Baghdad: The House of Representatives decided to hold a new voting session to elect the second deputy speaker of parliament, after a short recess this evening, Monday, following a parliamentary debate regarding a number of invalid ballots that appeared during the counting and sorting of votes.

According to National Iraqi News Agency, the candidates in the election were MP Ribwar Karim and MP Shakhwan Abdullah. During the initial round of voting, Karim received 153 votes while Abdullah garnered 119 votes. However, the presence of 21 invalid ballots prompted the decision to conduct another voting session for the position.