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| Iraq |
| Iraqi referendum results delayed until Friday |
| 2005-10-19 |
| QUESTIONS about the integrity of the vote and physical barriers to getting marked ballots to the capital mean final results from Iraq's landmark referendum on a new constitution won't be announced until Friday at the earliest, officials said. The returns have raised questions over the possibility of irregularities in the balloting - and have prompted an audit into an irregularly high number of "yes" votes. With the delays, the outcome of the crucial referendum will remain up in the air possibly into next week, at a time when the Government had hoped to move public attention to a new milestone: the start today of the trial of ousted dictator Saddam Hussein. Saddam and seven senior members are facing trial in a heavily secured Baghdad courtroom for a 1982 massacre of about 150 Shi'ites in the town of Dujail, north of Baghdad. Meanwhile, insurgent attacks began to heat up again after being nearly silent on referendum day on Saturday, when polling stations were heavily protected across the country. A US soldier was shot and killed in Mosul, 360 kilometres northwest of Baghdad, early yesterday, the military said. In fighting in western Iraq, two US Marines and four militants were killed on Monday near the town of Rutba, not far from the Jordanian border, the military said. Gunmen killed the deputy governor of Anbar province, Talib Ibrahim, spraying his car with automatic weapons fire in Ramadi and wounding two of his bodyguards, police said. Anbar, the vast western Sunni region, is the main battleground between insurgents and US-Iraqi forces. Militants killed at least nine Iraqis elsewhere yesterday in shootings and a mortar attack, including an adviser to the industry minister, one of the country's top Sunni Arab officials, police said. The handcuffed and mutilated bodies of six Shi'ites were pulled out of a pond where they were dumped north of Baghdad, and three other bodies were discovered elsewhere in the capital. The audit, announced by the Electoral Commission on Monday, will examine results that show an oddly high number of "yes" votes - apparently including in two crucial provinces that could determine the outcome of the vote, Ninevah and Diyala. The election commission and United Nations officials supervising the counting have made no mention of fraud and have cautioned that the unexpected votes are not necessarily incorrect. But Sunni Arab leaders who oppose the charter have claimed the vote was fixed in Ninevah and Diyala and elsewhere to swing them to a "yes" after initial results reported by provincial officials indicated the constitution had passed. Both provinces are believed to have slight Sunni Arab majorities that likely voted "no" in large numbers, along with significant Shi'ite and Kurdish communities that largely cast "yes" ballots. But initial results from election officials in Ninevah and Diyala indicated about 70 per cent of voters supported the charter and only 20 per cent rejected. Sunni opponents needed to win over either Diyala or Ninevah to veto the constitution. Sunnis had to get a two-thirds "no" vote in any three of Iraq's 18 provinces to defeat the charter, and they appeared to have gotten it in Anbar and Salahuddin, both heavily Sunni. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #3 Must be those Diebold machines again ... has anyone notified Jimmy Carter? |
| Posted by: doc 2005-10-19 16:50 |
| #2 Don't discount the retention of voting and vote counting procedures from the prior regime. Oftentimes such lop sided results are seen in American cities, expecially when all the votes of the dead people are included. |
| Posted by: Pheating Hupeamp1806 2005-10-19 14:52 |
| #1 And the article does not mention that the "NO" votes seem to have been grotesquely inflated in the Sunni provinces: 97% in at least one of them, seems to me waaaaay too much to be honest: you never get such unanimousness in honest referendums. No matter the subject. |
| Posted by: JFM 2005-10-19 14:49 |