Iraqi Voting, American Style

This is a follow-up to Ron's post yesterday on the vote in Iraq this week regarding their new constitution. The NYT is now reporting that investigations are underway in up to twelve Iraqi provinces over what appear to be "irregularities" in the results. Even Andrew Sullivan looked at the numbers and thought they looked "errily close to the days of Saddam."

I'll leave you to click through for the full articles yourself, but there are two opposing situations from this ballot initiative that appear to merit attention. First, the results in the primarily Shiite and Kurdish provinces. You would expect to see widespread support for the new constitution in those regions. They are the two groups with the most to gain from this move, and the ones who tend to support the U.S. occupation the most. But the level of support is by no means homogeneous, nor do they have a tradition of voting anywhere close to what an established democracy like the United States has. (And even here we can barely get half the people out to vote on a good day.) The turnout numbers would seem to indicate that not only did virtually every person eligible to vote do so, but that 99% of them voted yes. Let's face it... you'd be lucky to get 99% of anyone to vote the same way on anything, even if it was a vote to get free money.

Second, we have the four Sunni provinces, where opposition was expected to be the strongest. In two of the provinces, the opposition was massive. But in the other two, suddenly there was a huge surge of interest in voting "yes" on the ballot? Curiously, it would only take the majority opposition of three of the four provinces to defeat the initiative. I personally think that, across the entire spectrum of their voters, the majority of people wanted this to pass, but sometimes you have to simply stop, look at the numbers, and ask yourself if this passes the "smell test." And as Juan Cole said, something definitely smells fishy.

Why would we expect 99% support in the Kurdish regions? A majority, sure. But there are still many Kurds who want nothing less than complete autonomy and a separate Kurdish state, something they don't get from this constitution. The Shiites are largely in support, but they still have plenty of people who want to wipe out the Sunni entirely and feel that this system gives that minority too much power. On the flip side of the coin, why would two Sunni provinces show such a unified voice of dissent and the other two suddenly get all wishy washy about it? Smell test, indeed.

We can barely (if at all) pull off an election here in the United States without corruption and fraud, and that's using some fairly technical electoral infrastructure and a nationwide computerized database of voter registration. The Iraqis, in large part, barely have ID papers and were voting by stuffing paper ballots into large, plastic bins with slits cut in the top. How hard would it be to play with those numbers if you were in power and so inclined?

Remember, you don't need to rig a vote across an entire country to get the desired results. You only need to take care of a couple of key "swing" areas if you're good at reading the poll numbers. (Do the states of Ohio and Florida in 2000 and 2004 ring a bell?) You could leave the vote entirely alone in two Sunni provinces, do some box stuffing in two others, and be assured of a victory in the final count. But you'd probably want to be a bit subtle about it so it didn't look like obvious ballot box stuffing.