الأحــكـام الجــنائـيــة للــتـــزويــر الإنـتـخـابــي ( دراســـة مــقـــارنــــة )

Rp- The Criminal Provisions for the Electoral Fraud ( A Comparative Study). pdf

Abstract
This study is related to the crime of the Electoral Counterfeit by describing it as one of the dangerous crimes that affecting the integrity of the elections, as the legislator stipulated in the Iraqi Parliament Elections Law No. (9) for the year 2020 to criminalize some forms of the particular criminal behavior which are related to it within the electoral crimes, and the crime was distinguished by the fact that it is no longer limited to the electoral counterfeit that occurs on the paper documents, but rather it is extended to the electronic documents as a result of the reliance of the administration on technology in the recent elections. The criminal provisions for the electoral counterfeit included all the particular legal provisions that are related to the counterfeit that occurs in the elections, whether they were mentioned in the general punitive laws such as the Penal Code or special texts of election laws, in addition to the texts of the international declarations, international covenants, and constitutions that, even if they do not refer to a direct text that criminalizes the electoral counterfeit, but it indirectly referred to this by urging attention to the elections and their integrity, and this is only achieved through deterrent texts that criminalize all behaviors that affect the integrity of the right to vote in the elections, noting that these texts must overcome the stalemate to keep pace with the development of the form and dimensions of the crime, with the expansion of the scope of the criminal responsibility. Counterfeit may be committed by any other party, whether participating in the elections or not.
The criminal protection against forgery is not integrated with the existence of a text that punishes it after its occurrence. Rather, there is greater importance to the role of the preventive aspect in all stages of the electoral process, starting from the registration of the voters until the announcing of the results which are represented by international monitoring and binding procedures determined by the legislator, should be used by the electoral administration step by step. Also, the occurrence of the forgery is not confined to a certain stage without another, as the possibility of the occurring of the crime may happen in all cases, in addition to the role of complaints procedures and how quickly to look at the appeals by the competent authority, as the delay and slow procedures lead to impunity for the perpetrators and the achievement of a goal of the counterfeiters in the elections.
As a result of this study, it is found that the legislator does not expressly stipulate the crime and limit it to some forms of the criminal behavior, so the matter must be referred to the provisions of the Iraqi Penal Code, which is limited the protection of the paper documents from forgery without electronic ones, with the absence of the legislation that criminalizes assaulting the official electronic documents, in addition to the fact that the Iraqi legislator with regard to the forgery of the electoral papers, he referred to a counterfeit crime of the election ticket only and not other electoral papers. As for the penalty, the legislator made the penalty for a counterfeit crime in the elections lighter in comparison to penalty for an ordinary counterfeit crime that is mentioned in the Penal Code. As for the procedural level, the legislator does not signal it out with a particular specificity, as he entrusts the issue of the investigation to the Board of Commissioners according to a lengthy procedural mechanism and in case that it is proven that the counterfeit crime has occurred, it is referred to the court, so that the ordinary procedures similar to the procedures of the ordinary counterfeit crime start. The researcher through this study asks the legislator to emphasize the punishment of the crime with stipulating it in an explicit form, and setting special procedures for it in terms of the investigation, with allocating a specialized court to consider the case.
Dr. Shaymaa A. Abdulameer Kareem Alkhafagy
Ph.D. in Linguistics