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Iraqi constitution vote split on ethnic
and sect lines
23.10.2005
By Edward Wong
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BAGHDAD, Iraq,
Oct. 22 - The Iraqi electoral commission released
the first set of official results on the new
constitution on Saturday, and the numbers provide
further evidence that the vote was largely divided
along ethnic and sectarian lines. Audits of the
voting have slowed the release of complete results,
but election officials said they had found no
significant incidents of fraud.
The figures, though still preliminary, indicated
that in Salahuddin Province, the home region of
Saddam Hussein and a Sunni Arab stronghold, 81
percent of voters in the Oct. 15 referendum rejected
the constitution.
The electoral commission also released partial vote
tallies for 12 other provinces, most of which are
dominated by Shiites and Kurds. Initial results
showed that all of them appeared to approve the
constitution, with 9 voting yes by more than 90
percent.
Taken together, the figures account for a fifth of
the country's ballots and half of the voters in
those 13 provinces, officials said. As such, they
are not final tallies, but give strong indications
of how voting went in those parts of the country.
Officials say in private that the constitution is
expected to pass.
The commission also said Saturday that 63 percent of
registered voters - or 9.8 million people - took
part in the referendum on Oct. 15, more than the 58
percent turnout in elections for a transitional
government in January. The increase appeared to come
from Sunni Arab voters, who had largely boycotted
the first elections. Turnout on Oct. 15 in many
Shiite and Kurdish-dominated provinces fell below
January's figures, possibly a sign that some apathy
had begun to set in.
The commission said it still could not release
initial results for five provinces. The data from
Anbar Province, the western region that is the
heartland of the insurgency, was still being entered
into computers because security constraints had
delayed the tallies, said Safwat Rashid, an
electoral official. Initial results from the other
four provinces - Babil, Basra, Erbil and Nineveh -
were still being audited, he said.
When the initial counts showed that more than 90
percent of voters in 12 of Iraq's 18 provinces
supported the constitution, United Nations officials
suggested an audit of the results. The electoral
commission then chose Babil, Basra and Erbil from
the group of 12 for random audits, and so officials
have not announced any initial figures from those
provinces, other than turnout percentages.
The officials also declined to give details on why
they were investigating Nineveh Province, in the far
north of Iraq. Nineveh, where the capital is Mosul,
an embattled city, is an ethnically mixed province
that has significant Sunni Arab and Kurdish
populations and a strong base of support for the
insurgency. In the last week, some Sunni Arab
politicians have raised objections at very
preliminary figures announced by provincial
officials in Nineveh that showed voters there had
supported the constitution by more than 70 percent.
How could that be possible, the politicians asked,
when Sunni Arabs generally hostile to the
constitution are a plurality in Mosul, a city of two
million people?
Mr. Rashid said that the audit of the four provinces
was being done simply as standard procedure when
numbers appear extraordinarily high. He said there
was no indication of vote fraud.
"We didn't discover any dangerous violations during
the constitutional referendum," he said at an
afternoon news conference.
Though no tallies were released for Anbar, it is
almost certain that voters in that province, which
had a turnout of 32 percent, overwhelmingly rejected
the constitution, as appears to be the case in
Salahuddin.
The electoral law says that if two-thirds of the
voters in three provinces vote no on the
constitution, then it must be scrapped and another
transitional government elected.
Voters in Nineveh may have rejected the
constitution, but it is highly unlikely that they
would have done so by a two-thirds majority, given
that there are many Kurds in the province.
From the initial tallies released Saturday, it
appeared that Diyala Province, a mixed Sunni-Shiite
region east of Baghdad, may have approved the
constitution by only a narrow margin. The tallies
showed a 52 percent yes vote to a 48 percent no.
Those numbers could change once the rest of the
results in Diyala are counted and verified.
www.nytimes.com
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