Allawi faces defeat as Iraqi cleric's team leads the polls
By Borzou Daragahi in Baghdad
04 February 2005
The coalition of Iyad Allawi, the Iraqi interim Prime Minister appointed by the Americans, is heading for election defeat at the hands of a list backed by the country's senior Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, partial results released yesterday indicate.
The results from Baghdad - where Mr Allawi was expected to do well - show the one-time CIA protégé with only 140,364 votes compared to 350,069 for the alliance, which is headed by a Shia cleric who lived in Iran for many years.
Among the mostly five Shia provinces tallied so far, the alliance's lead is even wider. It has 1.1 million of the 1.6 million votes counted at 10 per cent of polling centres in the capital and the Shia south. Mr Allawi's list was second with 360,500.
"Large numbers of Shia voted along sectarian lines," said Sharif Ali bin Hussein, head of the Constitutional Monarchy Party. "Americans are in for a shock. A lot of people in the country are going to wake up in shock."
Safwat Rashid, a member of Iraq's Independent Election Commission, and international poll officials warned observers not to read too much into the numbers, which did not include Sunni or Kurdish provinces.
The list of Ayatollah Sistani, who did not run for election, had been expected to do extremely well. It remains to be seen, however, whether it will obtain more than 50 per cent of the seats in the 275-member parliament.
Mr Rashid said the vote total would not be known for another 10 days, although numbers from polling the Iraqi diaspora abroad had been ratified. About 170,000 ballots were cast, with 44 per cent voting for the Sistani list, 18 per cent for the Kurdish list, 12 per cent for Mr Allawi's list and 8 per cent for the main Christian Iraqi list.
Mr Rashid said the Baghdad numbers came from "mixed" neighbourhoods. Many analysts have concluded that Mr Allawi performed so poorly there and other parts of the Shia south, where he hoped to make a stronger second-place showing, that he has little chance of working his way back as prime minister. Given the extent to which the US and Britain built up Mr Allawi, his removal would be seen as a serious blow.
Leaders of the alliance list - which ran a vociferous grassroots campaign aided by mosques and the blessing of the revered Ayatollah Sistani - were celebrating their prospects, predicting they would win the 138-seat majority necessary to ratify a cabinet. "I think we are almost there and even more," said Adnan Ali al-Kadhimi, who is deputy chief of staff for Ibrahim al-Jaffari, the number two candidate on the alliance list and leader of the Dawa Party.
Mr Kadhimi said the alliance would insist that one of its members become prime minister, arguing that Mr Allawi had been invited to join it months ago but declined in order to create his own coalition. "[Mr Allawi] had his chance," he said.
The alliance would try to quell the country's violent Sunni-led insurgency by improving services, he said. "If we can win the heart of the people the people will be in support of the government. "Maybe they can provide information and help to surround and isolate the insurgents."
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=607555
Supporters of radical cleric 'win province'
By Robert Fox Defence Correspondent, Evening Standard
4 February 2005
Followers of radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr are poised to win control of a province in Iraq, according to predicted election results.
Candidates supporting the cleric - whose militia fought against British troops - appear set to win Maysan province in Shia-dominated south-east Iraq. They are also expected to do well in nearby provinces, including Basra. A senior British officer in Basra said: "We have to live with it."
Last year coalition forces fought Moqtada's Mahdi Army when it staged a revolt and tried to take over the Imam Ali shrine in the holy city of Najaf. In August British troops seized the head offices of his movement in Basra.
He did not stand in the election, but he ran a list of individual supporters.
First results of provincial council elections are expected today. The national assembly result is expected to be declared next Thursday, the Muslim New Year.
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/articles/16366421?source=Evening%20Standard
UPDATE: Officials Back Away from Early Estimates of Iraqi Voter Turnout
Everyone is delighted that so many Iraqis went to the polls on Sunday, but do the two turnout numbers routinely cited by the press -- 8 million and 57% -- have any basis in reality? And was the outpouring of voters in Sunni areas really "surprisingly strong"?
By Greg Mitchell
(February 02, 2005) -- Everyone, of course, is thrilled that so many Iraqis turned out to vote, in the face of threats and intimidation, on Sunday. But in hailing, and at times gushing, over the turnout, has the American media (as it did two years ago in the hyping of Saddam's WMDs) forgotten core journalistic principles in regard to fact-checking and weighing partisan assertions?
It appears so. For days, the press repeated, as gospel, assertions offered by an election official that 8 million Iraqis went to the polls on Sunday, an impressive 57% turnout rate. I questioned those figures as early as last Sunday, and offered the detailed analysis below on Wednesday. Now, John Burns and Dexter Filkins of The New York Times report in Friday's paper that Iraqi election officials have quietly "backtracked, saying that the 8 million estimate had been reached hastily on the basis of telephone reports from polling stations across the country and that the figure could change."
I'll be delighted if the turnout figure, when it is officially announced, exceeds the dubious numbers already enshrined by much of the media. But don't be surprised if it falls a bit short. The point is: Nobody knows, and reporters and pundits should have never acted like they did know when they stated, flatly, that 8 million Iraqis voted and that this represents a turnout rate of about 57%.
Carl Bialik, who writes the Numbers Guy column for Wall Street Journal Online, calls this "a great question ... how the journalists can know these numbers -- when so many of them aren't able to venture out all over that country." Speaking to E&P on Wednesday, Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post -- one of the few mainstream journalists to raise questions about the turnout percentage -- referred to the "fuzzy math" at the heart of it.
Those with long memories may recall the downward-adjusted turnout numbers that followed violence-plagued elections in South Vietnam in 1967 and in El Salvador in 1984.
And one thing we now know for sure: the early media blather about a "strong" Sunni turnout has proven false. Adding a dose of reality, The Associated Press on Wednesday cited a Western diplomat who declared that turnout appeared to have been "quite low" in Iraq's vast Anbar province. Meanwhile, Carlos Valenzuela, the chief United Nations elections expert in Iraq, cautioned that forecasts for the Sunni areas were so low to begin with that even a higher-than-expected turnout would remain low.
In a rare reference to an actual vote tabulation, The New York Times on Thursday reports that in the "diverse" city of Mosul, with 60% of the count completed, the overall turnout seems slightly above 10%, or "somewhat more than 50,000 of Mosul's 500,000 estimated eligible voters."
This, of course, is no minor matter: Iraq's leading Sunni Muslim clerics said Wednesday that the country's election lacked legitimacy because large numbers of Sunnis did not participate in the balloting. Sure, many of them are simply sore losers (they lost an entire country) but that doesn't make their reaction any less troublesome for Iraq's future, especially with the cleric-backed Shiite alliance apparently headed for a landslide win.
Dexter Filkins of The New York Times warned Thursday that the widespread Sunni boycott "could even lead to the failure of the constitution; under the rules drafted last year to guide the establishment of a new Iraqi state, a two-thirds 'no' vote in three provinces would send the constitution down to defeat. The Sunnis are a majority in three provinces."
As for the overall Iraqi turnout: the more the better, but why is the press so confident in the estimates from an Iraqi commission with a clear stake in a high number?
For three days now, the press has routinely referred to the figure of 8 million Iraqi voters, following the lead of Farid Ayar, the spokesman for the Independent Electoral Commission for Iraq. In the original press citations, what Ayar actually said (hedging his bets) was "as many as 8 million," which most in the media quickly translated as "about 8 million," and then, inevitably, "8 million."
Curiously, the day before the election, according to press reports, Ayar had predicted that 7 to 8 million would turn out, giving him some incentive to later spot the numbers in that neighborhood.
Also, one dares to ask: If the commission expected close to 8 million, and that's what happened -- and there was less violence on election day than anticipated -- why was the turnout greeted as such a surprise? Especially since U.S. and Iraqi leaders have spent months knocking the press for failing to report that the vast majority of regions in this country are safe and friendly.
The percentage of turnout supplied by Ayar came to 57% (happily rounded off by the press to 60%). This was based on what was described as 14 million potential voters divided by those 8 million who braved the potential bullets and bombs to go to the polls.
On Sunday, while hailing the millions going to the polls, I also raised questions about the 14 million eligible figure: was that registered voters, or all adults over 18, or what? Few on TV or in print seem to be quite sure, to this day.
It's a big difference. Since Sunday, countless TV talking heads, such as Chris Matthews, and print pundits have compared the Iraq turnout favorably to U.S. national elections, not seeming to understand that 80%-90% of our registered voters usually turn out. The problem in our country is that so few people bother to register, bringing our overall turnout numbers way down.
Howard Kurtz at least looked into the Iraqi numbers. In a Tuesday column, he observed that "the 14 million figure is the number of registered Iraqis, while turnout is usually calculated using the number of eligible voters. The number of adults in Iraq is probably closer to 18 million," which would lower the turnout figure to 45% (if, indeed, the 8 million number holds up).
To put it clearly: If say, for example, 50,000 residents of a city registered and 25,000 voted, that would seem like a very respectable 50% turnout, by one standard. But if the adult population of the city was 150,000, then the actual turnout of 16% would look quite different.
"Election officials concede they did not have a reliable baseline on which to calculate turnout," Kurtz concluded.
He also quoted Democratic strategist Robert Weiner as saying: "It's an amazing media error, a huge blunder. I'm sure the Bush administration is thrilled by this spin."
Bloggers quickly questioned Kurtz's upgrade to 18 million, noting that the population of the country, according to many sources, is 25 million or so, and the population is heavily teenaged and younger. But other current estimates run as high as 27.1 million.
The critics also hit Kurtz for not providing a source for his 18 million figure. But Kurtz told E&P on Wednseday, "I talked to a couple of experts, one of whom was Ken Pollack, from Brookings, and also ran it by two of my reporters in Baghdad. But it is definitely an approximation, just trying to give a sense that -- the one thing everyone I consulted seems to agree on -- is that the 14 million, the baseline, is a very fuzzy figure because there was no registration."
He said he thought it was Pollack, "who studies this for a living," who pegged the adult population of Iraq at 17 or 18 million. "Maybe he leaned more toward 18 million," Kurtz added. "I don't know if this is a definitive figure but I was just trying to explain the difference between whatever that figure is and the 14 million that was so widely used by all the media as if it were everyone eligible -- which means, to me, everyone over 18. When in fact it was this concocted number about passive registration based on who got rations. The point is, it's all fuzzy math, and I was just trying to illustrate that."
He added: "This was my stab at just trying to tell readers the 60% figure that had been so widely touted was hardly definitive, and it may be lower."
All credit to the brave Iraqis who did vote, and in many places they did turn out in droves. But it occurred to me, watching the moving TV images on Sunday of people standing in line outside polling places in Sunni hot spots, that maybe, as so often, the camera lied. In many embattled Sunni cities, we'd been told, many if not most polling places never opened. Wouldn't this likely cause a crush, by even a few hundred voters, at the relatively few places that did open?
Not that anyone, that I know of, was asking.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=10007880 83
begrijp ik het goed: nu Sistani en zelfs al-Sadr de verkiezingen aan het winnen zijn begint het opkomstpercentage plotseling een stuk lager te worden?
De opkomst percentage was nooit zo hoog als werd gezegd.
het schommelde eigenlijk rond de 10%? :nerd:
CLERIC: TROOPS MUST GO
Iraqi rebel cleric Moqtada al Sadr his called for a date to be set for the withdrawal of US troops.
He has also criticised the recent elections in Iraq saying he boycotted them so as not to become a stooge of the West.
The radical Shi'ite religious figure led his Mehdi Army militia in a fight against US troops for seven months last year before a ceasefire in October.
Sadr said: "I stood aside for the elections and did not stand against them as I did not want to show disobedience toward the Marjaiyah (senior clerics).
"I did not join these elections so that I wouldn't be one of the West's pawns.
"The West is so proud that they have held the elections but I would ask: who is responsible for the blood that day?
"I call on all religious and political powers that pushed towards the elections and took part in them to issue an official statement calling for a timetable for the withdrawal of the occupation forces from Iraq."
The firebrand cleric gave notice that he would no longer hold his tongue about political developments in Iraq after keeping quiet for months.
Millions of Shi'ites, who make up about 60% of the population, voted in the election which was supported by the leading Shi'ite religious figure, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
At least 36 civilians died in attacks on Sunday as Iraqis went to the polls in the first free elections for 50 years.
http://www.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30200-13295657,00.html