this account, nor were any of IHEC’s concerns publicly addressed. The problems, it seems, will simply carry over into the election yet again.
