Parliamentary elections were held in Iraq on 12 May 2018. The elections decided the 329 members of the Council of Representatives, the country's unicameral legislature, who in turn will elect the Iraqi president and prime minister. The Iraqi parliament ordered a manual recount of the results on 6 June 2018. On 10 June 2018, a storage site in Baghdad housing roughly half of the ballots from the May parliamentary election caught fire. In October 2018, Adil Abdul-Mahdi was selected as prime minister five months after the elections. This election would be the last held under the Webster/Sainte-Laguë method of proportional representation, as electoral reforms passed in 2019 amid the 2019–2021 Iraqi protests created a district-based system, and sought to have representatives represent more local voices (as opposed to the entire governorate they were previously elected from), reduce deadlocks resulting from inconclusive coalition talks, as well as stop infighting amongst list members and a myriad of small lists from siphoning off votes and failing to meet the electoral threshold. It would also prevent parties from running on unified lists, which had previously led some to easily sweep all the seats in a particular governorate. Background The elections took place six months after a non-binding independence referendum in Iraqi Kurdistan, in which 93% voted in favour of independence. In retaliation, the Iraqi government led by Haider al-Abadi closed Erbil International Airport, seized control of all border crossings between Kurdistan and neighbouring countries and, with the help of the Hashd al-Shaabi militias, militarily seized control of disputed territories, including the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. Nonetheless, Iraqi politicians called for dialogue with the Iraqi Kurdistan government and force them to formally annul the results. The elections were originally scheduled for September 2017, but were delayed by six months due to the civil war with the Islamic State which ended in December 2017 with the recapture of their remaining territories. The largest Sunni Arab majority coalition, the Muttahidoon (Uniters for Reform), called for a further six month's delay to allow displaced voters to return to their homes. A Sunni Arab MP described holding the elections at this time as a "military coup against the political process". However, the Supreme Court ruled that delaying the elections would be unconstitutional. Electoral system Members of the Council of Representatives are elected through the open list form of party-list proportional representation, using the 18 governorates of Iraq as the