Doug Lorimer
While US President George Bush praised the October 15 referendum on the new Iraqi constitution as evidence of Iraq's "progress toward democracy", preliminary results of the voting released by the Independent Election Commission of Iraq (IECI) indicate that there was widespread ballot rigging by US-backed Shiite and Kurdish political parties.
The October 17 New York Times reported that "about 10 million Iraqis cast ballots, or about 64 percent of registered voters, said Barham Salih, the minister for planning. Preliminary results, he said, show the constitution appears to have been approved by about 65 percent of those voting."
However, according to the NYT, the IECI had revealed that in 12 of country's 18 provinces "as many as 99 percent of the voters were reported to have cast ballots in favor of Iraq's new constitution". The NYT reported that independent monitors said there was widespread ballot stuffing by local election officials in the 12 predominantly Shiite and Kurdish inhabited provinces.
Under the interim constitution imposed on Iraq in March 2004 by the US-led occupation authority, a two-thirds "No" vote in three provinces would block adoption of the new constitution. However, according to the IECI, only two provinces — predominantly inhabited by Sunni Arabs — had voted "No" by that margin.
Reuters reported on October 18 that preliminary counting of ballots "showed big regional splits. Shiite-dominated southern provinces, including Najaf and Karbala, saw support for the constitution at 85-95 percent, while the heavily Kurdish province of Sulaimaniya reported a 98-percent 'Yes' vote.
"Provinces in the Sunni heartlands of central Iraq rejected the charter, with Salahaddin — Saddam's home province — returning a 70-percent 'No' vote and the restive city of Fallujah in Anbar province reporting 99 percent of voters voting 'No'."
Sunnis Arabs "appear to have played by the rules", the IECI statement declared.
Agence France Presse reported on October 18 that the "Sunni-dominated province of Salahaddin appeared to have already rejected the text, by around 80 percent, but an estimate put the 'yes' vote in another principally Sunni province, Diyala, at at least 60 percent.
"Anbar and Nineveh provinces are also majority Sunni."
Anbar province in western Iraq, the heartland of the patriotic armed resistance to the US-led occupation, "was expected to come down strongly against the charter, so Nineveh in the north which includes the mixed, restive city of Mosul, looked to hold the key".
US soldiers stationed in Mosul told Time magazine correspondent Christopher Allbritton that local election officers had moved polling sites that day, confusing voters. Allbritton reported: "In one case, they claimed, an official had moved a polling site to his office at another school two miles from the old site without informing anyone. There were also reports of election officials separating the vote tally sheets from the ballot boxes, allowing them to be marked separately — and possibly fraudulently."
"It wouldn't surprise me if the election was rigged", Allbritton was told by a US Army officer in Mosul, who requested anonymity and who worked on security arrangements for the poll with Iraqi security and election officials. "I don't even trust our election process", the officer said, in an apparent reference to the blatant ballot rigging that occurred in Florida under Governor Jeb Bush during the 2000 US presidential election.
In an article written for the Inter Press Service on October 19, Washington-based US national security policy analyst Gareth Porter observed that the "final official figures for [Nineveh] province, obtained by IPS from a US official in Mosul, actually have the constitution being rejected by a fairly wide margin ...
"According to the widely cited preliminary figures announced by the [IECI] in Nineveh, 326,000 people voted for the constitution and 90,000 against ...
"However, according to the US military liaison with the IECI in Nineveh, Maj. Jeffrey Houston, the final totals for the province were 424,491 'no; votes and 353,348 'yes' votes. This means that the earlier figures actually represented only 54 percent of the official vote total — not 90 percent, as the media had been led to believe. And the votes which had not been revealed earlier went against the constitution by a ratio of more than 12 to 1."
Porter also pointed out that the final official vote totals "suggest that the Sunnis, who clearly voted with near unanimity against the constitution, are a minority in the province. It is generally acknowledged that Sunnis constitute a hefty majority of the population of Nineveh ...
"A total of 350,000 votes for the constitution in the province is questionable based on the area's ethnic-religious composition. The final vote breakdown for the January election reveals that the Kurds and Shiites in Nineveh had mustered a combined total of only 130,000 votes for Kurdish and Shiite candidates, despite high rates of turnout for both groups."
From Green Left Weekly, October 26, 2005.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.