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October 03, 2005

Talk about rigging an election

In Iraq, not showing up to vote counts as voting. By simply being registered to vote, you count towards the 1/3 of registered voters who "do not reject" the constitution, thereby allowing it to pass in the critical Sunni provinces. The only way the constitution will not pass is if the Kurds suddenly decide to vote it down, which I doubt.

I've already fallen off the Newsaholic wagon, but this is an important development:

Meanwhile, the parliament decision Sunday was the latest instance of the Shiite-dominated government making a favorable interpretation of rules on the constitution.

Those rules state that the constitution is defeated if two-thirds of voters in any three of Iraq's 18 provinces reject it, even if an overall majority across the country approve.

Iraq's Sunni Arab majority has been counting on those rules to defeat the charter at the polls. There are four provinces where Sunni Arabs could conceivably make the two-thirds majority "no" vote.

But instead, parliament, which has only 16 Sunni members, approved an interpretation stating that two-thirds of registered voters - rather than two-thirds of all those who cast ballots - must reject the constitution for the rules to apply.

The change effectively raises the bar to reach the two-thirds mark.

Saddam would be proud of these guys:

Of about 8.56 million votes cast in the election, the UIA received 4.08 million, the combined Kurdish parties garnered 2.17 million and the Iraqi list of interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi got 1.17 million.

CNN calculates that those numbers would give the UIA about 130 seats on Iraq's 275-seat National Assembly, the Kurds about 70 seats, and the Iraqi list about 40 seats.

Some 58 percent of Iraq's registered voters turned out for the elections, despite violence that killed more than 40 people.

It is virtually impossible for the Iraqi constitution to fail now.

Consider that 2/3 turnout among registered voters is considered high here in the US, where we've had considerably longer to get the hang of this democracy thing, and you might understand why no Sunni will accept the legitimacy of the constitution now. Civil War could well erupt, or Iraq could simply fall apart into three distinct parts. There is a word for that - Balkanization:

Balkanization is a geopolitical term originally used to describe the process of fragmentation or division of a region into smaller regions that are often hostile or non-cooperative with each other. The term has arisen from the conflicts in the 20th-century Balkans. The first Balkanization was embodied in the Balkan Wars, and the term was further reaffirmed in the Yugoslav wars.

Posted by Mike at October 3, 2005 01:24 PM

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