Thirteen cases of voting machines' failure have been reported to the electoral commission in the multi-ethnic city of Kirkuk.
Almost 24 million Iraqi voters to cast ballots today October 10th in Iraq's early general elections to vote for 3,226 candidates vying for 329 parliamentary seats.
The polling stations have opened doors at 7 am throughout the day up to six pm.
Kirkuk office of the Independent High Electoral Commission IHEC, the official body that oversees polls, said 13 machines have stopped all over Kirkuk.
The machines are used to scan fingerprints of the voters by inserting voting card and thumb finger of the voter at the same time. Once the data of the voting ID, ID of the voter and the finger print match, the voter is allowed to vote.
"5 are in Amal Sha'ibi neighborhood south of Kirkuk, one in Asra and mafqudin, another in Tisin neighborhoods, four in Rashad sub-district, southwest of Kirkuk, one in Daquq district south of Kirkuk, another in Dubiz northwest of Kirkuk," said Ali Abbas media officer of IHEC Kirkuk office.
"The deficit is due to technical issue and maintenance teams will fix all machines. Some of the observers are old-aged and can't fix electronic problems despite the training they had," he added.
Over one million voters out of 1.6 million residents of the multi-ethnic province of Kirkuk, one of the disputed territories, are going to cast ballots to nominate 12 candidates to Iraqi parliament, three of it for women plus a seat for the Christian community.
Out of 130 competitors, only 33 of them are women. Kirkuk is divided into the three electoral districts and 315 ballot stations.
"We were waiting in a queue to vote when we were told there is a small technical problem with the voting machine but later we found out three stations have problems in Qanat School in Riyadh," Burhan Asafi told KirkukNow.
Asafi said the voters were discouraged due to the slow process.
There are over 55,000 polling stations all over Iraq and only 450 voters can cast ballots in a station.
