[Peace-discuss] Iraqi voting in Ninevah--fraud?

[Morton K. Brussel]

Is this important? It might have been if we had heard about it  
earlier.  --mkb



POLITICS-IRAQ:
Vote Figures for Crucial Province Don't Add Up

Analysis by Gareth Porter*

WASHINGTON, Oct 19 (IPS) - The early vote totals from Nineveh  
province, which suggested an overwhelming majority in favour of  
Iraq's draft constitution that assured its passage by national  
referendum, now appear to have been highly misleading.

The final official figures for the province, obtained by IPS from a  
U.S. official in Mosul, actually have the constitution being rejected  
by a fairly wide margin, but less than the two-thirds majority  
required to defeat it outright.

Both the initial figures and the new vote totals raise serious  
questions about the credibility of the reported results in Nineveh. A  
leading Sunni political figure has already charged that the Nineveh  
vote totals have been altered.

According to the widely cited preliminary figures announced by the  
spokesman for the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq (IECI) in  
Nineveh, 326,000 people voted for the constitution and 90,000  
against. Those figures were said to be based on results from more  
than 90 percent of the 300 polling stations in the province.

Relying on those "unofficial" figures, the media reported that the  
constitution appeared to have been passed -- on the assumption that  
the Sunnis had failed to muster the necessary two-thirds "no" vote in  
Nineveh. No further results have been released by the IECI since  
then, and the final tally from the national referendum is not  
expected until Friday at the earliest.

However, according to the U.S. 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 more than 12 to 1.

These ballots could only have come from the Sunni sections of Mosul,  
a city of 1.7 million people. Although the votes from polling centres  
in those densely populated urban areas would take longer to count  
than those from more sparsely populated towns and cities outside  
Mosul, they should not have taken much longer than those for the  
Kurdish sections of Mosul.

Thus there seems to be no logistical reason for failing to announce  
the results for the 340,000 votes that went overwhelmingly against  
the constitution. Rather, the evidence suggests that it was a  
deliberate effort to mislead the media by Kurdish and Shiite  
political leaders who were intent on ensuring that the constitution  
would pass.

They knew that all eyes would be on Nineveh as the province where the  
referendum would be decided. By issuing figures that appeared to show  
that the vote in Nineveh was a runaway victory for the constitution,  
they not only shaped the main story line in the media that the  
constitution had already passed, but effectively discouraged any  
further media curiosity about the vote in that province.

The final figures revealed by the U.S. military liaison with the IECI  
suggest a voter turnout in Nineveh that strains credibility. On a day  
when Sunni turnout reached 88 percent in Salahuddin province and 90  
percent in Fallujah, a total of only 778,000 votes -- about 60  
percent of the eligible voters -- in Nineveh appears anomalous. Even  
if the turnout in the province had only been 70 percent, the total  
would have been 930,000.

The final 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, although Kurdish leaders have  
never conceded that fact.

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.

To have amassed 350,000 votes for the constitution, they would have  
had to obtain overwhelming support from the non-Kurdish, non-Arab  
minorities in the province.

According to official census data, before the invasion of Iraq in  
2003, Assyrian Christians and Sunni Arabs accounted 46 percent of the  
more than 350,000 people on the Nineveh plain. Most of the others are  
Shabaks and Yezidis. Kurds represented just 6 percent of the population.

But the Kurds have asserted political control over the towns and  
villages of the plains, with a heavy Kurdish paramilitary and Kurdish  
Democratic Party (KDP) presence. That Kurdish presence provoked  
widespread opposition and some public protests among non-Kurdish  
communities on the plains, especially Christians and Shabaks.

Assyrian Christians are particularly afraid the constitution's  
article 135, which divides the Christian community into Chaldeans and  
Assyrians, will be used by Kurds to expropriate their lands and  
villages in North Iraq.

Michael Youash, director of the Iraq Sustainable Democracy Project in  
Washington, has spoken with Assyrian Christian leaders in two  
district towns, Bakhdeda and BarTilla, on the Nineveh plain where  
Christians represent roughly half the combined total population of  
more than 100,000 people.

He says Assyrian Christian political organisations mounted big  
demonstrations against the constitution in both towns, and that their  
local leaders are sure that very high percentages in both towns voted  
against the constitution.

In response to an e-mail query, Maj. Houston, the U.S. military  
liaison with the IECI, said, "It was my understanding that the  
Christian communities would be opposed to the constitution," but he  
dismissed the suspicions of vote fraud in the province.

Saleh al-Mutlek, one of the Sunni negotiators on the constitution  
last summer and now a leading opponent of the constitution, told  
reporters, "There is a scheme to alter the results" of the vote. He  
alleged that members of the Iraqi National Guard had seized ballot  
boxes from a polling station in Mosul and transferred them to a  
governorate office controlled by Kurds.

A former U.S. military liaison with the Nineveh province IECI has  
confirmed a similar incident of seizure of ballot boxes from a  
polling station during the January elections.

According to Maj. Anthony Cruz, Kurdish militiamen tried to bribe  
local electoral commission staff to accept ballots that had obviously  
been tampered with. Cruz also confirmed a much larger ballot-stuffing  
scheme by Kurdish officials in the province, as reported by IPS in  
September.

On Monday, the Electoral Commission announced that it would conduct  
an audit to examine the high "yes" vote, but it is not clear that it  
will include the results in Nineveh.

*Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst.  
His latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the  
Road to War in Vietnam", was published in June (END/2005)
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