As I understand it, the Iraqi elections happening 13 days hence will work something like this: On January 20th, the list of candidates will be released (for security reasons, it was kept secret until what is practically the last moment). A bit more than a week later, the Iraqi people, who have been given special cards that allow them to vote, will head in for the heavily guarded polls. Once they vote, their thumbs will be marked with some kind of semipermanent ink that will help protect against duplicate voting. Following the polls closing, each district will do their own counting, and report it to the government. Based on the results, the registered political parties win seats based on their percentage of the popular vote. It gets fuzzy from there.
If there are any errors in my accounting of events, please correct them and fill in the holes ASAP.
My real question about this procedure is that it is basically blind voting. While several parties have been campaigning, at this point the individuals who will be leading Iraq are unknown to the general public (I’m assuming that there is no conspiracy to “edit” the candidate lists to keep out dissenters). They are basically being asked to vote vaguely for a party, with no knowledge of the background or politics of the people they will be voting for. The media has no time to look at each of the several hundred candidates, and will probably look at the parties instead.
With the luxary of not having to outline a system of elections for a country where half the candiadates are likely to be assassinated in the short time they are known, this seems like an incredibly poor way to introduce democracy into Iraq.
Talk radio this morning on the way to work was on about the Iraq elections. The hosts were trying to engender comment by opining that the Iraqi insurgents would get a taste of democracy through the elections, i.e. the people could get behind a leader, and so the insurgents would fade away.
All that set me to wondering. Is Saddam Hussein on the ballot? Seems to me that a case could be made for his inclusion, both by his insurgent supporters, and by his opponents.
And what if he won the election as a write-in (I know, not likely permitted)?
Or, what if a candidate had a name just barely similar to ‘Saddam Hussein’, and won by a margin for that reason?
Like everything else associated with this damn fool war, it’s an embarrassingly pathetic joke.
Between the frightened candidates, frightened voters, expected low voter turnout, and the strong possibility that some portions of the country won’t be able to vote at all, the only thing this “election” is guaranteed to do is to give George W. Bush another sham “success” to crow about.
How anyone can really believe that this will be a genuinely democratic election is rather beyond me: it would far more accurately be described as a one-day census, since ordinary Iraqis are expected to vote along sectarian, religious or ethnic lines almost uniformally.
Anywhere else in the world, if UN observers saw even a single politician killed, a single party HQ bombed or out-and-out war occurring in a single town, let alone throughout a 2-million-person city, to say nothing of kidnapped bishops and beheaded aid-workers, those elections would be cancelled or declared void.
Anyone who says that Iraq will be a democracy after the elections will be utterly delusional. Unfortunately, they will be the most powerful people in the world.
Well one funny aspect is that avoiding voter duplicate voting will be better done than it is in the US itself…
Personally I’d love to have fair elections in Iraq… or at least almost fair. Still between american interests and a multitude of insurgent groups interests its almost impossible. Just the lack of time and exposure of other alternatives means that Allawi is going to be rubber stamped as a legitimate rules… or some other palatable ally.