The UN was conspicuously absent during the Iraqi Constitutional referendum on October 15th. Instead of supplying election monitors to make sure the voting was fair and conducted according to international standards, UN monitors remained hunkered down in their hotels in Amman, Jordan, fearful that they'd be attacked if they showed their faces in Iraq. As it turns out, the only attacks that occurred that day were US troops attacking rebels in Ramadi, the capital city of Anbar Province. As a result, only 2,000 people voted in Ramadi and more than 60 polls didn't even open in Sunni-dominated Anbar Province. Still, the city of Fallujah saw more than 90% turnout and the province as a whole voted 97% against the new Constitution.

Of the other Sunni majority provinces, early returns showed that Salahuddin Province also defeated the constitution by a more than two-thirds majority. Returns from Diyala and Nineveh, however, were more problematic. Voter turnout in Salahuddin was around 87%, which was the second highest in the nation. Obviously Sunni voters swarmed to the polls in an effort to the defeat the Constitution. But in Sunni-majority Diyala, turnout was originally pegged at 57%, with a 70% "yes" vote--an indication that mostly Shiite and Kurdish votes were counted in the early returns. The same was almost certainly true for Nineveh (with the Sunni-dominated city of Mosul, Iraq's third largest metropolitan area), where the vote was registered as 78% "yes," with no turnout percentage given at all.

Almost immediately, the Iraqi electoral commission announced that they would examine the early returns from "key" provinces where the numbers looked suspicious (although they wouldn't say which provinces). Gareth Porter, writing for the Inter Press Wire Service, reported that the US military liaison in Nineveh, Major Jeffrey Huston, told him that the early returns from Nineveh represented only 54% of the vote, not 90% as the media had been led to believe. Furthermore, Porter points out that, in January's parliamentary election, Kurdish and Shiite candidates mustered only 130,000 votes in Nineveh. On October 15th, however, Nineveh returns showed 350,000 "yes" votes on the Constitution, a difference that strains credulity and suggests that someone was stuffing ballot boxes. Of course, the US relied on Kurdish peshmerga to run the polling places in Nineveh and collect the ballot boxes, so who can be surprised at the anomaly?

The Iraqi electoral commission, run by the current Shiite-Kurdish coalition government, has no motive to pursue any charges of electoral fraud. We may never know the true results of the vote. In the mind of Sunnis, however, these events will only further confirm to them that the political process is corrupt and not to be trusted. Even political analysts at the think tanks here in the US and in the UK agreed that the Constitutional vote would almost certainly divide the Iraqi populace further along sectarian lines and lead to civil war, not the reconciliation that the Bush administration hopes for. The divide between Bush administration propaganda and the reality in Iraq is growing deeper by the day.

--Maria Tomchick. See: "Vote Figures for Crucial Province Don't Add Up," Gareth Porter, Inter Press Wire Service, 10/19/05, http://www.ipsnews.net/print.asp?idnews:30692