Iraqi Election Irregularities
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Elections, The WorldA few problems with the voting.
Word of the review came as Sunni Arab leaders repeated accusations of fraud after initial reports from the provinces suggested the constitution had passed. Among the Sunni allegations are that police took ballot boxes from heavily “no” districts, and that some “yes” areas had more votes than registered voters.
Yep, sounds like a democracy…
Election officials in many provinces have released their initial counts, indicating that Sunni attempts to defeat the charter failed.But the commission found that the number of “yes” votes in most provinces appeared “unusually high” and would be audited, with random samples taken from ballot boxes to test them, said the commission’s head, Adil al-Lami.
The high numbers were seen among the nine Shiite provinces of the south and the three Kurdish ones in the north, al-Lami told The Associated Press.
Those provinces reported to AP “yes” votes above 90 percent, with some as high as 97 and 98 percent.
Too soon to tell if these numbers are actually wrong or not, but if a recent poll that showed a 2% approval rating for Bush’s leadership among blacks was decried as absurd, shouldn’t the same scrutiny be given to a 98% on a referendum vote?
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October 18th, 2005 at 3:13 pm
The Iraqi elections are squeeky clean compared to elctions in Chicago and St. Louis.
October 18th, 2005 at 4:26 pm
A poll is not a vote. A poll takes a small sample and attempts to extrapolate over an entire population. A vote is simply a matter of counting up the ballots. I don’t know why you would make such a connection except to provoke.
I have no problem with the idea that George W. Bush’s approval rating among American blacks may be as low as 2 percent. But the poll you cited earlier isn’t convincing to me, and frankly any poll in which the sample is less than 100 out of tens of millions of people, and the margin of error is greater than the number arrived at in the poll, is a very shaky basis to trumpet into headlines, as you and Maureen Dowd and a great many Bush-despisers are gleefully doing.
I also don’t think it requires Bush to jump on his horse and “do something” to change it. One of the refreshing qualities of not being on the left is that you no longer have to think about human beings entirely in terms of their race/gender/sexuality/class. Talking about “blacks” as a monolithic block is rather gruesomely echoic of some of the slavery apologetic tracts I’ve got in my library.
As to Iraq, as the article points out, the ballot-box stuffing seems to have been most evident in the provinces that almost assuredly voted to support the charter anyhow (Shi’ite and Kurd). Where it would matter, in terms of practical outcome, is in the three or four provinces that had a chance to vote against it. There it ought to be rigorously, and transparently, investigated.
In terms of the erection of a democracy in Iraq, of course, every bit of electoral fraud matters and every compromise in the process ought to be rooted out. But, as Americans know (especially those who study our history) the notion of electoral purity is a mark to shoot for, more than a goal to expect to attain.
October 19th, 2005 at 11:43 am
What amuses me is that all of the liberal blogs are making remarks about how the Iraqis learned from the Republicans, and all of the religious right blogs are saying that Iraqis learned ballot stuffing from the Democrats.
To me this suggests a more universal problem and until both side are willing to agree that it’s not all the other side’s problem, it continue.